Fighting for Fair

Landmark victories show the growing strength of the movement for caste equity in the United States / Caste

- THENMOZHI SOUNDARARAJAN

I remember my first Zoom call with Prem Pariyar in the summer of 2020. Ruvani Fonseka, one of his professors at California State University, East Bay, had reached out on his behalf to Equality Labs, the Dalit civil-rights organisation that I run, to suggest we work together. Pariyar told his story while his children giggled and played behind him. He was a father, a survivor and an Ambedkarite, and he had a mission: caste abolition. That fateful meeting began a historic movement to institutionalise protections against caste discrimination at the California State University system—the largest public university system in the United States, with more than four hundred thousand students across its 23 campuses.

Pariyar came to the United States in 2015, fleeing his home in Nepal after his family was brutally assaulted for speaking out against the discrimination they faced as Dalits. He hoped that here, halfway across the world, he could live free of caste, but this hope was soon shattered. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area while waiting for his asylum application to be processed, he experienced unspeakable untouchability from others who had also come from his part of the world. His voice cracked as he described how, as a restaurant worker, he was forbidden to eat or sleep where his fellow workers lived. He carries the shame of that time even today.