Current Event Highlight: Caste Discourse around new Twitter CEO
Earlier this week, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced he was stepping down as CEO, to be replaced by Senior Twitter Executive, Parag Agrawal. In the grand scheme of things, Parag’s varna and jati background (North Indian Bania - a Vaishya caste) are basically irrelevant to his promotion to the post. However, Americans newfound discovery and interest in the topic of “caste”, fueled by a spate of dishonest articles in the recent months, meant that his varna + jati background came into surprising levels of scrutiny.
There is a trend of American’s especially imposing white-black social lenses to look at other cultures and situations and this has recently coalesced in nonsensical phrases like “Brahminical patriarchy” and activists attacking “Brahmins” using recycled anti-Semitic tropes substituting “Brahmin” for “Jew”.
To no surprise then, people unaware Agrawal was not a Brahmin, started insinuating he was, and alleged that Brahmins were taking over Silicon Valley. These occurred across the political spectrum.
On the right, Logo Daedalus, a dissident right wing, borderline white nationalist, and frogtwitter adjacent account, tweeted out this unhinged thread - which as the ratio shows, was promptly found and mocked by people who actually knew what they were talking about.
When pointed out to that Agrawal is not only not a Brahmin, but also not Tamil, he doubled down and claimed that Agrawals and Tamil Brahmins intermarried and were functionally the same caste.
Now from the left, we have “Dalit Diva” aka Themozhi Soundararajan, one of the founders of Equality Labs, notorious anti-Hindu organization, that thrives on publishing fake statistics about caste in the Hindu community and providing a megaphone for Islamist and Christian missionary organizations. Thenmozhi tweeted an unhinged claim that Silicon Valley was purely about white cismen transferring power to Brahmin cis men. The prime irony of this being that, Thenmozhi in particular, and Equality Labs in general, are self-referred to (and sadly often cites) as “experts” on caste, yet could not even properly identify the obvious caste background of the person they were whining about.
Burnt-Out Case, an Indian-American writer, has a great thread exposing Dalit Diva’’s caste rhetoric and faux activism, and what its potential impact on the Indian and Hindu-American communities could be (thread, single-page).
Why is this Twitter discourse relevant? What we see in relation to this, the New York Times making spurious attacks on BAPS as promoted posts, and various lobbying attempts to institutionalize caste-consciousness in America, is an attack on the Hindu community, which will lead to Hindus being interrogated about something which matters less and less even in India itself, and is basically irrelevant in the diaspora. Hindu communities need to stay vigilant to forces that misconstrue caste and mislead Americans to ensure our economic and political voices aren’t murked.
Video Highlight: The Science of Dharma
Discussion on Hinduism and Science hosted by Lokagatha - 1/4 in Hindi, 3/4 in English.
Aesthetic: Nepal Temple
