Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan was scheduled to give a talk at Google News. The Company, however, cancelled the talk after employees claimed she was “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. Senior manager at Google News, Tanuja Gupta, who had invited Soundararajan for the talk, resigned over the incident.
This move by Google led employees to wonder if the company was “willfully ignoring caste bias”, an article by The Washington Post said.
Soundararajan, who runs a nonprofit organisation called Equality Labs, works for causes of Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste. Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Airbnb, Netflix, and Adobe have previously hosted Soundararajan for talks. The activist, reacting to the move by Google, said: “Most institutions wouldn’t do what they did. It’s absurd. The bigoted don’t get to set the pace of conversations about civil rights.”
Gupta, in her resignation email, said she questioned whether Google wanted its diversity efforts to succeed. “Retaliation is a normalized Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit,” she wrote.
Shannon Newberry, a spokesperson for Google, wrote in a statement that caste discrimination has no place in the tech giant’s workplace. “We also have a very clear, publicly shared policy against retaliation and discrimination in our workplace,” she added.
“We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which — rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancour,” Newberry further wrote.
As an independent media platform, we do not take advertisements from governments and corporate houses. It is you, our readers, who have supported us on our journey to do honest and unbiased journalism. Please contribute, so that we can continue to do the same in future.
