Diversity and exclusion

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In months like March, or June people from particular identities and those whose work is propelled by questions of social and political transformations, find their phones buzzing a lot. There are corporates and consulates, journalists and Insta-political groups who want to do articles and events "for diversity and inclusion", now a thriving profession, rife with phrases like social impact and scaling up.

I wonder if they heard last week, about the suicide of a man called Vivek Raj, a Dalit employee of Lifestyle International in Bangalore. Raj had made a complaint of caste-based harassment from colleagues at work. Reportedly, he was encouraged to quit by the HR department. He subsequently tried to file a police complaint at the Marathahalli police. The police weren't cooperative. An FIR was filed only after intervention from an Assistant Commissioner of Police.

Before he took his life on June 4, Vivek Raj posted a video on YouTube where he talked about how difficult it was to fight the system: "Coming from a particular background, studying hard, working hard, you change, you evolve and get better as a human being. You try to be kind to others. But the world is not kind to you… Let it be me, who will start this revolution in the corporate industry."

Diversity and Inclusion, must surely be averting their gaze somewhere. Diversity and Inclusion as an industry, especially seems to thrive in spaces which are either corporate or designed like corporates, awash with jargon and an obsession with numbers and scale. Diversity is performed through events in designated months, like Women's month and Pride Month and with exhibitionistic attention to pronouns and vocabulary. Questions of discrimination are prettied up as "celebrating" identities, but definitely stay very far away from questions of caste. Separating diverse discriminations into hermetic apolitical boxes conveniently prevents any conversation about how discriminations of many kinds - caste, gender, sexuality - intertwine to create a system designed to favour those with privilege and make their success look like merit.

Recently, Tata Consultancy Services reported wide scale resignations of women employees when the company ceased remote-working. There was jargon for it of course - "reset domestic arrangements" yaniki gender norms that expect women to carry the burden of unpaid care work. Corporate types on the news earnestly mansplained ki how will we build a corporate culture without teams and mentorship? Reports say companies which have helped women to transition step by step have not seen such a high attrition rate.

‘Corporate culture' with its excel sheets and striped shirts might be cosplaying at neutrality, but its system is anything but. A study conducted in 2012 found that over 93 per cent of the Indian Corporate board members belong to dominant castes. Under 20 per cent of these are women. We talk about women and this is where we are at. We are silent about caste so imagine what that means.

Genuinely inclusive frames are continuously evolving ones. The tickbox flattery of diversity events is a fixed format that evades questions of social power and prejudice. Corporate culture has to question itself in tandem with the larger culture. For that, those whom these systems place at the centre and so, make powerful have to question their own value systems and assumptions along with expanding representation. Meaningful inclusion is not possible without that truly political reckoning.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com