A Dalit activist named Thenmozhi Soundararajan had her scheduled talk at Google News cancelled after employees claimed she was “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident.
An article by The Washington Post said that this move led employees to wonder if Google was “willfully ignoring caste bias.”
Soundararajan runs a nonprofit organisation called Equality Labs, which advocates for Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste. She has previously given talks on caste at Microsoft, Salesforce, Airbnb, Netflix, and Adobe. In response to Google cancelling her talk, she 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,” she said.
Gupta wrote in an email during her resignation that 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.
Google spokesperson Shannon Newberry 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 wrote.
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