Comment by Riaz Haq on June 8, 2022 at 8:04am

Employees of Google during an internal monthly meeting on Thursday, 2 June, questioned executives why the anti-bias talk by Thenmozhi Soundararajan was cancelled.

https://www.thequint.com/news/world/google-employees-question-cance...

The company’s top diversity officer responded that it was cancelled because it “was actually pulling employees apart,” reported Insider, based on an audio recording of the meeting that was leaked.

This news comes just days after Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google, resigned from the company on 1 June, to express solidarity with a Dalit rights activist who was not allowed to give a presentation on caste.

In April, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organisation, was scheduled to give a lecture to employees of Google News during Dalit History Month. However, it was called off after several Google employees called Soundararajan "Hindu-phobic" and "anti-Hindu" in emails to company heads.

During the all-member meeting on Thursday, the question of whether Google wanted to alter more diversity initiatives to “not cause others discomfort,” in light of the anti-bias event’s cancelation was raised. Employees had reportedly asked how they can discuss discrimination at Google considering the retaliation Gupta faced.

"Retaliation is a normalised Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit," Gupta had written in her resignation email.

Google’s chief diversity officer, Melonie Parker, responded that the company was “deeply opposed” to caste discrimination, and that “it has no place here or anywhere,” Insider reported.

“And in fact, a large group of employees felt that they were being vilified. And this resulted in a lot of internal concern, heated threads, as well as escalations," he said.

Meanwhile, Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, has expressed solidarity with Soundararajan and Gupta.


They demanded that Soundararajan's talk must be reinstated at Google News and the company should have a continued commitment to bring in Dalit and caste-oppressed speakers to address caste discrimination. Google must immediately add caste to all of its HR policies in all locations, the tweet read.

Sundar Pichai, Google's chief operating officer (CEO), said that the company should take into account “all types of issues people face, and we should strive to make a difference in all of the areas, including caste discrimination” as part of its DEI work, quoted Insider.

However, Soundararajan who had appealed to Pichai to allow her to give her presentation, has still not received a response.

"He is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation," said Soundararajan, who is also a Dalit, reported The Washington Post.

“Even a consultant like myself is facing casteist smears in the company you lead. Imagine what a caste-oppressed worker at Google would face if they dared to come forward,” her statement read.

Several prominent personalities and people took to social media to slam the "blatant casteism" at the workspace.


Some Netizens Claim She Has 'Hatred for Everything Hindu'
Meanwhile, several other netizens have hailed the decision stating that she was "anti-Brahmin" and was "bent on creating caste diversion."


HinduPACT, a Hindu Policy Research and Advocacy Collective USA, accused Soundararajan of peddling "a vicious and well-resourced influence operation."

"What drives their campaign is a shared hatred for everything HINDU and a well curated agenda to defame and de-platform any representation of the Indian American diaspora or Hindu Americans in the future of America. Sinister and Goebelessian," the tweet read.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 8, 2022 at 8:18am

Tanuja Gupta's resignation letter from Google. Things I learned:


https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22050236/tanuja-gupta-goodby...


When workplace policies collide with the realities of DEI
And how Google sacrifices women to keep order
My career at Google has come to an end because of this company’s willful ignorance of caste
discrimination, the double standards of its DEI programming, the weaponization of
confidentiality to avoid accountability, and a normalized practice of retaliation against those who
speak out.
If we never had a chance to meet in the halls of Google during my 11 years at the company,
allow me to introduce myself. My name is Tanuja Gupta. I was born and raised in Texas after my
parents immigrated to the United States in the 1980s from India. By birth, I am half Hindu, half
Jain, though I most closely identify as a Jain. After high school, I attended college at New York
University where I graduated in three years and made the Dean’s List every semester. I worked
full time through my last two years of college, and started my career in tech at the age of 20. I
have since worked in technology for another 20 years as an engineering program manager.
During my cumulative 11 years at Google, I have been promoted 3 times. When I was an
individual contributor (ie not a people manager), I co-organized the Google Walkout to protest
how sexual harassment and discrimination were handled at Google, going on to successfully
advocate for ending forced arbitration within our company. Outside of Google, I have continued
to advocate for both the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the recently passed HR
4445 to end forced arbitration for sexual misconduct in the workplace.
In April 2019, after Google ended its policy of forcing arbitration, I became a people manager for
our Google News team. In 2020, I received that third promotion to “Level 7” and to date, have
built a team of 17 reports. During my last performance review, which ended May 2nd, I received
a rating of ‘Strongly Exceeds Expectations.’ I sit 4 degrees of separation from our CEO (me →
Sr. Director → VP → SVP → CEO). Aside from being entrusted to lead several key initiatives for
our 700+ cross-functional News team, I also founded a diversity, equity and inclusion model that
became the blueprint for other teams at Google. After two years of building this program, I was
co-awarded Google’s Search Superlative Award in 2021 for the impact of my work and this DEI
model.
I’m sharing all of this because everything you read below will come down to credibility -
mine, the banned speaker’s, Google’s and my fellow Googlers’. It’s also a reminder that
no amount of work success, number of successfully executed projects, or accrued
credibility makes you any less disposable if you challenge the structures of power.
One element of this DEI program model I mentioned is to run a speaker series, where experts
from different organizations come speak to Googlers to educate them on matters of equity in
different industries and countries. Since April is Dalit History Month, we wanted to shed light on
caste discrimination. For those who are not familiar with this topic, the caste system is a
millennia-old system of exclusion originating in South Asia. It impacts over 1.9B South Asians
globally today, including 5.4M South Asians here in America. Dalits (the most oppressed in the
Caste system) have been historically subjected to violence and denied access to education,
healthcare, land ownership, and other social capital. Dalits are considered ‘untouchable’
because they are considered ‘polluted’. And today, even though this sort of discrimination runs
afoul of federal and local laws, Dalits, including those who have migrated to other countries like
the United States, continue to suffer discrimination in private and public spaces —including tech

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 8, 2022 at 8:19am

Tanuja Gupta's resignation letter from Google. Things I learned:


https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22050236/tanuja-gupta-goodby...



I’m sharing all of this because everything you read below will come down to credibility -
mine, the banned speaker’s, Google’s and my fellow Googlers’. It’s also a reminder that
no amount of work success, number of successfully executed projects, or accrued
credibility makes you any less disposable if you challenge the structures of power.
One element of this DEI program model I mentioned is to run a speaker series, where experts
from different organizations come speak to Googlers to educate them on matters of equity in
different industries and countries. Since April is Dalit History Month, we wanted to shed light on
caste discrimination. For those who are not familiar with this topic, the caste system is a
millennia-old system of exclusion originating in South Asia. It impacts over 1.9B South Asians
globally today, including 5.4M South Asians here in America. Dalits (the most oppressed in the
Caste system) have been historically subjected to violence and denied access to education,
healthcare, land ownership, and other social capital. Dalits are considered ‘untouchable’
because they are considered ‘polluted’. And today, even though this sort of discrimination runs
afoul of federal and local laws, Dalits, including those who have migrated to other countries like
the United States, continue to suffer discrimination in private and public spaces —including tech
workspaces, specifically Google.
In September 2021, two Google employees approached me confidentially about the caste
discrimination they had witnessed at the company. They shared the struggles they faced simply
having a talk at Google about caste discrimination. I agreed to host this talk as part of our News
DEI program and connected to them my direct report to execute. The News DEI Speaker Series
was all set to have a talk about caste equity on April 18th with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the
co-founder of Dalit History Month and Equality Labs. Thenmozhi Soundarajan is a leading
expert in caste equity and a Dalit herself. Her work led to the first Congressional hearing on
caste discrimination in America, and her organization Equality Labs has been essential to the
Cisco caste discrimination lawsuit. Caste discrimination follows South Asians wherever they go.
So considering how matters of caste equity are covered in the news (or not) AND given the
huge South Asian population in tech, my News team found this topic relevant and timely for our
speaker series.
However, starting two days prior to the talk, a series of actions, reactions (and inaction) started,
leading to what I believe are retaliatory measures towards me and discrimination towards South
Asian caste-oppressed employees:
● Wed, Apr 13 - Fri, Apr 15
○ A handful of Google employees send emails to myself and/or members of
Google product & HR leadership at different levels with concerns, accusations
and disinformation about the talk and speaker.
○ Someone doxxes my direct report by posting her email about the talk on Twitter.
○ I meet with my VP and Chief Diversity Officer, who collectively decide to
postpone the talk and perform due diligence on the speaker. They also ask me to
debunk the misinformation in the emails from a handful of Googlers.
○ They promise to hold the talk once the due diligence is complete.
● Mon, Apr 18
○ Meanwhile, I host a talk with Thenmozhi off-corp so it’s open to the public - watch
here on YouTube.
○ I and several other Googlers donate to the speaker’s organization, Equality Labs,
via our internal gift match platform since it is an approved organization (click
here).
● Two weeks pass with canceled HR meetings and no response on the information I
have provided on the speaker.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 8, 2022 at 8:19am

Tanuja Gupta's resignation letter from Google. Things I learned:


https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22050236/tanuja-gupta-goodby...



Thu, Apr 28
○ I post this email describing what’s happened to groups to reach ~8K Googlers,
launch an internal site at go/caste-equity and invite Googlers to sign a petition if
they believe the talk should be reinstated.
○ I host another talk with Thenmozhi off-corp, with a much bigger audience this
time - watch here on YouTube.
○ HR asks my manager to submit a Talks@Google form as another form of vetting
the speaker - to date, I have never heard back on the results.
○ Employee Relations (HR) also reaches out to me, which I assume is to help with
my direct report’s doxxing case.
● Fri, Apr 29
○ 400+ Googlers sign the petition, and multiple tech companies and activists send
us endorsement letters of Thenmozhi Soundarajan (which are forwarded to our
Chief Diversity officer and CEO). I post this email.
○ I meet with Employee Relations, where I realize I am now under investigation
because Google employee(s) escalated concerns about me.
○ Moderators remove my emails from the industryinfo@ and pmtpm-discuss@
forums.
○ At this point, I’m tracking three separate investigations with different parties (i)
Security, to investigate who doxxed my direct report, (ii) ERG PeopleOps, to
investigate the proposed speaker’s credentials and vet the complaints of the
Googlers and (iii) Risk Compliance, to investigate me based on concerns by
people I do not know.
● Two weeks pass, Dalit History Month ends and I hear nothing on the HR
investigation nor the Talks@google submission. Meanwhile, my email spawns new
threads that (a) deny caste discrimination (ex1, ex2); (b) label caste-oppressed people
as less educated (ex); (c) contain Hindu-phobic allegations (ex); (d) make claims of
caste equity reverse discrimination (ex); and (e) ask for my petition to be a survey, as if
we should only hear about this topic from this speaker if the dominant majority group
agreed (ex). At some point, the Moma search for [Equality Labs] also has a top
suggested result with content from a known disinformation site. Another 200+ Googlers
sign the petition to reinstate the talk with Thenmozhi.
● Thu, May 12
○ HR notifies me that I have violated the People Manager Code of Conduct and
that I will receive a written warning letter later in the day. The investigator also
confirms that if I was an individual contributor, this investigation would not be
happening. They also ask me to take down several parts of the go/caste-equity
site, including any reference to HR actions and specific statements by three
Googlers - who will all be contacted separately as well. (One of the Googlers
confirmed HR never contacted him.)
○ Separately, the Head of Product Inclusion & Equity reaches out to me to learn
more about caste as it relates to our products.
○ Two hours later, in a meeting with my VP (pronouns: they/them), I find out that
the person who is responsible for deciding whether or not we will have a talk on
caste equity (and whether or not Soundarajan can be the speaker) has been my
VP all along. And that they will conduct a listening session with the Hindu
Employee Resource Group to help them make a decision. They also confirm the
contents of my warning letter: my performance rating in the next cycle will
automatically be lowered, affecting my compensation, and I will be ineligible for
promotion for at least the next promotion cycle.
● Mon, May 16
○ I meet 1:1 with our VP, who says we should have the conversation on caste
equity, but with a different speaker. I ask them to meet with the original speaker,
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, to at least hear from her directly. My VP agrees.
Right after, we meet with my direct report to break this news and make a plan to
move forward where the DEI HR team will help us source and vet speakers.
Read the full TRANSCRIPT here, PII redacted.
○ I meet 1:1 with my Manager and have a conversation which cinches my letter of
dispute, as you see a week later.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 8, 2022 at 8:20am

Tanuja Gupta's resignation letter from Google. Things I learned:


https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22050236/tanuja-gupta-goodby...



Mon, May 16
○ I meet 1:1 with our VP, who says we should have the conversation on caste
equity, but with a different speaker. I ask them to meet with the original speaker,
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, to at least hear from her directly. My VP agrees.
Right after, we meet with my direct report to break this news and make a plan to
move forward where the DEI HR team will help us source and vet speakers.
Read the full TRANSCRIPT here, PII redacted.
○ I meet 1:1 with my Manager and have a conversation which cinches my letter of
dispute, as you see a week later.
● Tue, May 17
○ My VP, Thenmozhi and I meet for 40 minutes, where my VP asserts this is not a
legal discrimination issue and acknowledges Thenmozhi is being held to a
different standard than all other speakers. Read the full TRANSCRIPT here, PII
redacted. (If you read only one transcript, let it be this one.)
● Thu, May 19
○ After multiple pings, I recap to my VP, manager and HR that we have sourced
multiple alternative speakers, but have been explicitly told not to reach out to
them by HR.
○ We also still have no understanding of the vetting process, or what was
objectionable about Thenmozhi in the first place.
○ I do not hear back from HR, and still haven’t to this day.
○ I confide in a colleague who says to me “they’ve been waiting for an opportunity
to do this to you for years”. This triggers my memory and I remember the report
on Project Vivian as reported in VICE, where the end forced arbitration group that
I founded is discussed explicitly. And I am the last Walkout organizer at the
company. It suddenly occurs to me that the punishment I have received may
have nothing to do with this episode, but that Google may have finally just found
that opportunity to fire me without firing me.
● Mon, May 23
○ 11:15am EST - I dispute the warning letter (read 1,2,3,4, PII redacted) - to date, I
have received no response with the requested information / clarifications from
HR nor my VP.
○ 11:20am EST - I formally request a legal investigation for retaliation and
workplace safety (read 1,2,3,4,5, PII redacted).
○ 6:00pm EST - I resign from Google. My manager states, “I had a feeling the
second I read the letter … I think about everything I could have done and should
have done. I guess I don’t see a full version of this story where I could have
made you and Google happy.”
● Tue, May 24
○ My VP reaches out for a chat, asking if I have plans, offering their personal email,
willing to make introductions to people in government and tech. When I ask,
“would you stay if you had to sign that letter?”, they reply “I don’t know.”
○ They also say that they will separate the DEI talk from the Product Inclusion talk,
so it will not go through the HR DEI processes.
○ My VP confirms, “I can run my product and engineering business however I like
without HR involvement. The problem with this whole thing, sadly, has been the
word ‘DEI’ in the speaker series, and then basically that gets into a world in
which multiple groups feel like they have purview.”
○ Lawyers from Alphabet - not HR from Google - reach out to start the investigation
of retaliation. They ask for my lawyer’s contact information.
● Wed, May 25

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 12, 2022 at 4:46pm

Dr. Audrey Truschke
@AudreyTruschke
Upper-caste Hindu nationalists on this interview right now: “Googlers didn’t mind talking about caste, they just didn’t want a Dalit-led group talking about caste.”

What sheer, unadulterated bigotry.

https://twitter.com/AudreyTruschke/status/1558221459591467009?s=20&...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-problem

Google’s Caste-Bias Problem
A talk about bigotry was cancelled amid accusations of reverse discrimination. Whom was the company trying to protect?

By Isaac Chotiner

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-problem

ntil recently, Tanuja Gupta was a senior manager at Google News. She was involved in various forms of activism at the company, and, in April, she invited Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality Labs, a nonprofit, to speak about the subject of caste discrimination. (India’s caste system, which has existed in some form for centuries, separates Hindus into broadly hierarchical groups that often correspond to historical religious practice and familial professions. Those at the bottom of the system are called Dalits—formerly known as “untouchables”—and still face extreme discrimination in India.)

Numerous employees within the company expressed the view that any talk on caste discrimination was offensive to them as Hindus, and made them feel unsafe. The talk was eventually cancelled, and Gupta, who had been at Google for more than ten years, resigned amid an investigation into her own behavior. (A spokesperson for Google said that it has “a very clear, publicly shared policy against retaliation and discrimination in our workplace.”)

I recently spoke with Gupta. Her lawyer, Cara Greene, joined the conversation, which we agreed would stay on the record. During the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Silicon Valley deals with issues of caste discrimination, why Google employees felt “threatened” by the talk that Gupta had scheduled, and the circumstances behind her departure from the company.

Why did you want to join Google, and what did you feel about the place when you did?

tanuja gupta: I started working at Google in 2011. I had been working as a program manager in engineering and software for about a decade, but Google was top of the top. Of course you want a career at a great company. That was a product that I used day in and day out. It was a great opportunity.

When did you decide that you wanted to get involved with activism inside Google?

t.g.: Probably with the Google walkout in 2018. It was the height of the MeToo movement. The Kavanaugh confirmation was happening. The news about Andy Rubin had broken—the ninety-million-dollar payout that he received despite allegations of sexual misconduct. And so I think there was a little bit of a breaking point within the company, and in myself, the experiences that I’d had in tech. That’s when it started.

As we’ve all grown during the past couple of years, diversity, equity, and inclusion [D.E.I.] has become more and more recognized as not just a moral nicety but actually as a business imperative, that companies have a competency around these matters, especially in products. For the past three years, I was working on Google News products. To be able to cover news topics about matters of race, gender equity, caste, things like that, you actually have to be able to understand matters of diversity and inclusion. And so it went from being a separate, side thing to integral to being good at your core job.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 12, 2022 at 4:47pm

What got you interested in the subject of caste discrimination?

t.g.: There was my own obvious background. My parents immigrated from India in the early nineteen-eighties. I was certainly familiar with the topic. In September, 2021, two employees approached me. I hosted D.E.I. office hours every week where people could come in and talk about these topics, confidentially, and multiple Google employees came into my office and reported that they had faced discrimination when trying to talk about matters of caste in the workplace. There was already a public condemnation of caste discrimination at Google from the Alphabet workers’ union. They had put out a press statement when the Cisco case broke. There were reports from at least twenty Google employees as well. [In June, 2020, California sued Cisco and two of its managers for engaging in caste discrimination. Afterward, Equality Labs received complaints from more than two hundred and fifty tech workers, including twenty Google employees.]

What made it really relevant to Google News was that, in 2022, there was a huge election in India where matters of caste equity were integral. Given the news-product footprint in India, caste is absolutely something we need to talk about, and we need to make sure that our products are thinking about folks from different caste backgrounds.

You’re talking about the election earlier this year, in Uttar Pradesh, which is the most populous state in India, with more than two hundred million people, where a very right-wing politician, aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, was reëlected as chief minister. [The B.J.P, led by India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is known for its defenses of Hindu identity and religious chauvinism; its base of support has typically come from privileged-caste Hindus, although under Modi the Party has made inroads among voters from a variety of castes.] Are you saying that to understand these issues of caste was important for your work, and not just for the inner harmony of your workplace?

t.g.: That’s right. It was a perfect storm of all these things—colleagues coming to me as well as our products being affected by it.

And were these colleagues coming to you in India or in the United States or both?

t.g.: Both.

Were these people who were experiencing discrimination firsthand, or was it more people who wanted to talk about this issue and why it’s important?

t.g.: The first conversations I had were with people who felt that they were being discriminated against for even raising this topic. I think that’s a form of discrimination in and of itself—where you can talk about some matters related to D.E.I. but not others. Then you had some other folks who faced it directly because of being caste oppressed.

When you say that people felt that they could not bring up caste discrimination, was this in the context of stories about what was happening in Uttar Pradesh, or things within the workplace, or both?

t.g.: Within the workplace.

Who was the discrimination coming from, and how did it manifest?

t.g.: I can share what I’ve seen and what’s been shared with me. The first thing is denial. Saying this doesn’t even exist. That is a form of discrimination. There were messages on e-mail threads that talked about how this isn’t a problem here. If you replace the denial of caste discrimination with the denial of the Holocaust or something like that, it instantly clicks where other people start to realize, “Oh, something’s wrong if people are denying this.” The second thing—and I think the Cisco case is probably the most publicly known example—is that, within a team, when you’ve got people who are caste privileged and caste oppressed, the people who are caste oppressed start to be given inferior assignments, get treated differently, left out of meetings, which are certainly things that I heard from Google employees within the company. [The Google spokesperson said that caste discrimination has “no place in our workplace and it’s prohibited in our policies.”]

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 12, 2022 at 4:48pm

Another thing is these coded conversations. If you’re not attuned to what the issue is, you won’t even realize what’s happening. Asking things like “What’s your last name? I’m not familiar with it.” Then, when the manager hears that last name, they’re, like, “Oh, so you’re from this caste—no wonder you have these leadership skills.” Things like that. And somebody else in the room is, like, “What the hell?” It’s those different types of experiences that I’ve seen or that have been shared with me that show that caste discrimination is happening in the workplace.

Are you saying that in the United States this discrimination is coming from other Indian Americans? This is not to say that white people or Hispanic people or Black people or whoever else can’t perpetrate caste discrimination. But I think a lot of people who aren’t aware of the caste system or do not recognize someone’s name or what that might suggest about their caste would say, “How could I discriminate about caste? I don’t even know anything about caste.”

t.g.: I don’t fault people for not knowing the intricacies of caste discrimination. I fault people for not wanting to learn about it. Willfully not wanting to learn more about certain topics when you hear that people are being discriminated against, choosing not to do anything about it, that is a problem. And that’s what was happening. People can absolutely discriminate based on caste by essentially denying it and not wanting to learn about it.

In other words, there is first-order discrimination by Indian Americans toward people from underprivileged castes. And then when this gets kicked up the chain of command or gets commented upon, people of varying backgrounds practice their own form of discrimination by not looking into it or not wanting to hear about it.

t.g.: That’s exactly right.

So, you are hearing these stories. What happens next?

t.g.: We asked a speaker to come talk to our news team about matters of caste and discrimination, and specifically caste representation in the newsroom. Two days before the talk, which is part of a larger D.E.I. programming series that I ran for the team, a number of e-mails got sent to my V.P., to the head of H.R., to our chief diversity officer, to our C.E.O. directly, claiming that the talk was creating a hostile workplace, that people felt unsafe, that the speaker was not qualified to speak on the topic, and several other allegations. The talk got postponed. That was the term that was used.

Who was sending these e-mails?

t.g.: They were all internal Google employees. That’s about as much as I can say. Google essentially decides to turn down the temperature by postponing the talk and conduct further due diligence on this speaker. Bear in mind that, just five months earlier, this speaker had spoken at Cloud Next, which is a huge event for Google Cloud.

Then nothing happened for two weeks. There was no follow-up on the due diligence, or what made the speaker objectionable in the first place. I told Google that they’d been given some misinformation, and explained why it wasn’t true, and got nothing. At that point, Dalit History Month, which is in April, was about to end.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 12, 2022 at 4:49pm

Do you want to say what Dalit means?

t.g.: Dalit is a term that means “broken,” or “untouchable.” It refers to folks at the bottom or outside of the caste system who have been relegated to perform the dirtiest jobs because they are considered spiritually polluted. It comes from a millennia-old system that has religious roots. There has been a cultural and societal impact on millions of South Asians in America, and across the globe, who have faced tremendous setbacks, particularly gender-based violence, but also when it comes to owning land or homes, or finding economic and educational opportunities.

The reason it was important to do the event in April is that the speaker is the founder of Dalit History Month. We were at a point where nothing was being done; it was just silence. At that point, there is no difference between a postponement and a cancellation. In April, we started a petition internally to raise awareness about the lack of action. We got four hundred signatures overnight, and a lot of people actually started to learn about caste, which was the whole point of this talk in the first place. H.R. then informed me that I had violated Google’s standards of conduct, claiming that I publicly criticized Googlers for raising concerns to leadership about the harm and risk they felt from the talk. I should have also mentioned that, during the process of these escalations and concerns, my direct employee got doxed. Her personal information was put on Twitter. The content of the tweet was her e-mail invitation to the Google News team to join this talk on caste equity.

Then I got put under investigation. So I’ve got three things happening at once. I’m trying to run this investigation with our security team to figure out who doxed my direct employee. I’m answering questions because I’m under investigation. And I’m still trying to keep the train moving on actually holding a caste-equity talk and getting the speaker cleared. In May, a number of conversations started to happen where it became clear that there were no universal standards for actually bringing speakers into the company. There was no way to actually get approval for a speaker on caste equity. [The Google spokesperson told The New Yorker, “We made the decision not to move forward with this proposed talk which was pulling employees apart rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness.”]

Then I got issued a warning letter saying that I had violated these standards of conduct and that I was going to be penalized for showing a lack of good judgment, for disrupting the workplace, and for making people feel unsafe because I publicly outed them, even though I never, ever publicly named the Google employees who complained. My ratings were going to be lowered, and my compensation would be affected.

There was also an e-mail group within Google with around eight thousand employees of South Asian descent. What exactly was that forum?

t.g.: Eight thousand is a number that was tallied up from the different Google groups or aliases. We have internally moderated forums. Some forums are specific to groups—Hindus at Google, or Desis at Google, things like that. It’s a mix of them. My initial e-mail started getting forwarded to different forums, and then you could just see these e-mail threads spawn. I wasn’t engaging with any of them, but I saw conversations in which people were denying that caste discrimination was ever a thing, were saying that people weren’t smart enough to understand this topic, all these different kinds of allegations.

Did you have any conversations with fellow-employees who were opposed to this talk?

t.g.: No. At that point, the whole H.R. machine had kicked in, so I couldn’t engage with any of these conversations for risk of being seen as retaliatory.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 12, 2022 at 4:50pm

I think Americans have a pretty clear idea of who at a company might object to a conversation about the way law enforcement treats African Americans, and who would say “All lives matter,” or something like that. They would have an idea of politically where those people were coming from. What do you think was going on here?

t.g.: I think it’s probably a couple of things combined. There’s certainly the nationalist political movement that is well documented across the board, and the emboldening of that movement with the current leadership [in India]. Apart from that political side, any time you talk about a topic that’s going to threaten your own power you’re going to get some resistance. To your point of comparing it to talking about police brutality and racism in America, I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. Caste is just a different concept than we’re used to in America. We understand race, we understand religion, but caste is neither of those things fully. That’s where I think the lack of understanding is happening right now.



The right-wing Hindu movement in India has historically not been associated with people from underprivileged castes, and those people have generally been less supportive of the movement. Much of the criticism of the ruling party in India and talk of caste discrimination has been chalked up to “anti-Hinduism.”

t.g.: It’s so absurd to me. If you think about L.G.B.T.Q. rights, when you have a talk about those kinds of rights, that is not saying you’re inherently anti-Christian. They’re so different. That’s the only way I can think to explain it to someone here. The opposite of caste is not religion.

That’s where things have gotten really conflated. This was a talk about civil rights and the cultural and socioeconomic impact of caste discrimination on people in America, and how this system has moved here. That’s what we were trying to talk about, but, when you have people who are threatened by that conversation, because they associate caste discrimination with religion, with that kind of power, that’s where a lot of the conflicts came in.

One of the things that strike me as ironic here is that the language from those opposed to the talk is not unfamiliar. You can imagine, in another context, people who support D.E.I. efforts saying that, if people who are Hindu feel offended by this talk or feel that it’s an attack on their religion, that is a really important thing to protect. Is there a tension there?

t.g.: You don’t get to claim or hijack one form of discrimination to perpetuate another form. I had many personal friends who I could talk to about this who were, like, “I am Hindu, I am Brahmin, and I am deeply disturbed with how Hinduism is being used to perpetuate caste discrimination.” I don’t want to say that this is a monolithic thing, how Hindus feel about this. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m half-Hindu. You can absolutely have a conversation about caste discrimination and know that there may be religious roots in some of it, but that’s not where we are today. We are talking about a socioeconomic issue. That’s how you can hold the two things in your brain together. Does that answer your question?

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