Woke Rutgers Endorses Hindu Racism
At my nonprofit, the Vulnerable People Project, we advocate for the most abandoned and forgotten groups on earth. They range from the hunted Yazidi of Iraq to the persecuted Christians and Jews in Nigeria, to the Afghans who aided U.S. servicemen only to have Joe Biden abandon them in their most dire hour of need. Yes, we send coal for Christmas, dig wells, and distribute food. We just shipped pallets of baby formula to the traumatized Christians trapped in Gaza.
Another part of our work entails confronting callous elites who vaunt their “compassion” and love for “diversity” while in fact profiting handsomely from oppressive, evil regimes. Think of woke corporations who bleated “Black Lives Matter” while buying components produced by Uyghur slaves in Chinese camps.
Perhaps the most egregious Pharisees today can be found at our highly politicized universities in the West — places like Rutgers University.
Under pressure from a leading Hindu advocacy group, Rutgers has chosen not to ban caste-based discrimination, despite an internal report identifying caste bigotry as a serious issue that contradicts the university’s commitment to equity and inclusion.
“After careful review, the university has determined that current university policy and protected class categories provide protections against caste discrimination,” Rutgers said in a January 13 statement, fallaciously confusing the categories of “caste” and “class.”
“Caste is already covered by the Policy Prohibiting Discrimination and Harassment,” officials insisted, contending that “caste can and does fall” within the “classes” of discrimination based on religion, ancestry, national origin, and race, all of which the university prohibits.
Hence, “the university will not be taking steps to amend this policy at this time,” Rutgers stated, admitting that its decision “does not reflect the university’s agreement with, or adoption of, the findings and conclusions set forth in the report.”
Rutgers Rejects Internal Report
In August 2024, the Rutgers University Task Force on Caste Discrimination published a 62-page report concluding that “caste-based discrimination is a problem at Rutgers that limits the potential and opportunities of some in our university community.”
Underscoring “the importance of naming caste, thereby breaking the taboo surrounding this pernicious social hierarchy,” the task force urged Rutgers to “add caste as a protected category to its non-discrimination policy.”
“Those at the bottom — sometimes known as ‘untouchables’ — are most at risk of discrimination and other harms owing to their caste,” the report, titled “Caste-Based Discrimination in U.S. Higher Education and at Rutgers,” warned.
Citing the 2016 report by civil rights group Equality Labs, which described Dalits as “a diaspora within a diaspora” who suffer caste bigotry, the task forced noted that over 40% of Dalits in the U.S. reported “caste-based discrimination in educational contexts (including colleges).”
The internal report also stressed that “Rutgers would follow more than a dozen institutions of higher education” including universities like Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota, California, and Georgetown, “in specifying that caste-based discrimination is not tolerated on campus.”
Rutgers Capitulates to Hindu Supremacists
In its statement, Rutgers did not mention that it had received a letter from the legal counsel of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) in August, “strongly advising” the university not to implement any programmatic changes.
“‘Caste’ is a racially loaded term that is nearly exclusively, albeit falsely, associated with Hinduism and India,” the HAF disingenuously maintained in its letter. “It is also a reductive colonial term, and now administrative category under Indian law, that erases the actual, nuanced identities of Indians and Hindus and obstructs genuine, fact-based understanding today and historically.”
“The addition of ‘caste’ is not only unnecessary, but it will be intentionally stigmatizing, punitive, and discriminatory against your Indian origin students and employees,” HAF threatened. “In fact, institutional liability will only increase if policies specify ‘caste,’ a term that is equated with Indians and Hindus.”
The HAF letter also attempted to discredit Equality Labs and Suraj Yengde (one of India’s leading Dalit scholars and public intellectuals cited in the report), noting that both have “a long and public track record of anti-Hindu activism and hate speech.”
Yengde, a human rights attorney, is a senior fellow at Harvard University and author of Caste: A New History of the World and the bestseller Caste Matters, which was recently featured in the best nonfiction books of the decade list by The Hindu newspaper in 2020.
Hindu Supremacists’ Disinformation Campaign on Caste
In multiple essays on its website, HAF, which has been delineated as a Hindu supremacist outfit by Political Research Associates (PRA), promotes the spurious narrative that the caste system has been ideologically linked to Hinduism.
“The idea of an Indian caste system, as an unchanging, oppressive, and hereditary social hierarchy that is religiously mandated by and for Hindus, is the product of European conceptions about Indians and Hinduism,” HAF claims in an essay titled “The Racist History of the Caste System.”
Rather, the “British construction of an Indian caste system is the result of translating white-European and Christian supremacist theories into colonial policy,” it argues, pushing a fringe view of Hindu propagandists that has is not held by Western or most Hindu scholars.
The essay belabors its faux narrative:
Beliefs about white-European superiority and the inferiority of dark-skinned Indians shaped European theories about an Indian caste system. To prove both their own superiority as well as the inferiority of Indians (and other colonized populations), Europeans translated and interpreted select Hindu texts informed by their prejudices, to in turn, validate them.
Hindus Emulating White Supremacists
“HAF was founded in 2003 as a 501(c)(3) organization by a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in older Hindu supremacist organizations,” warns the October 2024 PRA report HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry as Minority Rights.
The Hindu outfit has “furiously fought to prevent the institution of legal protections against caste discrimination, emulating White supremacist tactics against anti-racist organizing,” the 82-page PRA report notes.
While it has taken extremist positions endorsing “caste, religious majoritarianism, and support for the Hindu supremacist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)” it has “gone to great lengths to pose as a civil rights group externally and maintain a semblance of legitimacy within mainstream American civil society,” HAF Way to Supremacy explains.
In 2005, HAF worked with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, a sister Hindu supremacist nonprofit organization registered in New Jersey, to oppose the inclusion of educational material on caste in California public school textbooks, arguing that teaching students about caste bigotry would discriminate against Hindus.
HAF spent a whopping $300,000 to oppose a bill introduced in the California state legislature in 2023 which sought to include caste as a protected category in the state’s civil rights law. The bill passed the state assembly on a 55-3 vote and the state senate 31-5, but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom under pressure from the American Hindu supremacists.
Newsom cited the same reason as Rutgers in his letter vetoing the bill, noting that “California already prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics,” and so “discrimination based on caste is already prohibited under these existing categories.”
Anti-Caste Hindus Challenge Rutgers
Meanwhile, the Hindus for Human Rights (HHR), an American organization mobilizing progressive diaspora Hindus to resist caste, Hindu nationalism and supremacy, and all forms of bigotry and oppression, issued a statement urging Rutgers to ban caste discrimination.
“As Hindu Americans, we are saddened and outraged to see bad-faith actors, who falsely claim to speak on behalf of our community, weaponizing Hindu identity in order to oppose these much-needed civil rights measures,” HHR pleaded.
HHR admitted that the caste system is inextricably interwoven into the fabric of Hinduism:
It’s undoubtedly true that the version of the caste system that exists in the Indian subcontinent and its diasporas is rooted in dominant interpretations of Hindu scripture and practice — and it is our responsibility as Hindus to confront and combat the ongoing harms that caste perpetuates against marginalized communities.
Hitesh Trivedi, associate Hindu chaplain at Rutgers, was pleased that the university had opted not to include caste in its list of discriminatory practices.
“I am glad that the Rutgers University Labor Relations office recognized that caste is already covered under their current policy and did not fall for the report by the task force, which singled out Hindu students and faculty,” he said in a press statement from the Coalition of Hindus of North America.
In my last column, I wrote about how the Indian government is trying to keep Dalits trapped in the religion that dehumanizes them by imposing harsh prison terms on local Christians who try to share the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ with them. What I didn’t expect (perhaps I was being naive) is that American universities with commitments to “diversity” would let that term be perverted so completely and used in defense of the oldest, ugliest form of racism on Earth.
Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.