Caste Training Fuels Hate and Authoritarianism, Reveals New Study by Network Contagion Research Institute

Does this sound familiar?  “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in the fall of 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.”

It’s the time when students across America are girding up for college applications, followed naturally by college rejections. The above statement was the sum total of information presented to a panel of a national sample of Americans as a part of a scientific study conducted by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University. 

The panelists, divided into two random groups, were then asked by the researchers to respond to a series of questions designed to probe the extent to which they perceived ‘casteism’ in the interaction. Their findings of the innocuous question above are dismayingly instructive: one group consistently saw more microaggressions, more evidence of bias on the part of the admissions officer, more ‘harm’ for the candidate and so on, down the line. 

But why? Read the scenario again — there is absolutely no information about anything other than what is stated:  A interviewed B and eventually, B was rejected. It’s a scenario that plays out across North America in workplaces and schools alike. And yet, one group was consistently more likely to see it as an interaction between a privileged ‘oppressor’ and a dispossessed ‘oppressed’. 

That is the startling observation from the result of a simple and yet elegant experiment, conducted by the respected and decorated social scientists at Rutgers University. Their report has laid bare the effect and real life consequences of Hindu hate groups and their Hinduphobic rhetoric on the minds of ordinary Americans. 

In the NCRI experiment, half the participants were shown a neutral description of the ancient social system in India, written by respected academics.

The other half were shown language from the ‘report’ on Caste in the United States by the Hindu hate group, Equality Labs. 

Yes, it is really that clear. The group that was exposed to the Equality Labs rhetoric was consistently more likely to view the admissions officer (with an Indian name)  as casteist, racist, biased and unfair. In an even more alarming finding, that group was also much more willing to punish the admissions officer up to the point of being fired (+19%), significantly more likely (+48%) to view all Hindus as racist

It is said that the person who says ‘I told you so’ is never well received or even liked. But at the risk of being despised for it, we will say it.

Yes, We Told You So

In the run up to the passing of SB 403 in California, we told anyone who would listen that creating legislation based on the ‘findings’ of Hinduphobic groups like Equality Labs would cause unnecessary suspicion to be visited on ALL Hindu Americans. 

We could already see the pernicious effect of the Equality Labs propaganda on the minds of ordinary Americans. We saw it in our daily interactions with colleagues and community members; in the questions that our children were asked at school; in the subtle and not-so-subtle comments from lawmakers we interacted with. 

But most of all, we saw how this narrative was weaponized against two engineers at Cisco, whose only crime was to have names that the Hindu hate groups deemed as ‘brahmin oppressors’. 

The findings of the NCRI / Rutgers report was anticipated in the hundreds of newspaper articles, editorials and op-eds that followed the exact same playbook. “Hinduism is casteist and therefore all ‘upper caste’ Hindus in any position of authority are automatically suspect”. No matter that a 2021 Carnegie Endowment survey showed a lack of caste awareness in the diaspora. Or that nobody could actually tell who was ‘upper caste’ and who was ‘lower caste’. No matter that Sundar Iyer, the prime accused in the Cisco case had openly declared himself to be an atheist decades ago. 

Fueling Hate and Authoritarianism

Another key finding from the NCRI DEI study is how the hateful rhetoric from the so-called champions against casteism and fascism has the exact opposite effect: test subjects who were exposed to the Equality Labs description of Hinduism were more likely to exhibit authoritarian tendencies and classic signs of fascism themselves.

To quote the report, “This heightened suspicion triggers authoritarian policing tendencies, leading people to endorse surveillance and purity testing, strict social controls, and escalating responses from corrective to coercive”

The report shows that training to think about the Hindu and Indian community as ‘oppressive upper castes’ and ‘oppressed lower castes’ — as the Equality Labs rhetoric does — is to paint a target on the backs of the Hindu communities for increasing surveillance and purity testing -from mainstream Americans.

If mere exposure to a small extract from Equality Labs rhetoric can prejudice ordinary Americans against Hindus, what untold damage is being visited by immersive exposure to this hate in the form of webinars, DEI trainings and academic conferences? Equality Labs has already conducted many such “trainings” on college campuses, offices and for policymakers and continues to push for more. 

It is time for all Americans to recognize the poison that is being spread by organizations like Equality Labs — and their sympathizers, even if they brand themselves as ‘Hindu’ organizations or use Hindu-sounding names. This is far too dangerous for society to sit idly by while Nazi-like propaganda gathers steam to single out and target minority groups. 

We always knew that the Equality Labs ‘survey’ on ‘Caste in the United States’ was an unscientific, unverified, self-reinforcing fraud. But now we also know that this fraudulent report has real-life consequences.– causing ordinary Americans to view their fellow Hindu Americans as suspect, racist, and oppressive! It’s also creating peer pressure on Hindu kids in American schools to repudiate their entire culture and heritage or be tagged as ‘oppressors’. As a consequence, Hindu kids are increasingly led to dissociate themselves from their roots. Respectable campuses like Rutgers are being urged to start McCarthyist witch hunts on the basis of flimsy, anecdotal and frivolous ‘harm’ 

Let us remember the chilling warning from the NCRI study:  “While DEI initiatives typically affirm the laudable goals of combating bias and promoting inclusivity, an emerging body of research warns that these interventions may foster authoritarian mindsets, particularly when anti-oppressive narratives exist within an ideological and vindictive monoculture”.

Equality Labs is determined to poison the well when it comes to Hindu Americans. This research confirms that the well does get poisoned with their rhetoric.  It is time to put an end to this. 

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Suresh Krishnamoorthy is a naturalized citizen and a practicing Hindu who has lived in the U.S. since 1988. He is on the Executive Board of the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA).