Harvard’s conservative student newspaper recently resurfaced with an essay titled “The Brahminist Veto,” presented as a defense of meritocracy, civil rights, and institutional integrity. A close reading reveals the opposite: a polemical narrative assembled through selective quotation, historical misinterpretation, and sweeping labels that caricature Hindu Americans and their advocacy as a “bigoted fringe” engaged in “institutional capture.” This analysis situates the claims in the essay within established principles of American civil rights, the factual record surrounding high-profile allegations against Hindu institutions, and the broader intellectual context of Hindu texts—while emphasizing the lived experiences of Hindu, Dalit, and Bahujan Americans and the shared ethical ground of the wider dharmic family, including Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs.
Central to the controversy is the word “caste,” a term that has come to function as an emotionally charged, negative shorthand for the Hindu tradition in the American imagination. Across otherwise opposed ideological camps—far-left and far-right—the term is often deployed as a cudgel, flattening a complex, diverse religious civilization into a single, static caricature. Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist students regularly report that this framing primes peers and institutions to see them through a deficit lens, not as individuals but as presumptive participants in a monolithic “system” that demands suspicion rather than engagement.
These concerns accelerated after Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies circulated an introductory Sanskrit-class graphic that depicted Bhagwan Krishna in a reductive and demeaning manner. Students and community members described feeling singled out—experiencing a mix of disbelief and hurt familiar to any religious minority presented with a caricature of a sacred figure in an academic setting. The department acknowledged the image as insensitive, removed it, and issued a statement of regret. Framing this outcome as a theocratic imposition inverts the logic of equal respect: the response mirrored norms routinely applied to imagery involving other faiths and stands squarely within the traditions of campus climate stewardship, not censorship.
In this light, characterizing routine civic advocacy by Hindu Americans as a “pressure campaign” or “institutional capture” is analytically weak. Communities exercise voice when they believe institutional speech or action demeans them; such engagement—letters, meetings, and respectful petitions—is how pluralism functions in higher education and civil society. Treating Hindu American advocacy differently from other protected minorities risks normalizing a double standard precisely where viewpoint neutrality should be strongest.
Equally important, the portrayal of Hindu organizations as exclusionary ignores the reality that many Hindu American advocates include Dalit and Bahujan members and leaders. Public discourse repeatedly overlooks this diversity. The late Milind Makwana, a prominent Bahujan voice who opposed California’s SB403 on principled grounds, exemplified these internal diversities of opinion and experience. Many Dalit and Bahujan Hindus in the diaspora emphasize both a categorical rejection of discrimination and a caution against frameworks that profile an entire faith community or collapse its internal plurality.
The essay’s handling of the BAPS Swaminarayan matter further illustrates the hazards of inference without evidence. Following a multi-year federal inquiry by law-enforcement agencies into allegations of labor violations and abuse at a New Jersey temple site, authorities closed the investigation in September 2025 with no charges filed, and multiple plaintiffs withdrew claims with sworn statements that no coercion or caste-based discrimination occurred. Converting a closed investigation into a proof of “influence” rather than a lack of prosecutable evidence subverts basic due-process norms. In American civil-rights jurisprudence, accusations require substantiation; absence of charges after a thorough probe cannot be repackaged as guilt by innuendo.
California’s SB403, which proposed adding “caste” as a distinct protected category, raised similar rule-of-law questions. Opponents, including many Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist Americans, argued that existing civil-rights protections already prohibit discrimination on the basis of ancestry, national origin, race, ethnicity, and religion. Creating a singular, highly stigmatized “caste” category, they noted, risked profiling a minority without robust evidence of widespread incidents in the United States. Empirical assessments of certain “caste trainings” in workplace and DEI contexts have additionally found that poorly designed modules can prime attendees to stereotype Hindus in particular ways and to single them out for unwarranted suspicion or punitive scrutiny.
Governor Gavin Newsom ultimately vetoed SB403, explaining that caste-linked harms were already redressable under current law. Far from a “Brahminist veto,” that reasoning aligned with longstanding civil-liberties concerns about redundant or targeted provisions that can be weaponized. Across the dharmic spectrum, the prevailing position is unequivocal: discrimination—including on caste—is morally reprehensible and legally actionable. The debate concerns the most effective and equitable legal architecture to prevent harm without legitimizing stigma, not the underlying obligation to protect every individual’s dignity.
On theology and history, the essay relies on familiar tropes that collapse Hindu thought into a rigid, timeless “Brahminist” hierarchy. Such claims cannot withstand scrutiny of primary sources or scholarly consensus. Consider the Manusmriti. The work is one among many Dharmashastras—normative, discursive texts—not a uniform, binding code historically enforced across the subcontinent. Its elevation to an unusual legal status occurred during early British rule, when administrators such as Sir William Jones attempted to codify “Hindu law,” privileging one text within a vast corpus for the convenience of colonial governance. Leading scholarship underscores that thinking of Dharmashastras as a monolithic applied legal code is a misunderstanding of history rather than a faithful description of precolonial legal practice.
Similarly, the persistent reading of the Rig Veda’s Purusha Sukta (10.90.12) as a legal prescription for social hierarchy divorces the hymn from its cosmological frame. Vedic hymns deploy expansive metaphors to describe creation and interdependence. The verse immediately following (10.90.13)—associating the moon with mind, the sun with eye, Indra and Agni with mouth, and Vayu with breath—shows a poetic schema of cosmic correspondences, not statutory direction. A consistent hermeneutic cannot treat one line as literal social law while acknowledging its neighbors as mythic cosmology.
The historical record further dismantles assertions of an unchanging, pan-Indian caste “system” mapped neatly to four varṇas since antiquity. The first all-India censuses under British administration (1871–72 onward) struggled to slot jati groups into a single hierarchical template; many communities petitioned for revised status in response to official classifications. That behavior points to fluid social realities responding to colonial enumeration rather than to a fixed, granular legal structure stretching back unchanged for centuries.
As Professor Sanjoy Chakravorty and other scholars have described, colonial census practices hardened loosely organized or locally contingent identities into categories with formal consequences, transforming social descriptors into administratively “objective” facts. A superintendent of the 1921 Punjab census, Mr. Middleton, captured this dynamic with unusual candor.
“We pigeonholed every one (sic) by caste, and if we could not find a true caste for them, labeled them with the name of a hereditary occupation. We deplored the caste system and its effects on social and economic problems, but we are largely responsible for the system we deplore … Government’s passion for labels and pigeonholes has led to a crystallization of the caste system, which except amongst the aristocratic castes, was really very fluid under indigenous rule.”
Against this evidentiary backdrop, the essay’s interpretive confidence rests on shaky ground. The episode illustrates the perils of cherry-picking verses or sources to support predetermined conclusions and of misreading citations that, on their own terms, complicate claims of historic uniformity and rigidity. Rigorous engagement demands historical context, methodological humility, and consistency of standards across traditions.
A final, revealing move in “The Brahminist Veto” is the suggestion that elite institutions should “defend the Hindu faith against outdated and extreme misunderstandings.” While superficially sympathetic, this framing echoes a colonial paternalism in which external arbiters presume superior interpretive authority, define orthodoxy, and then confer or withhold legitimacy. A more robust, pluralist model of knowledge-building invites collaboration with Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh communities; recognizes internal diversity; and centers the same respect for sacred imagery, ritual, and language that is already standard for other religious minorities.
Harvard’s own motto, Veritas, resonates with Ṛta—ऋतं—the Vedic idea of cosmic order and truth. That shared linguistic and philosophical heritage is not an argument for confessional gatekeeping. Rather, it is an invitation to scholarship anchored in evidence, to pedagogy that treats dharmic traditions with intellectual seriousness, and to campus climates where Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist students can be fully themselves without being subject to exoticizing frames or sweeping suspicion.
Practical steps follow from these principles. For universities: adopt clear, viewpoint-neutral standards for respectful use of sacred imagery across traditions; ensure that DEI and anti-bias programs addressing South Asia are co-designed with a broad spectrum of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh scholars and community members; and train faculty and staff to recognize how “caste” is socially constructed and historically contingent, avoiding modules that unintentionally profile a minority faith community.
For policymakers and employers: enforce existing anti-discrimination law vigorously on the basis of ancestry, national origin, race, ethnicity, and religion; gather high-quality, disaggregated data to identify actual harms; and prefer universal, conduct-focused remedies over identity-targeted categories that may stigmatize. Due process and equal protection are not obstacles to justice; they are the constitutional pathway to it.
For journalists and scholars: apply the same evidentiary bar to claims about Hindus as for any other community; avoid treating polemical terms like “Brahminism” as neutral descriptors; and attend to the diversity within Hindu, Dalit, and Bahujan communities, as well as to the family resemblance and ethical continuities among dharmic traditions. Engaging primary texts alongside lived practice—temple, sangha, gurdwara, and pathshala—yields a fuller, fairer picture than excerpting verses to fit modern stereotypes.
For the broader dharmic community: deepen solidarity across Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh lines on the shared commitments to non-harm, dignity, and equal opportunity; elevate voices from every background, including Dalit and Bahujan; and continue articulating a positive vision of American pluralism in which dharmic values enrich civic life without being pathologized.
In sum, “The Brahminist Veto” trades in caricature where careful analysis is needed. A credible defense of meritocracy and civil rights does not demonize a minority faith, dismiss its advocates as a fringe, or sidestep due process. The way forward is not through sensational labels or theological cherry-picking but through verifiable facts, constitutional principles, comparative religious literacy, and a sustained commitment to the unity and dignity of all dharmic traditions. That approach advances Veritas in the classroom, equal justice in the public square, and genuine inclusion for Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh Americans alike.
Inspired by this post on CoHNA.
