At the workplace, this is plain-vanilla religious discrimination: discriminating against someone based on how they practice their faith.
In that they are groups socially constructed inherited ascribed identities to which social status and significance are attached, yes, they are “like” races.
> If that’s the case isn’t this already technically illegal as racial discrimination?
There are arguments that the various forms of caste discrimination are or necessarily involve ancestry, racial, ethnic, nationality, and/or religious discrimination as defined in law prior to this, but it's an extra hurdle to make people separately prove that the particular discrimination fits into what is established as one or more of those categories, rather than having “perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status” explicitly included in the definition of “ancestry”, which removes the need for each individual subject to sucb discrimination to make the case that it is in one of the prohibited categories rather than something somewhat similar but not included.
It would be more historically correct here to say that the whole notion as found in the Americas of 'race' as a system of pervasive discrimination and unequal status was explicitly designed to be "like" caste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta
Yes. A combination of prohibitions on inter-caste marriage and the propensity for the upper castes—the ruling classes—to interbreed with India’s rotating cast of West Eurasian conquerors has lead to genetic differentiation between its castes [1].
That said, clarifying this statutorily is cleaner than punting to the judiciary.
In legal terms: it's massively different because non-Brahmin isn't legally recognized as a protected minority race, so there are essentially no explicit guards or support in place.
Pretty much only the legal use of any of this is relevant for a legal blocker on discrimination, so it can get oddly pedantic at times. The goal is to stop widely-known and well-documented discrimination, but the terms are whatever will achieve that in a legal environment.
Is this a legal concept in the USA? I thought it just left it at “race” and everything legally was symmetric across all “races” (though perhaps not always in practice).
For this case, you'll need to get X to be legally recognized as a distinct race from Y (that has not happened in this case), and minority races have MUCH more protection than ones that are seen as a majority. It also tends to be sensitive to employment statistics broadly and in an area, and "Indian" is often not "under-represented" even if some sub-races are being massively oppressed.
It's more of a "yes, race is a protected characteristic. that doesn't mean it matches your definition of race" thing. You could probably successfully sue on it and get it effectively recognized via that precedent, but it'll be a substantial legal battle to get there and many cases do not establish legal precedent.
They are among people who want to discriminate on the basis of race.
A more historically recent but analogous scenario is the social and racial structure of Latin America, wherein those with more white European ancestry tend to have higher social status compared to those with more indigenous ancestry. Most people have some of both, but in the logic of such systems, proportions of ancestry matter, and phenotypical visual appearance is used as a proxy to gauge this, whether in South Asia or Latin America.
Also, the connection between South Asia and Latin America's rationalization of their social systems is not coincidental. The term "caste" itself is derived from the Portuguese word "casta" used by traders in South Asia to describe the prevalent social structure they encountered. They (and the Spanish) quite deliberately imported this model to their colonies in the Americas.