City of Seattle Bans Caste Discrimination

seattle: The City of Seattle has become the first US city to ban caste discrimination as its council added caste to the anti-discrimination laws. Supporters of the ordinance said that case discrimination crosses national and religious boundaries and that without such laws, those facing caste discrimination will have no protections.

The city council members voted as activists and organizers on different sides of the issue began arriving in Seattle. Earlier, more than 100 people had put in requests to speak at the meeting as several activists waited for their chance to speak to the council before the vote.

Council Member Kshama Sawant, the only Indian American on the Seattle City Council, said that the ordinance does not single out one community. Over the past three years, several colleges and university systems have moved to prohibit caste discrimination in the United States.

In December 2019, Brandeis University became the first US college to include caste in its nondiscrimination policy and California State University System, Colby College, Brown University and the University of California, Davis have all adopted similar measures.

Harvard University also included caste protections for student workers in 2021 as part of its contract with its graduate student union.

The measure in Seattle has the support of Dalit activist-led organizations like Equality Labs among others, Associated Press reported. Opposition to this ordinance came from groups such as the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America, the report added.

In response to the resolution, Hindu American Foundation cofounder and Executive Director Suhag Shukla stated:

“Throughout our two decades of existence, HAF has maintained that caste discrimination is wrong, violating core Hindu principles of the divine oneness of all beings. At the same time, we maintain that the singling out of South Asians and addition of ‘caste’ to nondiscrimination policy violates the very policies it now amends. The City of Seattle has voted to treat South Asians in a manner that no other ethnic or racial community is treated under the guise of nondiscrimination. It has voted yes to discriminating against ethnic minorities, repeating the ugliness of nativists in the state nearly a century ago.”

In passing this resolution, Seattle is now in violation of the US Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process that prohibit the state from treating disparately people on account of their national origin, ethnicity, or religion, and implementing a vague, facially discriminatory and