California's Caste Bill And What Could Have Been
California's caste bill was a historic legislation that would have shifted the anti-caste landscape in the US. But Governor Gavin Newsom last-minute veto ensured that would not happen
I wrote this piece in the late October 2023, when the media attention in the US (and across the world) was laser focused on the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, and the mainstream culture in America was reeling from the sharp right-ward turn it had taken seemingly overnight. Away from calls of racial equity and justice that took centerstage in 2020, and towards a more menacing pattern of suppression and punishment against those who spoke against what has since become the singular acceptable narrative.
Even as this piece failed to see the light of the day then, it remains an important document of a turning point in time for the anti-caste movement in the United States. Caste, as I mentioned in an earlier essay, seems to be have gone underground but there are seeds that are still being planted. As we move forward to witness what comes next, it’s equally crucial to understand how we got here. So I’m releasing this piece from the vaults (with a few minor updates) for us to understand and reflect on California’s anti-caste bill, whose veto from California Governor Gavin Newsom — someone who was arguably at the time among the most significant liberal voices in the country — had already foreshadowed what was to come.
After nearly 31 days of silence, on October 7th California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill (known more commonly by its official title SB403) that would outlaw caste-discrimination in the state of California, undermining its chances to become the first state in the nation to have that distinction. Newsom’s veto decision, where he called the bill ‘unnecessary,’ came after a month of calls and a hunger-strike by anti-caste groups that had rallied to get the bill through the State Senate and Legislative Assembly with a sizable majority. The bill, which started as a stand-alone protection for caste discrimination (following the lead from the historic law passed in Seattle in February) was altered several times since its introduction by California Democrat and Senator Aisha Wahab, which some anti-caste organizers and activists felt had diluted its impact and created the conditions that allowed Newsom to easily dismiss it.
After several amendments and changes the most significant alteration to the bill came in July, when caste was removed as a singular category that was underscored by its unique social and geo-political dynamics and subsumed under the larger umbrella of ancestry. The opponents of the bill, which included several Hindu right-wing organizations strongly advocated for these amendments and expressed disappointment when any mentions ‘caste’ were not entirely removed from the bill. (ed note: An article published in Harper’s Magazine in 2024 outlined the extensive behind-the-scenes tactics that many Indian American lobbyists had engaged in to pressure Newsom to drop the bill, including threatening to withhold the support from the sizable Indian American community in California should he decide to run for President). When Gavin Newsom eventually vetoed the bill after it sat on his desk for nearly a month, he argued that California at that time prohibited discrimination based on race, sex and ancestry (among others) and since caste was ‘already prohibited under these existing categories’, he could not sign the bill.
However, what makes Newsom’s claim of caste already having legal safeguards even more puzzling is that it was the very lack of these protections that led to the landmark caste discrimination case against the Silicon Valley giant, Cisco in the summer of 2020. The HR manager at Cisco had cited that there was no law against caste discrimination that would enforce the company to take any action on the complaint of discriminatory behavior raised by a Dalit engineer against his dominant caste Brahmin managers. Months of inaction by Cisco had compelled the Dalit employee to pursue legal recourse through California’s Department of Fair Housing and Employment to seek justice and fair compensation (the case is still under consideration in 2025). Now with Newsom effectively denying legal protections for caste in the state, the possibilities for more Silicon Valley companies using his justification to further dismiss or ignore complaints of caste-based discrimination by their Dalit employees remain as open as ever.
The struggle around caste is not novel, neither in the United States, where it is has played out more openly in the last three years, nor in India where it originated a millennia ago and still continues to massively mold its social, cultural, political, and economic worlds. The only difference that has recently led mainstream media in the US to define caste as a ‘divisive subject’ in South Asian spaces is that it’s no longer invisible. Dalits (a self-claimed title for the formerly untouchable ‘lower’ caste people from the South Asian subcontinent) are refusing to let dominant caste South Asians to be sole deciders of whether caste exists, and are unflinchingly calling out hundreds of years of institutional discrimination that has been baked into our systems and transported wholesale to the United States.
The recent visibility of caste led by the tireless efforts of Dalits themselves, both in India and America, seems to have created immense discomfort among certain South Asians who refuse to see themselves as anything outside of the staid label of ‘model minority’. Several generations of institutional access compared to the more recently immigrant Dalits have allowed dominant caste Indian Americans to accrue vast resources and build immense social, cultural and political capital. (ed note: As I would go on to write in the revised version of Coming Out as Dalit published in the US in 2024, dominant caste Indian Americans have constructed the myth of their ‘model minority’ status through years of concentrated efforts that included a whisper network of opportunity sharing, promotions and seed funding in Silicon Valley, all of which often excluded Dalits).
The growing wealth and influence of Indian Americans has coincided with the rise of their political and bureaucratic power in Washington DC and states like California, where a large share of the rich Indian American voter base is located. It also allowed them to emerge as a formidable and reliable voting bloc for Democrats (around 68% of Indian Americans across the US are registered blue) who were evidently anxious about losing them in California if the caste bill was passed. Even though there is little evidence to suggest that all Indian Americans in California or beyond were opposed to the caste protection bill (ed note: a 2025 survey by the Carnegie Foundation suggested that an overwhelming majority of Indian Americans in fact supported measures to formally outlaw caste discrimination).
The denial around the existence of caste is curiously common within South Asian societies. Until recently in India, where untouchability was made illegal in 1950 and where several legal protections for marginalized lower castes, Dalits and Adivasis (Indigenous Indian tribes) have been in place for decades, the dominant narrative was one of caste either not existing or not impacting much, even if it did. This was in spite of the alarmingly escalating statistics of violence, student suicides, and sexual assault against Dalits and Adivasis and the fact that these marginalized groups have almost negligible representation in the upper echelons of Indian bureaucracy, media, judiciary, corporate structures and even politics (PM Narendra Modi who comes from a backward caste background not withstanding). It should surprise exactly no one that several Indian immigrants and Indian Americans, many of whom often participate in caste specific associations and actively practice endogamy (marrying within one’s own caste) to preserve caste purity, are steadfast in their belief that caste does not exist in the United States, even as they are the ones responsible for importing it.
Surviving this blanket denial of not only the oppression we withstand almost daily but also of our right to identify and oppose it forces many Dalits into hiding their caste in order to ‘pass’ as dominant caste. The Dalit engineer in the Cisco case was hiding his ‘lower’ caste identity until in an act of caste violence, his Brahmin manager revealed it to his other South Asian colleagues. Born in among the ‘lowest’ caste manual scavenging “Bhangi” community, where the name of my caste is recognized as a slur and the members of which face discrimination from even other Dalit communities, I too grew up hiding my caste in India. It was only after I moved to New York that I was able to objectively question the idea of ‘lowerness’ I had been made to accept as my truth (and that of my family) my entire life. Moved by the powerful letter left behind by Dalit scholar and revolutionary Rohtih Vemula, who was forced to take his own life as a result of the pushback from calling out systemic discrimination in 2016, I wrote a note titled ‘Today I’m Coming Out as Dalit’ and revealed the painful truth I believed could shatter my life if I was still living in India.
I soon realized, however, that it wasn’t the absence of caste in the United States that gave me reprieve from the constant struggle of hiding my own. It was the lack of its omnipresence and overt prominence. If you’re not South Asian, India’s caste system in America is hard to recognize and even harder to identify. Gussied up beneath flashy customs, traditions and cultural habits and behavior, caste within our communities moves silently, but its effect, whether in neighborhoods, public transport, workplaces and even places of worship, is no less deadly.
As I harrowingly discovered when after calling out an Amazon Prime show, Made in Heaven for using my likeness without permission, I was subject to an unrelentingly and unprecedentedly vicious online hate campaign that lasted over six weeks and which one petition in my support described as a “virtual lynching unfolding in public view”. The makers of the show that claimed to represent ideas of justice and fairness through the fictionalized set-up of Indian weddings (the anthology series featured multiple Indian brides who led “progressive” lives and faced social conundrums) not only appropriated the likeness of a living Dalit woman writer, but also vindictively retaliating and discrediting my work when I asked for credit. It then became clear to me that New York or New Delhi, my still untouchable and slur-invoking ‘Bhangi’ caste was always going to define my reality.
Analyzing the Indian caste system in the US through the narrow and limited perspectives of ‘model minorities’ or reducing its understanding to a “divisive issue that’s opposed by many of their own people” — as the mainstream US media has done recently — is a misconception and a grave error. Caste is not complex. It is simply the issue of a majority with enormous visibility and power denying the right to a minority to even acknowledge their discrimination. Unfortunately, the lack of nuance, decades of dominant caste narratives erasing caste, and a massive misinformation campaign that obfuscates the plain menace and stark unfairness of this brutal system have led many Americans, including perhaps Governor Gavin Newsom, to believe otherwise. But even with the setback in California, the anti-caste movement has finally begun, and it’s not stopping anytime soon.
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Related reading on caste in India and the US: