Cisco lost an appeal in a California court to move to private arbitration in a case where managers of Indian descent at the company were accused of caste bias by an Indian employee, according to a Reuters report. 

The telecommunications and networking hardware company has denied these allegations arguing in front of an appeals court on August 5, 2022 that the California Civil Rights Department should ensure that the complainant be subject to the employee arbitration agreement that they had signed when they entered Cisco’s employ. 

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The appeals court replied that it could not be “compelled to arbitrate under an agreement it has not entered.”

The Cisco employee, who goes by the pseudonym John Doe has not been identified to protect his identity.

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On Friday, August 4, 2022, Cisco approached a lower-court judge to reverse the ruling and to reveal the identity of its employee who had lodged the complaint. Earlier, the court had said that their identity had been hidden to protect the individual’s family in India from potential retaliation. 

The Cisco employee had complained to the state of California in 2020, alleging that two higher-caste managers were denying him work and had made derogatory remarks about him and that human resources had not taken his complaints seriously. 

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Increasingly, caste is becoming a hot button issue in Silicon Valley, where Indians make up the largest number of immigrant workers. The socioreligious grouping system which has its roots in ancient history has traditionally been used to keep lower-caste groups oppressed for centuries. 

So much so, that in April this year, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s talk at Google on caste biases as part of Dalit History Month was cancelled. The Washington Post reported that the company had received emails from employees stating that Soundararajan was “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu”. However, Google released a statement saying that caste bigotry and harassment to run rampant in the company”.