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10 January 2024

8 min read

Untouchable: experiencing discrimination around the world

In America it’s in the headlines, while in India it continues to influence. Rahil Patel explores caste discrimination and finds out who helped craft constitutional protections for those affected.

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A group of protesters march behind a banner waving flags.

Supporters of the caste discrimination bill march.

Equality Labs

Cisco is a highly successful California based tech company. It has an annual revenue of $57 billion and boasts of many awards and prizes. Great Place to Work placed Cisco at number one on its 2023 list. But what has this to do with caste discrimination? Well, 33 per cent of Cisco’s 84,000 employees are of Indian origin and the company is struggling under a lawsuit currently upheld by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The widely reported lawsuit is for caste discrimination against a Dalit (Untouchable) employee. The engineer has claimed to be paid less than his peers due to his low caste status.

Is this common? Well, the high caste Brahmin CEO of Google, Sunder Pichai (of Indian origin) has also faced allegations, raised by California based civil rights organisation, Equality Labs, of “caste bigotry” that is “running rampant” within his company.

“You can take an Indian out of India but you can never take India out of an Indian.” This was the sorrow filled saying I heard amongst well meaning fellow Indians whilst growing up in the United Kingdom. It usually cropped up when my Indian relatives and friends were confused by the appalling attitudes of other fellow Indians and trust me, it was quite common.

In October 2023, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom vetoed a Bill to outlaw caste-based discrimination across his state. His decision was met with anger and rage from low caste Indian Dalits and from those who are fighting alongside them to ban discrimination amidst this rigid but ancient Hindu social structure.

It may surprise us in the west that the city of Seattle in Washington State was the first city in the USA to outlaw caste discrimination followed by Fresno in California.

But is this just a moral battle against an enemy that doesn’t really exist and a lame excuse to protest away with ‘Dalit Lives Matter?’ Or is there a tiny surreptitious fire carefully kindling away underneath the blinding smoke that mustn’t go unnoticed? After all, we are in the west…right? Of course we believe in equality…right?

The Swaminarayan Movement, America’s largest and most influential Hindu tradition saw the FBI raid it's temple compound in Robbinsville, New Jersey in 2021 for illegally importing Indians from India and illegally paying them below the national wage as well as confining them to the temple compound. The FBI raid rescued 200 workers who were largely from Dalit or Tribal castes.

When I was training in India to be a Hindu monk I remember recognising the harsh reality of the caste system in one single moment. One day, after I had finished a conversation with a friend in the temple compound I turned to head back to my room when I saw a young boy waving to me far away from the temple gates. I waved back and gestured to him to come in and talk but he stayed rooted to the spot. A little confused, I walked over and asked, “why don’t you come inside the compound?”

“I can’t.” He said,

“Why?”

“I’m a Dalit…I can’t even touch you!”

Thinking back over that mind numbing moment I can’t help imagine how hard it must have been for the woman in the Bible with the issue of blood who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment within the rigid culture of the time. The difference I guess is that Jesus turned to the broken hearted woman and healed her and then called her ‘daughter’ and defined her real identity as a result.

If the Dalit boy on the other hand came into the temple compound that day the security guards would have typically hit him with a long stick to drive him out of the temple gates. If he had touched me in the meantime I would have had to immediately go for a bath with all my clothes on and ensure that I didn’t touch any other human being or even a book or a pot on the way!

PM Modi’s comment has a pernicious and curious undertone. If Dharma is first then one is obliged to follow the caste system diligently.

Bhimrao. R Ambedkar was a brilliant economist and lawyer who studied at the London School of Economics. When his genius mind was called upon to draft the new constitution for independent India he was all too aware of how Hinduism was not so compatible with democracy. The idea of equality and dignity was evidently embedded into western institutions to his mind and Ambedkar knew very well that these ideas were founded on Judeo Christian principles, primarily, that all are created in the image of God. In other words, equal. Being a Dalit himself, Bhimrao knew the pitfalls of Hinduism’s caste system and the anarchical society it would create if the institutions left behind by the British were replaced with caste based ideas. As a result he crafted a constitution based upon Christian principles ensuring that all castes were allowed the opportunities and privileges from the state and its institutions by law. Sadly, although the state provided those privileges and protections by law in 1952 when the constitution came into effect, the society in India at large until this day does not. India exports it to the west as well.

When the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave his speech on National Human Rights Day in India a few years ago he emphasised to the nation that Dharma needs to be held first before Human Rights… if Dharma is pursued, he insisted, Human Rights would follow. Dharma simply put, is to pursue one’s duty and righteousness as according to Hindu tradition.

At a quick glance here one is reminded of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said during his Harvard Commencement Speech in 1978. He told his audience that it was time that the west upheld human obligation more than human rights. He had a valid point to state in a significantly individualistic culture which still prevails in the west but PM Modi’s comment has a pernicious and curious undertone. If Dharma is first then one is obliged to follow the caste system diligently.

It has taken an incredibly long time to carve away at the negatives of the caste system in India but it is nowhere near the end.

Krishna who is the most widely revered incarnation of God in the Hindu world told his disciple Arjuna to fight and kill his cousins and teachers on the battlefield of Kurukshetra as it was his Dharma to do so. As a Kshatriya warrior caste Arjuna was not meant to meditate in the forest but fight and kill, as is laid out quite clearly in the beginning chapter of the Bhagvad Gita scripture.

Although the Gita scripture is quite a complex context to unravel here, in today’s India and in large parts of the west placing Human Rights behind Dharma can be quite dangerous. It somewhat validates the violence towards those of other faiths and endorses a dislike to those of a lower caste.

The need for individual freedom from caste based social structures in India was introduced to the British Parliament by William Wilberforce and Charles Grant in 1793. Interestingly, it was the same year that the cobbler-turned missionary William Carey snuck into India against the rules of the British East India Company. The company knew that if missionaries entered the country they would battle against the unfair social order and upset the high caste Brahmins. And that would hinder their lucrative trade.

Wilberforce and Grant along with other devout Christians fought in Parliament for 20 years until in 1813 a law was passed to allow missionaries passage into India. These men and women of God began to transform the subcontinent and provide education and health care for all castes. Teaching and training the Indian mind that God created male and female first (in his image) and they then created a social order as per God’s guidance whilst cautiously deconstructing the idea of God creating a social order first and male and female after.

It has taken an incredibly long time to carve away at the negatives of the caste system in India but it is nowhere near the end.

Sadly, the caste hierarchy has infiltrated parts of the Christian faith in India too. Dalit Christians who are made in the image of God cannot enter certain churches.

What fascinates me however, is when a Dalit leaves India, in most cases, a lot of India leaves them! They are quite successful. In a society like India one is made to believe (in large part by the communities) that past life karma has destined the individual to be a Dalit and so one must continue to clean the gutters and carry away dead dogs. But when a Dalit enters into a land like the USA or the UK where notions of equality and freedom are based upon Christian values the thinking of that individual changes drastically. A Dalit engineer filing a case against his seniors is inconceivable in large parts of the Indian community in India.

But the issue of caste is not the domain of Hinduism alone. Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar is very much entrenched in a caste based order which is quite an irony as abuse of this social order was one of the main reasons Gautam Buddha established the faith.

Sadly, the caste hierarchy has infiltrated parts of the Christian faith in India too. Dalit Christians who are made in the image of God cannot enter certain churches and where they can in some parts they are not allowed to sit in the pews but on the floor, at the back.

Author E.M Forster lovingly did say that India is both a mystery and a muddle.

The late Christian and author John Stott wrote in his book The Cross that Jesus was facing the most excruciating pain in the garden of Gethsemane not because of the cross and its horrific nails but because Christ was about to be touched by sin. God readily touches us even though we are untouchable.

The relentless work by William Carey, Wilberforce, Grant and other Indian reformers began to change the Indian mindset primarily by introducing the notion of love and freedom at every level of Indian society. Do we have the will to continue respectfully that fight?

How to navigate a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.”

We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne).

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time.

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed…

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it.

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised.

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. It can make sense of both of them. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.”

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition.

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder) £25.

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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