Efforts in the United States to legislate “caste” as a protected category have sparked sharply divergent responses. Many academics and civil rights advocates view such laws as a bold extension of anti-discrimination protections. By contrast, large sections of the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh diaspora experience these proposals as a revival of colonial-era governance—an externally imposed framework that pathologizes dharmic communities and risks institutionalizing the very bias it claims to cure.
There is little disagreement on the moral question: discrimination is wrong. The debate turns on two deeper issues that shape both policy design and lived experience. First, who holds legitimate authority to diagnose and remedy internal social problems: the state or the community? Second, can dharmic communities be trusted to reform themselves with support and dialogue, or must they be subjected to coercive oversight by law and bureaucracy?
Historical memory matters here. In the Indian subcontinent, British rule marked the first sustained attempt by a modern state to make “caste” an object of enumeration, surveillance, and control. From the late 19th century onward, colonial instruments—decennial censuses, ethnographic surveys, and measures like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871—transformed fluid social identities (for example: kula, jati, gotra, rashtra, shreni, sampradaya) into rigid, enumerated schedules.
These schedules did not simply describe society; they reshaped it. They organized recruitment, justified separate electorates, and supplied missionary propaganda that cast Hindu society as uniquely barbaric. The postcolonial state, inheriting this apparatus in 1947, expanded it through categories such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes, complete with quotas and certificates. A grammar of governance emerged in which the state defined, ranked, and disciplined social order, implicitly signaling that communities were incapable of self-directed reform.
The contemporary US debate appears to reprise this logic. A typology of attitudes toward state and society helps clarify the stakes. On one axis lies trust in a community’s capacity for internal reform; on the other, confidence in the state’s ability to impose change from above. The state-led quadrant presumes society is too recalcitrant to change without coercion. Much colonial-era sociology operated from this presumption, and recent caste legislation proposals in the US seem to share it.
Once the state becomes the arbiter of identity, complex incentives and verification problems follow. India’s post-1947 experience illustrates this clearly. A vast administrative machinery—commissions, officers, surveys—now adjudicates caste certificates and maintains proliferating lists. Over time, state-manufactured categories have produced distortions and disputes across jurisdictions, with groups labeled “backward” or “forward” in often conflicting ways. Reports suggest that what was roughly 4,000 castes in 1931 grew to several million descriptors by 2011 as enumeration expanded—an explosion driven less by social reality than by classification regimes and the benefits attached to them.
These challenges become even more acute in a diaspora context. Caste-like hierarchies are not unique to India; they are visible, with important local variations, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar—societies that also inherited aspects of the British colonial apparatus. In the United States, however, there is no common administrative baseline for identity verification. Should colonially assigned designations from South Asia apply in America? Who will determine how surnames, regions, languages, or communities map to caste schedules—and by what standards? Where do interfaith, interracial, interstate, and adopted children fit? Absent clear criteria, the risk of arbitrary judgments, stereotyping, and disputes is substantial.
Implementation is already straining institutional practice. Some organizations have turned to caste-awareness or DEI-style training as a stopgap. Early signals are troubling. A 2023 Rutgers University study found that caste-focused diversity training appeared to increase bias against American Hindus by prompting participants to see Hindus primarily through a caste lens, regardless of individual beliefs or practices. Rather than reducing discrimination, such programs risk essentializing identity and amplifying suspicion.
For families in the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh communities, the personal stakes are real. Many parents fear their children will be asked to self-disclose, defend, or deny an identity they neither know nor hold, and students report anxiety at being pre-labeled as “oppressor” or “oppressed” based on surnames or heritage. Professionals worry that untested screening heuristics will affect hiring, promotion, or peer trust. These are not abstract concerns; they shape the everyday sense of safety, belonging, and dignity.
The purpose of anti-discrimination law is to protect individuals from actual harm, not to fix social theory in statute. When policy treats “caste” as a singular, transhistorical essence rather than a historically contingent and regionally varied phenomenon, it risks reifying and exporting a colonial construct. In doing so, it may inadvertently stigmatize dharmic communities as inherently hierarchical and uniquely in need of state surveillance, thereby undermining civil rights goals and social cohesion.
There is a constructive path forward that avoids both denial and overreach, safeguards individuals, and strengthens dharmic unity:
• Apply existing civil rights and anti-discrimination laws rigorously to individual misconduct, regardless of its alleged motivation, and require evidence-based adjudication rather than identity profiling.
• Encourage community-led reform through dialogue across Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions, recognizing shared dharmic values of dignity, compassion, and self-correction.
• Prioritize socioeconomic need, due process, and viewpoint-neutral standards over expansive identity enumeration that invites stereotyping and bureaucratic creep.
• Invest in high-quality, methodologically sound research that distinguishes between historical legacies, contemporary practices, and diaspora realities, avoiding the importation of colonial-era typologies into American life.
• Replace caste-essentialist trainings with inclusion programs that focus on universal dignity, intercultural literacy, and the diversity within dharmic communities—without imposing suspect categories or forcing disclosure.
The central question remains: when the state acts on “caste,” does it heal or does it repeat—under a new vocabulary—older patterns of classifying and disciplining communities from above? Until this historical resonance is acknowledged, the same measures will be read in two incompatible registers: emancipatory reform by some outsiders, and postcolonial continuity by many within the dharmic diaspora. A rights-centered, evidence-based, and community-partnered approach can protect individuals from discrimination while sustaining the unity and dignity of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions.
Inspired by this post on CoHNA.
