Equality Bill

My Lords, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, has already spoken most eloquently about caste discrimination. I add my voice to it as well. I do not think that I will do as well as him, but I will bring something different to my speech: a personal experience and knowledge of this heinous practice. In doing so, I hope that I may try and convince your Lordships that caste discrimination exists in this country and that it blights peoples’ lives in the same way as all other discrimination. It is very difficult in many ways to describe what constitutes a caste. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, gave the traditional view that there are four castes. Well there are four castes, but it is not just about that. It is about the practice of discriminating against a person who is not of your own caste. Sometimes this can even happen among the people of the higher castes. The highest caste will discriminate against the one lower; that one will discriminate against the one lower and so on and so forth. It is a practice that needs to be examined and, if possible, tackled. When I was a child, caste was very much part of our lives. As we are of the third class—the merchant class—we had to have a Brahmin—the highest caste—to cook our food because if someone from a higher caste came to our house, they would not eat our food because we were not of the same cast as them. We had two kitchens: one where meat was cooked and another where a Brahmin cook prepared food. I grew up expecting people to demand that food be cooked by someone from their own caste. The Indian constitution was formulated by a wonderful lawyer called Dr Ambekar, who was from the lowest caste. He was very anti-caste. He added provisions to the constitution saying that people should not be discriminated against on the basis of caste. He also outlawed one other very dreadful practice; the practice of dowry. Asking for a dowry is outlawed in the constitution. Laws are made but people do not follow them. The constitution is not followed so the caste system exists. The saddest part is, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, said, that it has been extended to other people and other religions in the Indian subcontinent. To me, it is very sad to find that the Sikhs now have four temples in every town, each one being for a different caste. That is appalling because the founder of the Sikh religion said, very categorically, that they are all brothers and sisters. Islam says its followers are all brothers—it talks only about brothers and not about sisters. They do not call it caste, but Biradari, or Jati, or some other name and people will not marry into another caste. To me, that is very sad. Many Christian converts in India were from the lower castes who thought that conversion was a way of getting out of the caste system.