Inequality Labs: How to Incubate Hate

Guest Post By Abhijit Bagal, Legal Analyst, Caste Files, October 10, 2023

Caste Files is an advocacy think tank working on Caste and Race studies in the context of Diversity and Inclusion. Find them on Twitter.

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It was pretty amusing to see an article in The Print by Deelip Mhaske, an Ambedkarite, and president of Foundation for Human Horizon, an UN-affiliated NGO that’s leading the Anti-Caste legislation movement in the USA, drawing a parallel between Equality Labs, a fellow Ambedkrite “civil rights organization” and RSS; stating that Equality Labs uses divisive techniques for mere media attention. Further, Deelip Mhaske’s article correctly states that Equality Labs is a for-profit company pretending to be champions of Dalits, and has dubious motives and concealed intentions. The article briefly alludes to the collusion between Equality Labs and radical individuals and organizations harboring extremist ideologies from Khalistan and Pakistan. All these observations are just the tip of an iceberg, and to call Equality Labs “divisive” or “dubious” would be a gross understatement.

Equality Labs ( henceforth also referred to as “E.L.”), founded by Thenmozhi Soundararajan, has been operating since 2014 but was officially incorporated in March 2022 in Delaware (File # 6687031) and in California (File # 202251715748) in July 2022. E.L. calls itself a “civil rights organization” and solicits donations for non-profit projects; however, it is a for-profit company, providing fee-based caste equity training to corporates, universities, and government agencies. E.L. is politically biased, lobbies for caste policies, and then provides fee-based caste equity trainings, thereby engaging in a conflict of interest. Incidentally, Thenmozhi Soundararajan started receiving grants from the Open Society Institute of George Soros in 2014.

A Methodical Malpractice

In 2018, E.L. released a research survey report titled “Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste Among South Asian Americans” that made racist, discriminatory, and false allegations without any evidence or data. The report was based on a survey spanning eight months and questioning 1,534 people with a 47-question survey. The survey was done via different mediums such as direct contacts, community listservs, immigrant organizations, cultural and linguistic networks, and social media. The total number of respondents was reduced to 1,200 from 1,534 after eliminating incomplete & duplicate responses, intentionally illogical and misleading responses, and other factors not meeting the criteria. To hide the biases and flaws, E.L. has not shared their study’s raw data, survey methodology, or research design to validate their study’s structural elements like design, sample selection, methodology, and selective cohort determination.

A few glaring issues to note with the E.L. survey are:

1. While the survey claims to study “caste in the U.S.,” it was open to participants from anywhere in the world and numerous participants from outside the U.S. took part in it.
2. Religion data of respondents who are reported as Dalits is kept out of the E.L. survey report, even though the survey calls out Hindu terms throughout.
3. Further, E.L. conducted its survey without sample randomization and without qualifying the ‘sample’. Responses were collected using an online self-administered platform, which makes the data biased in favor of the radical discriminatory agenda pushed by E.L.
4. The overt bias of the authors cannot but inform the survey methodology. If the survey is disseminated and then analyzed by the same people who call Hinduism an “evil, social construct” and something that “needs to be dismantled” then it is difficult to deny observer bias. 
5. Strikingly, a breakdown of respondents by religion is not properly provided despite the survey asking about religious identity. So, the religion of individuals reported as Dalit is not disclosed.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, John Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania have all discredited the E.L. report with Carnegie Endowment explicitly stating that:

“This study relied on a nonrepresentative snowball sampling method to recruit respondents. Furthermore, respondents who did not disclose a caste identity were dropped from the data set. Therefore, it is likely that the sample does not fully represent the South Asian American population and could skew in favor of those who have strong views about caste. While the existence of caste discrimination in India is incontrovertible, its precise extent and intensity in the United States can be contested”.

–Carnegie Caste Survey, Footnote 29

Spurious Sampling

The survey is unscientific since it uses a sample strength of a mere 1,200 cherry-picked respondents from 26 countries – as a representation of the 5-6 million South Asian American diaspora population. Moreover, the same was non-randomized from people across the world, not just Americans. Additionally, the research design of the survey was entirely based on anonymous stories of discrimination from across the world by unverified self-respondents. E.L. deliberately made a false statement by naming the survey as “Among South Asian Americans” even though the survey was self-administered online and was open to anyone with an internet connection in any part of the world, making it highly suspect and invalid from the standpoint of qualified scientific research lacking academic rigor. Any study must include neutral observers, and we are hard-pressed to find that in the report from E.L.

This sort of unrepresentative sampling bias and selection bias disqualifies the survey results and interpretations. The unrepresentative sample cannot be projected onto the South Asian diaspora in the United States. This report also contains anonymous “statements” which cannot be regarded as any form of valid evidence, because of their dubious nature that cannot be verified. The report is full of anecdotal anonymous statements that should be rejected outright from being used as evidence anywhere in the world. This makes it a highly suspect study especially from the standpoint of scientific research design or methodology, thus this survey cannot justify projecting its findings to the entire South Asian population in the United States, given its stark unrepresentativeness. The survey has no apparent rational conclusions and relies heavily on conjectures, quoting anecdotal stories from anonymous unverified sources. This can be the grossest form of misrepresentation and fictitious argumentation for any study, and the E.L. study is a case in point of using anonymous anecdotal stories and biased reporting. This report should be regarded as circumspect not just for being anti-Hindu with racial overtones, but also for promoting blatant egregious and discriminatory statements that are ignorant and unscientific.

Furthermore, the survey also seems to have peculiar parameters for determining caste discrimination in the U.S. For instance, at one point, the survey uses “vegetarianism” as a marker of caste discrimination in the U.S. with anecdotal examples like “No one ate my non-veg curry the whole night at the party“. The chance that the curry was not very good, or that the guests may have had a dietary preference, has not been accounted for. The survey, with its apparent preference for non-vegetarian food, believes that “upper castes” are largely vegetarian while “lower castes” are not vegetarian and prefer to eat meat. These sweeping claims, of course, can be countered by Indians living in India, let alone Indian Americans living in the U.S.

E.L. has a proven track record of fabricating fake data. The falsification and manipulation of data in the caste survey is part of a larger pattern by E.L. For instance, on Sept 11, 2020, E.L. made a mass appeal to its supporters outside the country to use the 95134 as a zip code while filling out one of its petitions to influence technology company policies in the U.S. The suggested zip code (95134) is the San Jose Silicon Valley location where Cisco Systems is located, and E.L. had no qualms in publicly asking international respondents, who should have no bearing or input on the policies of U.S.-based companies asking for fake data to secure its desired results by asking foreign actors to lie: “We need your help reaching 10,000 signatures on our petition, supported by Color of Change. If you are outside of the United States, use 95134 as your zip code.”

A Mandate of Malice

E.L. has ties to radical groups and individuals like the Organization for Minorities in India (OFMI) and Bhajan Singh Bhinder. OFMI has been involved in the separatist Khalistan violent movement in the U.S., supporting the secession of India’s Punjab state from the country. Bhajan Singh Bhinder was the subject of an undercover United States Customs Service investigation for trying to purchase C-4 plastic explosives, M-16s, AK-47s, grenade and rocket launchers, and Stinger missiles in support of the Khalistan terrorist movement in India. Bhajan Singh Bhinder has also reportedly served as a spokesperson for  Sikh Youth of America,  a radical organization that glorifies Sikh terrorists and has ties with the International Sikh Youth Federation, a U.S. Department of State designated terrorist organization under Executive Order 13224. Upon questioning, the names of Bhajan Singh Bhinder and OFMI were quietly and discreetly removed from the E.L. report.

Equality Labs often engages in actions to stereotype and target practicing Hindu Americans. Equality Labs has fabricated and falsified data in their research surveys to suit their biases. Videos from Equality Labs trainings, and their executive director, show Equality Labs spreading hateful disinformation about Hindus and Jews with egregious statements like Hinduism is “a spiritual foundation for slavery” with “violent scriptures”; “Nazis aren’t Germans in f***king Europe, they’re actually upper-caste Indians,” and invoking white supremacy.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, on March 2, 2020, wrote an article “Why do we say no to Holi” claiming that the popular Hindu festival of Holi is “upper caste” and that it celebrates the burning of a Dalit woman by “upper caste” men. The irony of all this was that there is absolutely no caste angle in the story at all, with all the people in the original tale being of the same family. After being live for more than one year, this hateful article was eventually deleted by Equality Labs (without providing any explanation) to hide the blatant Hindu hate they have been propagating. On March 6, 2020, Thenmozhi Soundararajan made a tweet urging people to desist from celebrating Holi due to its violent history and the immolation of a Bahujan Femme. Although the article has been deleted, an archived version of the article is available here.

E.L. has also been called out for antisemitism. On April 19, 2023, Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs, an international non-partisan, non-profit organization based in California, wrote a letter to the California State Senate Judiciary Committee. The letter cautioned the Committee against using unreliable data from E.L. by stating “SB-403’s ‘champions’ Equality Labs, is an organization that has also smeared Israel and promoted a campaign of hate that erases over 3,000 years of Jewish history in the region, while seeking to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state.”

Even though Deelip Mhaske acknowledges the dubiousness of E.L., no mention is made that the flawed and biased E.L. caste survey is being used as the primary source of evidence of “rampant” caste discrimination in the U.S. in justification for the Caste ordinance in Seattle, SB-403 in California, and Resolution 513 by the American Bar Association. None of these lawmakers bother to explain why the 2020 Carnegie caste survey totally contradicts the 2018 Equality Labs survey, and the results are diametrically opposite. In addition, lawmakers, academics, and the media, continue to quote from the flawed, biased, and unscientific Equality Labs survey, in spite of the subsequent, scientific survey from Carnegie, emphatically stating that only 5-6% of Indian Americans experienced caste discrimination in the U.S., and out of those, 1/3 say they were discriminated against by non-Indians, 1/3 by Indians, and the last third from both. So Indian on Indian caste discrimination amounts to only 3-4% at most!

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“They cannot make history who forget history.”

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar