Toronto’s college board has change into the primary in Canada to acknowledge that caste discrimination exists within the metropolis’s colleges and has requested a provincial human rights physique to assist in making a framework to handle the difficulty.
The Toronto District School Board on Wednesday voted in favor of a movement to that impact, which was launched by board trustee Yalini Rajakulasingam. While 16 trustees voted in favor of the movement, 5 voted in opposition to it.
The transfer addresses a difficulty essential to the world’s South Asian diaspora, notably the Indian and Hindu communities. It comes weeks after Seattle turned the primary U.S. metropolis to outlaw caste discrimination after a metropolis council vote.
India’s caste system is among the many world’s oldest types of inflexible social stratification.
“This motion is not about division, it is about creating healing and empowering communities and providing them safer schools that students deserve,” Rajakulasingam mentioned.
Rajakulasingam known as for a partnership between the human rights fee of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, and Toronto’s college board.
The caste system dates again hundreds of years and permits many privileges to higher castes however represses decrease castes. The Dalit group is on the bottom rung of the Hindu caste system and have been handled as “untouchables.”
Caste discrimination was outlawed in India over 70 years in the past, but bias persists, in line with a number of research in recent times, together with one which discovered individuals from decrease castes had been underrepresented in higher-paying jobs.
Even although India has banned untouchability, Dalits nonetheless face widespread abuse throughout that nation, the place their makes an attempt at upward social mobility have at occasions been violently put down.
The debate over the caste system’s hierarchy is contentious in India and overseas, with the difficulty intertwined with faith. Some individuals say discrimination is now uncommon.
Indian authorities insurance policies reserving seats for lower-caste college students at high Indian universities have helped many land tech jobs within the West in recent times.
Activists opposing caste discrimination say it’s no completely different from different types of discrimination like racism and therefore must be outlawed.
Source: www.dailysabah.com
