ABSTRACT
When the Equality Bill was introduced to Parliament in April 2009, no mention was made of caste; 1 yet, by the time the Bill received Royal Assent in April 2010, an enabling provision had been added containing a ministerial power to introduce secondary legislation at a future date, to make caste ‘an aspect of’ the protected characteristic of race. 2 The provision was celebrated as a victory by Dalit organisations in the UK and abroad, who hoped that the power to make caste ‘an aspect of’ race would quickly be exercised, but its inclusion was condemned by various governmental, parliamentary and civil society actors who would go on, over the next three years, to oppose its exercise vigorously. There were four main objections to the legal regulation of caste discrimination: (1) lack of evidence of a problem requiring a legislative solution; (2) legislation was unnecessary, because caste discrimination, if it occurred, was already covered by existing law; (3) ‘proliferation of the protectorate’ – the unjustifiable extension of the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination – and (4) undesirable socio-political consequences, including negative impacts on community cohesion. This chapter charts the passage of the Equality Bill through Parliament and explains and analyses these objections, and the circumstances which led to the last-minute inclusion of the “caste power.” In doing so, the chapter looks ahead to the post-Equality Act 2010 developments, discussed in Chapter 9. Opposition to the legal regulation of caste discrimination has not diminished since the enactment of the Equality Act in 2010. On the contrary, the legal, political and ideological arguments against caste discrimination legislation in the UK identified in this chapter have been pursued with increasing vigour.
