Caste Discrimination Lawsuit Filed Against Cisco: San Francisco: Over 20 years ago, a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay figured that a classmate was a Dalit. The discovery was made when the student didn’t see the boy’s name on the general merit list, and so figured that he had been admitted to the prestigious institution via reservations, India’s affirmative action programme.
Decades later, when both men made it to the Silicon Valley headquarters of the tech multinational Cisco, the “upper” caste staffer carried the knowledge of the other man’s “lower” caste with him and even passed on the information to colleagues at work.
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Last week, Sundar Iyer, the man who “outed” the other man’s caste, found himself at the centre of a civil rights lawsuit filed by the California government, which accused Iyer, his colleague Ramana Kompella and Cisco itself of unlawful employment practices.
While the lawsuit is the culmination of years of investigations, it couldn’t have come at a more significant time. While caste discrimination has never been a major public issue in the US, the lawsuit comes at a moment when the country is confronting racial discrimination, giving the Cisco case a sharper edge.
A number of Dalits in US tech companies point to the irony of their casteist colleagues supporting Black Lives Matter while continuing to suppress Indians from so-called lower castes.
While caste discrimination among Indians in US workplaces is not new, tech companies largely ignored the practise, primarily because, in strictly legal terms, it is not unlawful.
A Dalit person contracted with an American multinational told The Wire that his offer letter talked of not allowing for discrimination on the basis of race or religion, but made no mention of caste. When he broached the subject with human resources (HR), he was told that the offer letter was for all geographies and that caste was not a global issue.
Ironically, he says that even Indian MNCs in the US issue offer letters mentioning race and not caste.
California’s lawsuit will now make it hard for companies to ignore caste as a discriminatory practice. While the US has no specific law against the Indian caste system, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed the lawsuit against Cisco using a section of America’s historic Civil Rights Act.
The Act is an outcome of the movement led by African Americans in the 1960s to end oppression and segregation.
The lawsuit accuses Cisco of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of religion, ancestry, national origin/ethnicity and race/colour. The company is also charged with violating California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. The lawsuit calls Cisco’s actions willful, malicious, fraudulent, and oppressive.
More than 90% of Indian immigrants to the US are from the upper castes, says the lawsuit, adding that the complainant, John Doe (a pseudonym widely used in American litigation) was the only Dalit in a team of upper caste Indians.
When contacted, Cisco spokesperson Robyn Blum sent The Wire an official statement, which says, “Cisco is committed to an inclusive workplace for all. We have robust processes to report and investigate concerns raised by employees which were followed in this case dating back to 2016, and have determined we were fully in compliance with all laws as well as our own policies.
Cisco will vigorously defend itself against the allegations made in this complaint.”
Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Cisco paints a picture of an anything-but-robust system to deal with caste.
The case against Cisco
In October 2016, two colleagues informed John Doe, a principal engineer at Cisco, that his supervisor, Sundar Iyer, had told them that he (Doe) was from the “Scheduled Castes” and had made it to the Indian Institute of Technology via affirmative action. “Iyer was aware of Doe’s caste because they attended IIT at the same time,” said the case.
The suit says that, when confronted by Doe, Iyer denied having disclosed his caste.
In November 2016, Doe contacted Cisco’s HR over the matter. Within a week of doing so, Iyer reportedly informed Doe he was taking away Doe’s role as lead on two technologies.
Iyer also removed team members from a third technology that Doe was working on and reduced his role to that of an independent contributor and he was isolated from his colleagues, the lawsuit says. In December 2016, Doe filed a written complaint with HR on the matter.
He also complained that Iyer had made discriminatory comments about a Muslim job applicant.
According to the suit, Cisco employee relations manager Brenda Davies’s investigation notes on the case showed evidence of caste-based discrimination, and yet she closed the case on the grounds that caste discrimination was not unlawful.
The lawsuit says that her investigation notes even have Iyer admitting to outing his colleague’s caste by saying he was not on the “main list” at IIT.
The case says that Doe, who was further isolated and repeatedly harassed at work, called for a re-investigation. HR official Tara Powell reopened the investigation in April 2017.
In a damning indictment of Cisco, California government investigations show that, despite employees telling Powell that Doe was being treated unfairly though he was technically competent, that Iyer was trying to push Doe out of the company, and that witnesses feared retaliation from Iyer if they spoke out against him, Powell closed the investigation on grounds that she could not substantiate any caste-based discrimination against Doe.
In February 2018, when Kompella became the interim head of engineering for Cisco’s team after Iyer stepped down, the lawsuit said he continued to “discriminate, harass, and retaliate against Doe by….giving him assignments that were impossible to complete under the circumstances.”
“Cisco’s training was deficient in that it did not adequately train managerial employees on workplace discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, nor did the company prevent, deter, remedy, or monitor casteism in its workforce,” says the lawsuit.
