Sen. Aisha Wahab’s caste-based discrimination bill passes Senate Judiciary Committee

Sen. Aisha Wahab’s controversial bill that would ban caste-based discrimination made its way through the Senate Judiciary committee Tuesday, and is heading to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Senate Bill 403 was met with strong opposition from some members of the Indian-American community across the state. They say that it will enable racial profiling against South Asians.

A line of both supporters and dissenters spent nearly two hours sharing their views with the committee.

“This has to be one of the largest numbers of people that have testified in this session,” said acting chair Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz.

“Caste is a civil, racial, gender, workers, and human rights issue,” Wahab, D-Hayward, who has received death threats since announcing the bill, said Tuesday.

The bill received broad bipartisan support, but many opponents of the bill —and some of Wahab’s colleagues in the Senate — wondered if discrimination on the basis of caste is a big enough problem to warrant legislation. She cited several cases of such discrimination in California.

In 2020, California regulators sued Cisco on behalf of a Dalit engineer who said he was harassed due to caste. Dalit tech workers at Google have also said that caste-based discrimination is the company’s “‘best kept secret,” and Dalit students at CSU East Bay experienced discrimination to the extent that the CSU system added caste to its anti-discrimination policy in 2022.

“Caste systems are not widely understood,” Wahab said. “This bill does not target any specific community, religion, nor does it create more harm. It simply protects people from discrimination and allows people to know they are protected under California law.”

Supporters of the bill include the ACLU California Action, CAIR-California, Sacramento native Dr. Cornel West, and members of the Seattle community who came to Sacramento to show support for SB 403. The Seattle City Council passed legislation to add caste as a protected class, and was the first city in the country to do so.

There is a “foundational principle that we don’t have caste” in the U.S. said Sen. David Min, R-Irvine, who voted in support of the bill. “There are no untouchables here.”

Committee members encouraged Wahab to work closely with the community to assuage dissenters’ fears about reverse discrimination. But, Sen. Min said, “the pros (of the bill) outweigh the cons.”