Google cancels Dalit activist’s talk on caste: Global tech giant Google has been accused of being racist. A Dalit rights activist from California, USA, has accused Google, a search engine company, of promoting casteism.
According to reports, Google canceled the proposed event of activist Themmozhi Soundararajan on the topic ‘Caste problem’ in its office in the month of April. Themmozhi Soundararajan is the founder and executive director of Equality Labs, California. According to the allegations, Google did this after protests by its upper caste employees.
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According to international media reports, Google employees started spreading false information and rumours against Soundararajan, calling her “anti-Hindu” and “Hinduphobic”. This information is based on documents, as well as interviews with Soundararajan and Google employees without revealing their identities, given to the newspaper ‘The Washington Post.’
Equality Labs issued a statement saying, “During this time, opponents of racial equality have internally circulated false information about Soundararajan and Equity Labs until the cancellation of an event based on ‘civil rights’.”
Google news manager Tanuja Gupta resigns in protest
It is also being said that Soundararajan had written to Google CEO Sundar Pichai about the event being organized. There was no reply from Pichai’s side. Google News senior manager Tanuja Gupta, who had invited Soundararajan to interact with Google employees, resigned after the event was cancelled.
According to ‘The Washington Post’, she wrote in her farewell letter that, “It is normal at Google to take revenge for handling internal criticism, and women have to bear the brunt.”
Making serious allegations against the search engine company, Tanuja wrote in her letter that, “In the process of doing my job and promoting caste equality in the company, I have seen four black women being harassed and silenced. The truth is that these are not isolated incidents, it is a pattern.”
After her request was turned down by Google, Gupta conducted an interview with an anti-Brahmin activist on Youtube on 4 May this year.
Google spokeswoman Shannon Newbery issued a statement regarding the episode, saying, “Racial discrimination has no place in our workplace. We have a very clear, publicly shared policy against retaliation and discrimination in our workplace.” He also said in his statement that, “We decided not to proceed with the proposed dialogue – which was creating division and rancor – instead of bringing our community together and raising awareness.”
People are making various allegations against Google CEO Sundar Pichai on social media regarding this news. Sundar Pichai is not only of Indian origin, but he is also a Tamilian Brahmin.
Writer Meena Kandasamy tweeted, “I wonder how @sundarpichai has made peace with the fact that talking about caste got deplatformed by savarna lobbies, when he is a Tamil, has lived in Tamil Nadu, and most of all, gone to school inside the IIT Madras campus, a citadel of caste oppression & Brahmin supremacy.”