New Delhi: A Dalit civil rights organisation based in California, Equality Labs, has accused tech giant Google of allowing “caste bigotry and harassment to run rampant in the company”. The allegation was made after Dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder and executive director of the organisation, was not allowed to go ahead with a scheduled talk to Google News employees in April as part of the Dalit History Month. According to a 2 June report in The Washington Post, company employees started spreading “disinformation” about Soundararajan, including allegations that she was “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu”. The information was based on documents “as well as interviews with Soundararajan and current Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity”. “During this time, opponents to caste equity internally circulated disinformation about Soundararajan and Equality Labs to derail the civil rights event until its ultimate cancellation,” Equality Labs said in a statement. Soundararajan is believed to have written to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for her talk to be allowed, but without success.
Google News senior manager Tanuja Gupta, who had invited Soundararajan to speak, has resigned over the cancellation of the talk. “Retaliation is a normalised Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit,” she wrote in her farewell letter, the report in The Post noted. “In the process of doing my job and promoting caste equity at the company, I saw four women of colour harassed and silenced. The reality is that these are not isolated events, this is a pattern,” Gupta said in her letter. Google has denied the charges, with spokesperson Shannon Newberry telling The Post that “caste discrimination has no place in our 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 rancor,” Newberry was quoted as having said.
