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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?

Article

Belief

Creed

Education

24 January 2025

7 min read

The myth of secular neutrality

Where academia went wrong.

Alex Stewart

Alex Stewart is a lawyer, trustee and photographer.

A phrenology head is shown with its eyes closed.

David Matos on Unsplash.

In the recent horror-thriller Heretic, Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed, a sharp-witted psychopath who imprisons two missionaries, subjecting them to ceaseless diatribes about the supposed irrationality of all religions. Mr. Reed is also a terribly smug, self-righteous bore, a caricature of the fervent atheist who dismisses faith as mere superstition while assuming atheism is objective and neutral.

This kind of assumption lies behind the criticisms directed by secularists at those who argue from a position of faith, as we saw recently with the debates on the Assisted Dying Bill. Yet, the notion of secular objectivity is itself a fallacy. Secularism, like any worldview, is a perspective, ironically one that is deeply indebted to Christianity, and humanity’s history of abandoning faith and its moral foundation has had disastrous consequences.

Secularism is a bias, often grounded in an ethical vanity, whose supposedly universal principles have very Christian roots. Concepts like personal autonomy stem from a tradition that views life as sacred, based on the belief that humans are uniquely created in God's image. Appeals to compassion reflect Jesus’ teachings and Christian arguments for social justice throughout history. Claims that the Assisted Dying Bill was "progressive" rely on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of time as linear rather than cyclical. Even the separation of the secular and sacred is derived from Jesus’ teaching to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. Authors like Tom Holland in Dominion and Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe have shown how Western societies, though often disconnected from their Christian roots, still operate within frameworks shaped by centuries of Christianity.

The antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty. Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method.

A political secularism began to emerge after the seventeenth century European religious wars but the supposed historical conflict between science and religion, in which the former triumphs over superstition and a hostile Church, is myth. Promoted in the eighteenth century by figures like John Draper and Andrew White, this ‘conflict thesis’ persists even though it has been comprehensively debunked by works such as David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu’s Of Popes and Unicorns and Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria. Historians now emphasize the complex, often collaborative relationship between faith and science.

Far from opposing intellectual inquiry, faith was its foundation. Medieval Christian Europe birthed the great universities; this was not simply because the Church had power and wealth but because knowledge of God was viewed as the basis for all understanding. University mottos reflect this view: Oxford’s "Dominus illuminatio mea" (The Lord is my light), Yale’s "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth), and Harvard’s original "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" (Truth for Christ and the Church). This intertwining of faith and academia fuelled the Enlightenment, when scientists like Boyle, Newton, and Kepler approached the study of creation (what Calvin described as ‘the theatre of God’s glory”) as an affirmation of the divine order of a God who delighted in His creatures “thinking His thoughts after Him”.

Their Christian beliefs not only provided an impetus for rigorous exploration but also instilled in them a humility about human intellect. Unlike modernity's view of the mind as a detached, all-seeing eye, they believed man’s cognitive faculties had been diminished, both morally and intellectually, by Adam’s fall, which made perfect knowledge unattainable. Blaise Pascal captures this struggle with uncertainty in his Pensées.

“We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty....This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive from whence we have fallen.”

For Pascal and his believing contemporaries, the antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty. Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method, the process of systematic experimentation based on empirical evidence, and which later became central to Enlightenment thinking.

Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them.

Although many of its leading lights were believers, the Enlightenment era hastened a shift away from God and towards man as the centre of understanding and ethics. Philosophers like David Hume marginalized or eliminated God altogether, paving the way for His later dismissal as a phantom of human projection (Freud) or as a tool of exploitation and oppression (Marx), while Rousseau popularised the appealing idea that rather than being inherently flawed, man was naturally good, only his environment made him do bad things.

But it took the nihilist Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, to predict the moral vacuum created by the death of God and its profound consequences. Ethical boundaries became unstable, allowing new ideologies to justify anything in pursuit of their utopian ends. Nietzsche’s prophesies about the rise of totalitarianism and competing ideologies that were to characterise the twentieth century were chillingly accurate. Germany universities provided the intellectual justification for Nazi atrocities against the Jews while the Marxist inspired revolutions and policies of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes led to appalling suffering and the deaths of between 80 and 100 million people. Devoid of divine accountability, these pseudo, human-centred religions amplified human malevolence and man’s destructive impulses.

By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed, leading Francis Fukuyama to opine from his ivory tower that secular liberal democracy was the natural end point in humanity's socio-political evolution and that history had ‘ended’. But his optimism was short lived. The events of 9/11 and the resurgence of a potent Islamism gave the lie that everyone wanted a western style secular liberal democracy, while back in the west a repackaged version of the old Marxist oppressor narrative began to appear on campuses, its deceitful utopian Siren song that man could be the author of his own salvation bewitching the academy. This time it came in the guise of divisive identity-based ideologies overlayed with post-modern power narratives that seemed to defy reality and confirm Chesterton’s view that when man ceased to believe in God he was capable of believing in anything.

As universities promoted ideology over evidence and conformity over intellectual freedom, George Orwell’s critique of intellectual credulity and the dark fanaticism it often fosters, epitomized in 1984 where reality itself is manipulated through dogma, seemed more relevant than ever. Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them. Other commentators like Thomas Sowell are equally sceptical, critiquing the tenured academics whose lives are insulated from the suffering of those who have to live under their pet ideologies, and who prefer theories and sophistry to workable solutions. Intellect, he notes, is not the same thing as wisdom. More recently, American writer David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, questions the point of having elite educational systems that overemphasize cognitive ability at the expense of other qualities, suggesting they tend to produce a narrow-minded ruling class who are blind to their own biases and false beliefs.

It was intellectual over-confidence that led many institutions to abandon their faith-based origins. Harvard shortened its motto from "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" to plain "Veritas” and introduced a tellingly symbolic change to its shield. The original shield depicted three books: two open, symbolizing the Old and New Testaments, and one closed, representing a knowledge that required divine revelation. The modern shield shows all three books open, reflecting a human centred worldview that was done with God.

However, secular confidence seems to be waning. Since the peak of New Atheism in the mid-2000s, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with worldviews limited to reason and materialism. Artists like Nick Cave have critiqued secularism’s inability to address concepts like forgiveness and mercy, while figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Russell Brand have publicly embraced Christianity. The longing for the transcendent and a world that is ‘re-enchanted’ seems to be widespread.

Despite the Church’s struggles, the teaching and person of Christ, the One who claimed not to point towards the truth but to be the Truth, the original Veritas the puritan founders of Harvard had in mind, remains as compelling as ever. The story of fall, forgiveness, cosmic belonging and His transforming love is the narrative that most closely maps to our deepest human longings and lived experience, whilst simultaneously offering us the hope of redemption and - with divine help – becoming better versions of ourselves, the kind of people that secularism thinks we already are.

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