I was having recently at a management dinner with an Indian colleague (interestingly I think he's a Christian, not a Hindu) who said "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". It's interesting how brazenly open he was, and this was in a western country. I put forward a strong candidate for his team, who happened to have grown up in Saudi Arabia, and he was inexplicably rejected, although in retrospect it made sense.
The article also brushes up against caste, but doesn't explore the role of caste networks in tech.
If that's the "bridge to the west" that India is pushing, I hope some of those tendencies are stamped out, hard.
I'd hope so too, buy my grad school experience says otherwise.
Both Chinese CCP and Indian BJP recruit international students studying in the US for spreading propaganda. Maybe more- information gathering, spying... I don't know. I found average Chinese grads very tight lipped about their internal politics. While I didn't encounter any supposed Chinese recruit face to face, I saw Indians who, very amiable and friendly when met in person, would be sharing and posting misinformation and hate speech on social media on a regular basis.
> "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up".
Devil's advocate: this actually may have more to do with culture generally than religion specifically. Muslim countries may still have more clan-based / tribal social structures:
> Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions.
[…]
> Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.
Devils advocate: you're trying to justify some destructive (and presumably illegal since it's influencing his hiring decisions based on a protected category) workplace bigotry with a pseudo-sociological treatise.
If I were to share an anecdote about another group being subject to workplace discrimination and open bigotry; and then get a canned sociological treatise trying to justify it, that response would be, rightly seen as beyond the pale.
So no, I’m not going to engage with it.
EDIT: it looks like you’re from India, so you may not be aware of this. In most western countries engaging in workplace discrimination based on religion would get you into serious trouble, and quite likely fired. Not only is it illegal, it’s bad for business (losing a potentially valuable senior staff member because they’re the “wrong religion” has seriously hurt our project). Your reaction is quite telling though.
IMHO this is a glaring hole in constitution that got there due to the historical oppression from people affiliated with religions. Unlike other protected classes like race and gender religion is not bolted to a person at birth, and as a matter of choice should not be protected constitutionally or otherwise.
You’re assuming I’m an American. Regardless, this sort of pseudo-anthropological BS has been used to justify discrimination for centuries (and I hope we can agree it’s entirely irrelevant to hiring decisions: I accept that people will be as bigoted as they want in private, once it starts influencing hiring, it becomes a problem). What’s more interesting is that it’s still up, and still got people defending it.
I don't see a problem with having personal/company preferences. In fact you have to justify any kind of limits on preferences.
And no, I was not assuming you are American. But in the context of this website the constitution refers to the US constitution. What I said also applies to many other constitutions.
I don’t see a problem with having personal/company preferences
Fortunately you don’t make the law. But, regardless, he not only violated company policy and also broke the law, his “personal preferences” put a large program of work at risk.
You leave your prejudices at the door and hire the best people for the job: one of the fundamental rules for (non-f*d) businesses.
It sounds like you ignored the point completely and just switched to personal attack.
Do you agree or not that any law limiting hiring practices should be justified or not?
If so, how do you justify religion over other criteria that are personal choices of the candidate like style, cleanliness, politeness etc?
How do you even propose to discover criteria if you start with a clean list?
I generally agree about the business point, but you seem to belive religion has no impact on fulfilling one's duties regardless of the nature of business, which is dubious even in common important professions like doctors.
I’m not sure how you’d be able to figure out how a doctor would treat patients based on their religion. You seem to assume that people who belong to a particular religion adhere to every precept of their religion, which is not the case.
In any case, most people are born into a religion and have no real choice in the matter. They acquire various markers of their religion (a name for example) from their parents. You seem to think it’s a personal choice, but for the vast majority of people that’s not the case.
In the context of the person whose resume was rejected, he was not considered for the job based on his name and his educational history, which marked him as a Muslim. Even if we accept your argument that religious practice is a choice that can be discriminated against, there is no indication that he actually was a practicing Muslim (I don’t know if he was) he was rejected, sight unseen, because of those markers.
You demonstrate how important it is to stomp out the rightwing ultranationalism festering in India. It is not solely India's problem any more.
There is irreparable damage being done to the Indian psyche, and it is not going to be contained (unlike, for example, if it was China). Especially considering the impending climate disaster is going to disproportionately affect India and neighbors, resulting in social disaster, mass migration of a scale not seen before.
The world's problems are the world's problems. We Indians migrating into other societies see issues that the societies don't see themselves: (asian-hate, white supremacy, sunni-shia violence, anti-semitism).
But I am glad once again the world (ahem, the West) deigned to "fix" India before fixing themselves.
You make it sound like it's two separate buckets. The world and India can, strike that, have to work together. As an Indian myself, I will accept any help I get to fight rightwing bigotry. And I will help fight rightwing bigotry elsewhere.
People need to stop thinking as if borders are natural phenomenon.
The article also brushes up against caste, but doesn't explore the role of caste networks in tech.
If that's the "bridge to the west" that India is pushing, I hope some of those tendencies are stamped out, hard.