Before the Seattle city council vote, nearly 100 organisations and businesses had written to it, asking it to oppose the caste ordinance. At the time, Suhag Shukla, co-founder and executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, had told the BBC that while caste discrimination was wrong and violated core principles of her religion, she was against the law because it sent a message “that our community, which makes up less than 2% of the population, is so uniquely bigoted that we need a special category under the law to police us, reinforcing xenophobic stereotypes we had hoped the US had moved beyond”.
