Corporate India has a caste problem. And it is time to talk about it

Indian Express

5 hours ago

On June 23, the Indian aviation industry was again in the news, however, for all the wrong reasons. Reports started coming in of an IndiGo pilot trainee alleging caste based discrimination by his bosses. An FIR has been filed, and a police investigation is underway. Meanwhile, IndiGo has strongly refuted such claims, saying it stands for 'zero-tolerance policy towards any form of discrimination'. The investigation will take its own course, but it opens the avenue to talk about a much larger issue: Corporate India's caste problem.
Post the 1990s, when the private sector started to expand immensely owing to policy changes, it was primarily the Savarna entrepreneurs who benefited greatly. Among them, the rise of Bania capital within India Inc has been mapped extensively. However, this has been perceived as an organic development, born out of inherent merit, developed in some sort of 'casteless vacuum'. However, the material realities of labour and capital are intrinsically caste-coded. The overrepresentation of communities in some sectors of the economy is directly and (often) proportionally related to the absence of other communities in the same. Babasaheb Ambedkar had analysed caste as not just a system of division of labour, but rather a division of labourers. Within corporate India, this division and categorisation of labourers is starkly visible.
In the last decade or so, even as corporate culture internationally veered towards 'Diversity, Equity, Inclusion', also known as DEI practices, India Inc has remained caste-blind. Not just within corporate structures and the industry, but even within allied ecosystems — from B-schools to market commentators, journalists, and podcasters — there has been no serious or critical conversation on caste as a key variable in business management and planning. This is very surprising because most of the real economy is based on kinship networks and 'contacts' which often overlap with political funding and are ultimately mediated through caste connections. In the absence of any meaningful discourse on these intersections, the corporate understanding of Indian market realities remains stunted, myopic and unsuited for Indian needs, as it frequently over-fixates on some socio-cultural segments while invisibilising large swathes. India's commerce minister, Piyush Goyal's recent comments on the lopsided nature of startup/business priorities of corporate India also seem to suggest the same.
The minister's comments stirred up a debate. Most business leaders responded with a litany of complaints against the government itself and lamented the business challenges they faced. While there is certainly a lot of validity in their collective grievance, very few actually acknowledged that there was a 'priority gap'. Fewer still tried to analyse why the 'gaze' of India Inc remains limited only to a very small range of business models, often urban-situated and catering usually to high-net-worth individuals. Even as every B-school teaches its MBAs to 'think outside the box' and all industry captains talk ad nauseum about innovation — it seems that in the last 30 years no one has realistically found a way to innovatively create value for large sections of Indian masses outside those wealthy urban enclaves (almost always populated by other wealthy Savarnas like themselves).
It may well be because of the lack of diversity in their leadership, in the one-dimensional, non-diverse pedagogy (in spaces of training) that celebrates itself as ground-breaking and inventive. India Inc, despite three decades of neoliberalisation, remains a social formation that is run by Savarnas, for other Savarnas and trained by Savarnas.
This total ubiquity of Savarna-ness renders corporate culture in its own shape, where the omnipresent becomes the invisible. As per David Foster Wallace's allegory about the fish swimming in water does not 'see' the water, the caste stratified codes of corporate India become invisible to Savarnas within it. But almost immediately, it manifests to folks who come from different socio-cultural realities, often in hostile and contradictory ways. So much so that for many marginalised people, to survive and move ahead in India Inc, they have to internalise and validate Savarna idioms of business success. Whether it is the casteist ad campaign run by Zomato, Narayan Murthy's work-life balance ideas or Swiggy's decision for veg-only fleets (rescinded upon backlash) — that is how you emerge with statements or decisions.
And on occasion, where friction within teams emerges, inherent, embedded caste prejudices come to the fore in ways that are traumatic for caste-marginalised people but may seem totally normal or par-for-the-course to other Savarnas. It remains to be seen whether this is the case in the aforementioned IndiGo matter. Irrespective of how the matter unfolds, these types of flashpoints remain an unspoken reality for the minority caste-marginalised professionals working in top positions. In most cases, one stays silent and compliant, and internalises the bias as the structure itself is coded in the vocabulary of the dominant caste.
At a time when a strong online campaign is emerging against caste-based reservation among educated, elite Savarnas, it is perhaps time for India Inc to reflect upon itself and give shape to the unfulfilled promise of diversity and consider reservations in the private sector as an innovative, bold and progressive step in bridging market reforms, nation-building mandates as well as dignity to all working professionals.
The writer is Associate Dean at Woxsen University, Hyderabad. His latest book is Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything