In November 2009, a report on caste in the United Kingdom was issued by a Derby-based group called the Anti-Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA). It showed that caste discrimination, far from having been eliminated through migration and resettlement, was alive and thriving in the large Southasian communities of the UK. Of course, despite their disturbing nature, the revelations are not surprising: immigrant communities often carry with them the most vicious dispositions and hierarchies of the societies they travel away from geographically. Indeed, such communities often entrench such biases further as they settle into other (at times hostile) cultures, and as they carve out new political niches for themselves.
Often seen within a liberal multicultural and human-rights framework as homogeneously victimised by racism and anti-immigrant sentiments, Southasian communities in Britain often escape nuanced critical scrutiny (the unbalanced denunciations by anti-immigration campaigners and racists being a separate matter). In the current climate of a national preoccupation with Islam in the context of the US-led 'war on terror', British Hindu and Sikh communities have become even less accountable for some of the more unsavoury features of their collective existence. This has been particularly so as some of their high-profile spokespeople have made concerted attempts to distance both communities from Muslims, arguing that they are better assimilated and make a more positive contribution to the 'host' community.
Gender-related crimes in minority communities in Britain have received a degree of attention through the invariably sensationalised nature of such phenomena as the so-called 'honour killings' and forced marriages, and have registered on the political radar through the activism of groups such as the Southall Black Sisters. Yet the more insidious and invisible nature of caste hostility and discrimination has meant that it has been a struggle to get the issue recognised as one that adversely affects tens of thousands of Southasian Britons. Over the last several years, however, organisations such as the ACDA, as well as CasteWatchUK and the Dalit Solidarity Network, have been working to bring attention to the issue of caste discrimination. CasteWatch's work had already drawn attention to some of the concerns reported in ADCA's 2009 report. Slowly but surely, the issue is beginning to push at the edges of the larger debate about the nature and diversity of discrimination and hate crimes.
It should be noted that the horrific anti-Dalit violence and atrocities of the sort that routinely erupt in India and elsewhere are not duplicated in Britain. At the same time, what the ACDA report makes clear is that within British Southasian communities, already fragmented into religious groupings, caste still determines patterns of social interaction. It is also clear that those perceived to be from 'lower' castes, particularly Dalits, are routinely subjected to hostile behaviour ranging from intrusive and unwelcome questioning about caste status, unspoken disapproval and verbal insults (including deploying chamar and chuhra as pejoratives), to forms of social exclusion and outright discrimination in schools, workplaces, places of worship and within the eldercare and hospital systems. A pub in Bedford, in the east of England, is apparently known as the 'Chamar Pub' due to perceptions about its clientele. The former mayor of Coventry, a person of Dalit origin, felt it necessary to shift his campaign from a mostly Indian ward to a non-Southasian constituency in order to get elected to that post. There are accounts of workers being demoted at work once his or her caste is 'found out'. Others are not allowed to work shifts with high-caste colleagues; nurses have refused to bathe low-caste patients; and children report being teased at school for being Chamar.