Happy Birthday CasteFiles

CasteFiles Turns One

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 05, 2024

PRESS CONTACT

Richa Gautam | Abhijit Bagal | Directors, CasteFiles

The best things in life are organic. CasteFiles emerged when we realised the pattern of continuous flaring of the caste non issue in the American polity after we successfully exposed the sloppy Equality Labs Caste Survey and after we had successfully launched the Castegate.org analysis of the loopholes in the Cisco Caste Discrimination case.

The need for a specialized Advocacy Platform, Academic Think Tank, and Educational Media Platform was dire, as Caste had become a new buzz of the identitarian devices in the United States.

So even though we are one year old,our work in this field spans many years as a corrective force, balancing the lopsided narrative and developing new paradigms to decolonize Caste and Race.

One Year of Toddlerhood seems small and sweet, but our accomplishments stand tall, and our goals are even taller. We have achieved so far more than we strived for, and we hope to break new frontiers in the process of dismantling and dissolving caste consciousness.

Your support has been invaluable, and we sincerely appreciate your appreciation, the shoutouts, the outreach on social media and of course, the dollars that keep us going.

CasteFiles could not have grown into an effective platform for fighting prejudice against Indian Americans based on the bogey of caste without your valuable support.

To mark our 1st anniversary, we decided to give you a highlights of our actions and accomplishments over the last year that have helped our community fight back against the profoundly biased and unconstitutional campaign carried out against us.

1. CASTEGATE EXPOSÉ IN CISCO CASE: The CISCO case has become something of a touchstone by which the Indian American community's activism and advocacy shall be judged when it comes to violation of our rights. Our sister website - Castegate.org - did a deep dive into the minutiae of the case and made exposés that have been and continue to be central to our win against Caste Bills like SB403.. Castegate was a ready-reckoner and a handy reference for every single volunteer, lawmaker and official who dealt with the CISCO case.

2. PUSH-BACK AGAINST SEATTLE CASTE LEGISLATION: CasteFiles took the lead in its strong push-back against the Caste legislation that Councilor Kshama Sawant rushed through in the Seattle City Council. CasteFiles was at the forefront of the fight against the resolution filing a case against the legislation, that does not even try to mask its intent to single out and target the Indian American community.

3. FIGHT AND WIN AGAINST SB403: Advocacy and civic engagement with lawmakers and community leaders has been central to our fight against SB403 Caste Bill in California. Our research-based documentation and series of articles and on-ground activism was key in leading the charge against SB403, a legislation passed by the California State Assembly that would have specifically targeted Hindu Americans through its blatant anti-Hindu agenda. Eventually, the hard-fought battle by the community resulted in Governor Gavin Newsom vetoing the bill.

4. ACADEMIC INROADS BY OUR THINKTANK: Our research work is getting noticed and we are invited to contribute in academic research work. We also spent considerable time rebutting the controversial paper published by MIT Sloan on caste based corporate training proposals, that if instituted, would inculcate suspicions against the people of South Asian origin in corporate America. Ours was the only thoroughly researched response to the paper. Our research found the MIT paper to be erroneous on four counts - presumption fallacy, generalization fallacy, circular reasoning, and argument by anecdote, and provided a much-needed rebuttal and we are in continuous engagement with the academia.

5. UNRAVELING TRUTH BEHIND ABA'S RESOLUTION 513: The American Bar Association (ABA) adopted Resolution 513 in 2023, which added caste as a protected category against discrimination. CasteFiles stood out in providing details of the duplicitous an schizophrenic resolutions, calling out the contradiction between the diluted version of SB403 and how ABA translated the still pending law into a target against Hindu Americans.

6. CASTEFILES SUCCESSFUL COMPLAINTS AGAINST UNIVERSITIES: Equality Labs, a known campaigner against Hinduism and Indian Americans has worryingly moved to university campuses. We filed a complaint various universities which are being investigated for Civil Rights violations, including UC San Diego. Another of our complaint about Title IX violations, against a poorly designed caste survey at the University of Wisconsin prompted the university to scrap the survey within days of its commission. Our sustained campaign against noxious caste indoctrination in academic institutions is one of our most important ongoing campaigns.

7. CASTEFILES BECOMES THE SINGLE IMPORTANT SOURCE FOR BAPS CASE UPDATES: Our surprising top of the charts articles’ have been the ones on the BAPS case. The crumbling case against the New Jersey temple,also known as the Akshardham Temple in Robbinsville, NJ, was FIRST covered on CasteFiles with regular updates on the legal matters.

8. 50 UNIQUE ARTICLES: Since its founding last year, CasteFiles has become the one-stop destination for accessing high-quality research and reports on the issue of caste and its weaponization against the Indian American community. Our 50^th article was the highly read and appreciated MITSloan rebuttal published in 2023.

9. ADVOCACY AND ALLIANCES: While CasteFiles puts out high-quality reports prepared by a dedicated group of researchers, we also realize the importance of building horizontal and vertical alliances at the grassroots and with businesses, corporate entities, and academia. Our on-ground advocacy and activism work are done through closely forged partnerships with the Indian American community and the US mainstream.

10. AI BASED ANALYTICS OF SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS: At the root of the caste malaise are colonial theories of Hinduism. The campaign against the textbook tropes has been a long-drawn battle and needs to go on. To counter the harmful targeting of the Hindu American micro-minority also called a model minority not too long back.. Trained Data Analysts at CasteFiles are conducting AI based sentiment analysis of school textbooks to understand how these tropes about Hinduism are projected to mainstream fallacious tropes about Hinduism that are mainstreamed in school curricula. We are using advanced AI tools to exhaustively examine all textbook references to Hinduism and are in the process of compiling a detailed report.

11. CO-HOSTING CASTECON 2023: A Grassroots team along with Hinduu Community leaders and CasteFiles coordinated a conference to display their solidarity with the Indian American groups fighting SB403. A number of important voices from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, and African American community leaders along with diversity educators joined in to share their concerns regarding the unconstitutional bill. The event went a long way in laying out the current and future challenges for the Indian American community, especially the weaponization of a non-issue like caste.

We are unreserved in our gratitude to our donors whose tax-exempt dollars keep our work going. If you have not already contributed to our cause, please consider donating to us.

If you are interested in understanding the truth about caste and race, please visit the CasteFiles website at www.castefiles.com or email info@castefiles.com and become part of the conversation.