A few days ago, a video surfaced on the internet, seemingly recorded by a cab driver who had four passengers in his cab whom he had found through the ride-hailing platform Rapido. The video showed him asking them to leave after they used casteist slurs while speaking about one of their seniors. The cab driver, Ankit Kumar, mentioned how he had allegedly objected to the repeated use of such language and eventually stopped the cab, asking them to leave. The passengers were employees of the Indian Railways. A few days later, the platform responded by suspending Ankit’s account for “99 years and 11 months,” while the passengers faced no action, from either the platform or their employers, the Indian Railways, which is yet to release a public statement even acknowledging the incident. It is worth mentioning that the incident is contested, with media houses arguing for a counter-narrative that the video was staged by the cab driver, who misused the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and that the passengers themselves belonged to the SC, ST and Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities. While the identities as well as the intent of the passengers cannot be confirmed yet, the video shared by the cab driver and Rapido’s decision to suspend the cab driver are incontestable facts so far.If you look at the event without taking into consideration the reach of the video, the fact remains that most people are employed in the private sector, which has no mechanism to deal with caste-based discrimination, be it the informal labour force or corporates. On the other hand, if a public-sector employee faces such discrimination, their employers are legally bound to carry out a grievance redressal mechanism and the public sector also has affirmative action policies. Ankit works for a platform that hesitates to even recognise him as a worker and the community guidelines followed by the ride-hailing platform, as well as its competitors, process misconduct and safety issues in ways where the idea of addressing caste disappears. But looking away from a problem does not mean that it ceases to exist.A public-sector architecture, however imperfectThe protections against discrimination on the grounds of caste were built with the state in mind, and their extension into the realm of private corporations was overlooked. The Indian constitution abolished untouchability through Article 17, which made it a punishable offence, followed by the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, which gave the abolition criminal teeth. When the existing legislation turned out to be ineffective in addressing caste violence, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, was introduced. Apart from legislation, affirmative action policies were introduced to ensure representation in electoral politics, as well as in public-sector employment and education. While the inefficient implementation of the SC/ST Act is well-known and well-documented, there is a mechanism to which a public-sector employee who is SC or ST can turn, whether through a departmental SC/ST liaison or by filing a criminal complaint under the SC/ST Act.Gig platforms sit entirely outside labour lawA gig worker lacks all forms of safety measures because of the way they are classified, as explained by legal researchers in the Leaflet. They take note of how constitutional equality is guaranteed under Articles 14, 15 and 19(1)(g). But these bind only the state directly and reach private-sector employees only when parliament translates them into specific legislation, the way it did for gender through the Equal Remuneration Act and the POSH Act (Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013) and for disability through the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. Meanwhile, nothing of the sort exists for caste in the private sector. With platform workers not being considered employed in the conventional sense, since they are considered partners or independent contracts, they are placed “outside the protective umbrella of traditional labour laws” altogether, as a recent legal analysis in the International Journal of Innovative Research in Law puts it. The four new labour codes introduced have barely done much to address this. So far, only the Code on Social Security, 2020, formally recognises gig and platform workers as a category and mandates that companies set aside 1-2% of their annual revenue for a social security fund. But the provision remains discretionary in practice. Worker union groups, led by the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT), approached the Supreme Court in 2021 seeking to have platform workers recognised as employees with statutory benefits, but the litigation is still pending.Existing protections are strugglingA single-bench judge of the Karnataka high court tried bringing Ola into the ambit of private-sector discrimination on the grounds of gender through POSH by ruling in 2014 that Ola drivers should be considered employees for the purposes of the POSH Act. The company was fined Rs 5.5 lakh after it did not act on a woman passenger’s complaint of sexual harassment and was then directed to have its Internal Complaints Committee investigate within 90 days. Ola filed an appeal against this and a division bench in the same court stayed that finding in October 2024. The counsel representing Ola claimed that the drivers using the platform are not employees but users themselves. If a cognisable form of harm backed by two-decade-old federal statute finds it difficult to result in a stable employer-employee finding from the courts, then caste will be much harder to work with. While sexual harassment has a statute, caste discrimination does not have an equivalent against which a claim can be anchored in the private sector.In the private sector, diversity frameworks exist when it comes to gender safety and disability access, not as an altruistic measure, but since the courts and regulators have forced them upon companies. However, caste is not named publicly in community guidelines, leaving a lacuna in terms of protection and, in Kumar’s case, no way to file a complaint regarding casteism. Kumar found himself suspended under the same logic that applies to a driver who has an altercation over something like a fare. The problem extends beyond caste and goes into the territory of religious bigotry too, according to a report by TechCrunch in 2023. The CEO of Zomato, Deepinder Goyal, publicly stated in 2019 that the company was not sorry about losing bigoted customers, but it was merely a statement that had no follow-up policy response. A few years later, Zomato tried having separate fleets for meat and non-meat food, which was met with criticism by worker unions and public pressure on grounds that the move was rooted in caste- and religion-based segregation in food politics.Also read: Zomato Announces ‘Pure Veg’ Delivery Fleet, Revokes Colour Segregation After BlowbackThe private sector’s deliberate blind spotThere is clearly a gap in looking at caste as a protective measure, but it has not been overlooked by mistake; rather, it has been a deliberative move. The Indian government had considered mandating private-sector reservations in the mid-2000s to follow up on a commitment made in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) manifesto. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), among other industry bodies, filed a petition asking that the onus of dealing with the ‘issue’ be left with the private sector by offering voluntary scholarships and vocational training instead of reservations. A coordination committee met eight times between 2006 and 2019, but it produced no legislation of any kind. After that, consecutive social justice ministers confirmed that private-sector quotas could proceed only if the stakeholders reached a consensus, thereby handing the industry the power of a veto. The Sachar Committee recommended an Equal Opportunity Commission which was modelled on the National Human Rights Commission and empowered to hear cases of discrimination across sectors, but it was merely endorsed and never enacted.Caste discrimination across bordersIn the United States, the State of California sued Cisco Systems in June 2020 regarding allegations of two Indian-origin supervisors harassing an engineer from an SC background, becoming the first case in US history alleging caste discrimination. A survey by Equality Labs reported that 67% of Dalits felt unfairly treated in the US workplaces and state senator Aisha Wahab introduced SB 403 to add caste as a protective category in California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, Unruh Civil Rights Act and Education Code. The legislation was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2023 after it was passed, with Newsom saying that he found it unnecessary since caste was implicitly covered by the state’s existing ban on discrimination on the grounds of ancestry. Opposition to the bill was organised partly by the Hindu American Foundation, which called the veto a victory against, in their opinion, a ‘racist bill’ built on a methodologically flawed survey.Even though both these incidents took place in two different continents, the mechanism of exclusion is the same: caste discrimination is acknowledged in principle but then shelved under broad categories like ancestry and misconduct, after which there is no form of binding obligation attached to anyone.Protecting gig workersLabour lawyers and anti-caste researchers who work on the gig economy often find themselves converging on three requirements when they envision a workable framework. First, the reclassification of relationship between the employers and the employees, as gig platforms consistently claim that they have partners and thus there is no law that attaches to this relationship by default, caste or otherwise. Second, a grievance category that is named, since these platforms cannot act on any harm if it is not ‘named,’ and invisiblisation or lack of acknowledgement lets them get away. Third, the presence of a body with fact-finding powers independent of the company.As long as there is a gap in the architecture, Ankit, who named caste discrimination and the railway workers who practised it will be subject to two different bodies of law. While one of them is imperfect when it comes to implementation, it still exists; effectively, there is none for the person who spoke up.Ankush Pal is a sociologist researching and writing on epistemology of caste, urban spatiality and temporality.