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Current Ohio gubernatorial candidate and former Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy recently went into a social media exile, announcing his decision to quit his personal social media accounts on X (Formerly Twitter) and Instagram.
Citing the reasons that modern social media is becoming "increasingly disconnected from the electorate" and the messages being "negative and bombastic," he shared the decision in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
At the same time, an excerpt from his 2021 book 'Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam' has resurfaced on Twitter and has been circulating all over the social media app.
A post on the app, shared a photo of the excerpt written back in the day, highlighting Ramaswamy's description of Indian caste society and his experience with it. What followed was a familiar social media cycle: selective emphasis, rising outrage, and a narrative that quickly hardened into accusation."Did you know that @VivekGRamaswamy was born into the highest caste of Indian, so special even royalty is below him? That his childhood servants can't walk through the same doors as him? That he wears a magic rope "Poonal" so he can be special even when naked?," called out the post, inciting numerous X users into criticising the politician.
The post, which has received 94.3K views on the social media app, had parts of the excerpt strategically underlined to create a narrative where Ramaswamy boasted of himself being Brahmin, the highest caste in the Hindu society and that the people who provided service to his family were of the lower caste and entered the house through different gates. That every person who was a part of the society understood its values and principles.
It portrays Ramaswamy as an extremely proud casteist, thus leading to comments such as: "talking about discrimination with zero knowledge" and "Vivek is quite literally the worst type of human."
How social media takes things out of context
The book which the excerpt belongs to was published back in 2021 and was Ramaswamy's debut as an author. What the post described as a casteist lens is actually an attempt to explain a larger subject through a more comprehensible and personal anecdote. 'Woke, Inc.' is a book about American corporate identity politics and caste is used as an illustrative example, not the subject. In the writing, Ramaswamy clearly explains how hierarchy does not always align with wealth or power across societies.He gives the example of an Indian society, mentioning the four castes, Brahmins the priests, Kshatriyas the kings, Vaishyas the commercial class and Shudras the service caste. He added that caste was a description of social and occupational hierarchy. Brahmins were obligated to pursue knowledge, which didn't come with money or political power. Thus, his grandfather worked as a farm manager, his father as an engineer and his uncle as a doctor. Social customs required the caste to wear a sacred string, Poonal, which was a cultural marker of caste, not a symbol of power.He shared the anecdote of his domestic help who lived with them like relatives and was respected just like family members, unbeknownst as a child that they belonged to a said lower caste.
The distinction, he argues, was social rather than economic, a legacy of inherited norms rather than personal animus.It was these social values that led to the formation of rules. They were unfair, but for the people at the time they were associated with a 'proper understanding of the world'.Higher social rank did not mean an escape from the economic troubles for anyone who was a part of the society. The excerpt was a description, not the norm.
But reading only the underlined parts of it could have anyone carrying a brick and walking towards the political leader. Numerous times social media screenshots are taken out of context, especially when they are targeted at non-Indian audiences who lack the social context. Explanations are reduced to screenshots, writings to advocacy and context disappears.
America's evolving caste debate
Caste has become politicised in parts of the US, especially California.
Back in 2023, Senate Bill 403 or SB403 was passed by the state legislature to explicitly ban caste discrimination. Although the bill was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, it reflected growing concern about caste dynamics within South Asian immigrant communities, by adding caste as a protected class to the state's existing anti-discrimination laws.
The same year Seattle became the first US city to outlaw caste discrimination with followed by Fresno.
As per activists, the issue is more prominent in Americans of Indian descent and Hindus. Since most of them move to Silicon Valley and California, these places confront the issue of caste discrimination. But is it true? A 2018 report from Equality Labs, a California-based non-profit, stated that 25% of Dalit respondents said they had faced verbal or physical assault based on their caste; 50% of Dalits live in fear of their caste being outed; 67% reported being treated unfairly at their workplace. However, the survey was web-based, self-reported, and conducted among respondents already engaged with anti-caste advocacy.By contrast, a report by the Carnegie Foundation and YouGov, found only 1% of Hindu Indian Americans who identified themselves with a caste were Dalit. 80% of Hindus in America who identified with a caste, are upper caste. Of those Indian Americans who are Hindu, 50% have almost no friends from the same caste as themselves.
Thus, caste is not how they self-segregate or identify each other. It is acts like these which substantiate Ramaswamy's quitting of social media. Circulating an old excerpt without proper clarification attempts to feed into the "caste war" narratives and makes social media a negative and bombastic place, as he described. This is not about the current situation of India or about Ramaswamy's current views and opinions. It is about how context can be distorted to manufacture conflict—particularly between cultures—through selective framing.
English (US) ·