Toronto Canada (Commonwealth Union)_The Toronto District School Board took a revolutionary step this week when it became the first to recognize that caste discrimination is widely prevalent in schools across the city. With a majority verdict, the Board decided to create a framework to address the inherent issues via a provincial human rights entity.
The issue was triggered when Seattle became the first US city to outlaw caste discrimination. Toronto has a large South Asian diaspora encompassing a majority of the Indian and Hindu communities and vestiges of India’s caste system remain deeply ingrained. This form of discrimination is very prevalent within and outside India and the Board made it quite clear that the move was to create healing and empowering communities by adding safer schools for the students.
Even though the caste system in India was outlawed over seventy years ago, the biases remain, making it by far among the world’s most rigid and oldest forms of social discrimination with even violence and ostracization thrown in for those who veer from the norm. Upper castes have expansive privileges while lower castes are repressed. The Dalit community for instance, which is named as the lowest in the Hindu caste system are deemed ‘The Untouchables’. These biases and rampant discrimination even extend to lower castes being under-represented in the higher paying roles in employment as they progressed in careers.
While policies have been implemented by the Indian Government including a reservation quota for lower caste students at premier Indian universities which have paved the way for these students to get into high paying technology careers, debate continues over the prevalence of the caste-system which is for the most part intertwined with religion. Although some say caste discrimination is now rare, there is no clear-cut unanimous agreement to outlaw the issue. Activists continue to fight for outlawing it, calling it similar to racial discrimination.
