This Indian Matrimonial Website Is Being Pulled Up By The UK For Caste Discrimination. We’re Not Surprised
We live in a country where more than your hobbies, it’s your religion and caste that forms the basis of marriages. When our parents are looking for a match, they look for someone from our own caste. So I know that I am Punjabi but when someone asks me what sub-caste I belong to, I feel utterly lost. Like how does it even matter? What does it even change? The caste system in our country dates back to around 2000 years and while earlier it was connected to your profession, we don’t know when it became hereditary. Not like I support any of it…but the whole ranking system of sects is just a form of homophily that’s quite dangerous. I can tell that this is slowly changing and inter-caste marriages are increasing in numbers but still a large section of our society have a strict caste filter that’s not easy to pass through. There’s also an extremist section that would rather kill their daughters than have them married to someone of lower caste.
But UK is appalled by the practice (as much as we woke people are!). Shaadi.com, a matrimonial website from India is facing a lot of backlash in UK for being discriminatory against the Scheduled Caste community. Popular among UK’s Indian community, the website’s algorithms allegedly leave Scheduled Castes out and hence people are questioning its adherence to the country’s equality law.
Shaadi.com could land in legal soup and buzz is that they’ve been already warned. “Restricting matches by caste could be contravening the Equality Act. By forcing users to state their caste, the sites are either discriminating themselves, or knowingly aiding discrimination by users,” Chris Milsom, a barrister (the torchbearer of punishing caste discrimination in UK) told The Sunday Times.
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According to a report by the newspaper, a higher caste person will not be able to see lower caste potential matches unless they adjusted their preferences on the website. Shaadi.com, has obviously denied indulging in caste-bias.
Santosh Dass, chair of the Anti-Caste Discrimination Alliance in UK told PTI, “Using algorithms to segregate and favour certain users on the grounds of caste is outrageous — you would never do the same with race. I am shocked.”
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However, a spokesperson from the matrimonial site claimed that the segregation just “works as an important proxy to determine lifestyle fitment.” They further added, “There is no bias built in the system that reduces the visibility of a particular community. We are not in violation of any act as the platform does not discriminate [on the] basis [of] community or race and provides equal opportunity to everyone regardless of their race and community.”
It’s worthy to note that while the British mostly conducted a lot of atrocities in our country back then, they also passed laws to protect the lower castes. In fact, they outlawed several customs that were discriminatory against various castes. Of course, they did all of that after exploiting the caste system in our country to ‘divide and rule’.
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Maybe we are so acclimatised with the caste-system in our country that this behaviour doesn’t even surprise us anymore. The number of people who don’t hold caste as a barrier when choosing a life partner is rather small. Allow this to serve as an apposite reminder of the long impending change that our society is in dire need of.
