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On coming to know of their daughter being in love with a Dalit boy, her parents had admonished her and told her to end the relationship.In a case of suspected “honour” killing in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, a 19-year-old Dalit youth was murdered on Sunday, 23 July, by the relatives of an upper-caste Hindu girl with whom he was in a relationship. The youth was identified as Muttiah, a resident of Swamidas Nagar in the Appuvilai village near Thisayanvilai in Tirunelveli district. According to the police, Muttiah was working in the wedding-card-manufacturing industry and fell in love with...

HYDERABAD: Former Chief Justice of India, Justice NV Ramana, expressed concern over the deep-rooted caste system within the Indian community in the United States. He said this while appealing to the Telugu diaspora to continue its campaign for conferring Bharat Ratna on the late minister NT Rama Rao, former chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Addressing an event at the Pennsylvania Convention Centre in Philadelphia on Sunday, Justice Ramana said: "When caste differences have blurred in India, particularly in the southern part of the country, it's a matter of grave concern that caste system is prevalent among Indians in the...

India's caste system is among the world's oldest forms of surviving social stratification. The BBC explains its complexities. The system which divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (the Hindi word for religion, but here it means duty) is generally accepted to be more than 3,000 years old. How did caste come about? Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the most important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, "acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society"....

A raft of evidence shows that caste discrimination has been imported from India to the United States. Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects—and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence, including Vice President...

FILE – New Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant speaks during an inauguration ceremony for city officials Monday, Jan. 6, 2014, in Seattle. One of Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather – a man she “otherwise loved very much” – utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid. Now an elected official in a city thousands of miles from India, she has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws.

America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system, with Apple (AAPL.O) emerging as an early leader in policies to rid Silicon Valley of a rigid hierarchy that's segregated Indians for generations. … …U.S. discrimination laws…do not explicitly ban casteism. … …the first U.S. employment lawsuit [filed by California] about alleged casteism - has forced Big Tech to confront a millennia-old hierarchy where Indians' social position has been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin "priestly" class to the Dalits, shunned as "untouchables" and consigned to menial labor. … Since the suit was filed,...

What do you call an economic system where a relative few individuals own all the land and most of the people who live on that land do so at the sufferance of the landowner? It's feudalism. This was the economic system in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of the population was born into, lived and died in poverty. There was little hope for upward mobility unless one opted for a career in military service or the clergy. (From time to time, extraordinarily pretty peasant girls might be married off to a lesser lord.) The rise...

Until recently, the Hindu caste system was not an issue in the United States. Now, as a result of mass immigration from South Asia, this cultural hierarchy has been imported into our country and we have to deal with it. In 1916, B.R. Ambedkar, the father of India’s constitution and himself a Dalit, wrote: “If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.” Now, it's happening.

WATERVILLE, Maine (AP) — Colby College is banning discrimination based on caste, a system of inherited social class, becoming one of the nation’s earliest colleges to do so. The private liberal arts college revised its nondiscrimination policy to add caste to its list of protections for the campus community. The efforts were led by a professor who took an interest in caste discrimination across the country and realized the college needed to recognize it as a form of discrimination, the Bangor Daily News reported. “You have to first name what it is to say: This exists, we name it, we...

... America traditionally has not had a caste system. Until now. We can see emerging, right here in America, a sharp divide between progressive elites and ordinary citizens. This divide can be seen in multiple areas. Progressive elites have high walls protecting their homes, even as they declare that “walls don’t work.” They have private security, even as they insist Americans don’t need guns to protect themselves. They somehow elude accountability even when they break the same laws that get ordinary citizens into major trouble.

Two decades before he landed in Australia, Captain James Cook was at sea facing a desperate matter of life and death. The problem was scurvy, a deadly illness caused by Vitamin C deficiency and which had been the curse of sailors for centuries. By the time that Capt Cook set sail for the South Pacific in 1769 he had grown confident in a remedy, the only problem being that it was sauerkraut – never a particularly popular meal in England, and at a time when vegetables were looked down upon. How to convince the crew to eat 7,860 lbs of...

Whenever Benjamin Kaila, a database administrator who immigrated from India to the United States in 1999, applies for a job at a U.S. tech company, he prays that there are no other Indians during the in-person interview. That’s because Kaila is a Dalit, or member of the lowest-ranked castes within India’s system of social hierarchy, formerly referred to as “untouchables.” Silicon Valley’s diversity issues are well documented: It’s still dominated by white and Asian men, and Black and Latino workers remain underrepresented. But for years, as debates about meritocracy raged on, the tech industry’s reliance on Indian engineers allowed another...

Whenever Benjamin Kaila, a database administrator who immigrated from India to the United States in 1999, applies for a job at a U.S. tech company, he prays that there are no other Indians during the in-person interview. That’s because Kaila is a Dalit, or member of the lowest-ranked castes within India’s system of social hierarchy, formerly referred to as “untouchables.” Silicon Valley’s diversity issues are well documented: It’s still dominated by White and Asian men, and Black and Latino workers remain underrepresented. But for years, as debates about meritocracy raged on, the tech industry’s reliance on Indian engineers allowed another...

. “If you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are,” proclaims sports commentator Jemele Hill (pictured above), citing Caste, a “masterpiece” of a book by Isabel Wilkerson. Quickly challenged, Hill pushed back that Nazi Germany “learned their systems of genocide by watching America,” and the Nazis “borrowed significantly from American racial laws,” which is why “some Nazi scholars were in America studying racial terror in the South.” A somewhat different perspective might emerge from a black person who actually lived in Nazi Germany and the United States. Consider,...

(CNN)Oprah says her latest book club pick "might well save us." So the media mogul is sending 500 copies to the nation's governors, mayors, CEOs and college professors. The book is "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson. Oprah announced on Tuesday that it was her latest selection for her long-running book club -- and that it was the most important one yet. "This is a book for all of humanity and it is necessary for people who are leaders in our country to understand the origins of our discontent and what...

NEW YORK (AP) — California regulators have sued Cisco Systems, saying an engineer faced discrimination at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters because he is a Dalit Indian. India’s caste system long placed Dalits at the bottom of a social hierarchy, once terming them “untouchables.” Inequities and violence against Dalits have persisted for decades after India banned caste discrimination. The engineer worked on a team at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters with Indians who all immigrated to the U.S. as adults, and all of whom were of high caste, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by the California Department of Fair Employment...

Thousands of brides are being burned alive in India despite the practice being illegal, a Christian ministry has warned. India Partners, a Christian organization that works alonside indigenous Christian grassroots agencies in India, told Mission Network News on Thursday that there are still as many as 8,000 bride burning cases a year in the Hindu-majority country. A representative with India Partners, identified only as John, said the low view of women is spread through parts of India's society. “This is true both of men and women. It’s not just of men itself. Most women see the other woman as in...

An Indian student from the lowest Dalit caste was hacked to death and his wife critically injured in southern India in a suspected "honour killing" by relatives angered by their marriage, police said Monday. Three men armed with sickles and sharp weapons attacked the 22-year-old student and his wife, who is from a higher caste, on a crowded street in Tamil Nadu state on Sunday. Local police commissioner N Manjunatha said the 19-year-old woman's relatives were angered by the couple's marriage.

Another Brochure, this time detailing the wonders of the new caste system that is being implemented and published by the Office of Population Affairs. [Link]

Indian police have arrested one man and are looking for four other suspects after two teenage girls were gang-raped and then hanged from a tree in a village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said on Thursday. The two cousins, who were from a low-caste Dalit community and aged 14 and 15, went missing from their village home in Uttar Pradesh's Budaun district when they went out to go to the toilet on Tuesday evening. The following morning, villagers found the bodies of the two teenagers hanging from a mango tree in a nearby orchard. "We have registered...