Governor Newsom’s surprise veto of a bill that would have banned “caste discrimination” in California is raising questions about the future of similar legislation elsewhere in the country.

The bill, which aimed to redefine ancestry — already protected by existing anti-discrimination laws — to explicitly include “caste,” sparked a weeks-long debate among South Asians in California, with some even going on hunger strikes to support the bill and others protesting that it is discriminatory against Hindus. 

Caste, a social hierarchy system with roots in ancient Hindu texts, was outlawed in India but persists socially in some areas of the world, as The New York Sun has reported. 

Backers of California’s bill, which Mr. Newsom vetoed Saturday, said caste is not a Hindu-specific issue, but rather a problem of discrimination on a global level. Opponents of the bill, such as the Hindu American Foundation, said the public’s association of caste with Hinduism makes using caste language unconstitutional because it targets only Hindus instead of people of all faiths.

The veto hasn’t changed much because advocates for the legislation “always knew that it was going to be a difficult road,” and now “that road is a little bit longer,” a University of Maryland law professor, Guha Krishnamurthi, tells the Sun. He says he doesn’t expect efforts to ban caste discrimination to stop despite the veto.

“I think that as the Indian diaspora, the Hindu diaspora, becomes larger and larger within the United States, we will see more of these cases raising caste discrimination as an issue,” Mr. Krishnamurthi says. “And so it becomes more important to regulate caste discrimination in public spheres of life including employment and housing.” 

The veto “suggests the principal reason that he was vetoing it was that current law already covers caste discrimination,” Mr.  Krishnamurthi says, adding that he hopes judges agree. Many advocates are “taking solace in the fact that the veto does make clear that at least the California executive’s position is that caste discrimination is covered by the statutes,” he adds. 

The bill has sparked conversation about the relevance of caste in America, as it is often seen as an exclusively South Asian issue. The Hindu population in North America is expected to double by 2050, according to Pew Research. The second-largest Hindu temple in the world opened in New Jersey on Sunday after more than a decade of work. 

“The Hindu American vote has been an under-appreciated one, but things are changing with the increase in purple districts and races being won or lost by just a few hundred votes,” the Hindu American Foundation’s executive director, Suhag Shukla, tells the Sun. 

“Certainly that could be part of Governor Newsom’s calculus, but based on what I know was being communicated to him through a wide array of stakeholders,” she says, the governor saw the caste discrimination bill as being “unnecessarily racially charged and redundant.”

After the veto of the bill this weekend, the Hindu American Foundation’s managing director, Samir Kalra, said the governor “averted a civil rights and constitutional disaster” that would have targeted hundreds of thousands of Californians. 

The bill was a result of “racist rhetoric, a baseless lawsuit, egregious Civil Rights Department misconduct, false claims about the Hindu religion and South Asian community at large, and the self-serving, methodologically-flawed caste survey by Equality Labs,” the group’s statement said.

Although a representative from Equality Labs, a sponsor of the bill, was not immediately available to comment, the group previously told the Sun that it believed Mr. Newsom would sign the bill and that other states would follow.

 A spokeswoman for the bill’s sponsor in the state senate, Aisha Wahab, was not immediately available to comment but has told the Sun that caste discrimination is an issue that has come up regularly among her constituents. 

When asked by the Sun if Mr. Newsom will stand against a reintroduced version of the bill and if the Hindu American vote was a factor in his veto, a representative for the governor declined to say anything beyond Mr. Newsom’s veto statement. “In California, we believe everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, no matter who they are, where they come from, who they love, or where they live,” Mr. Newsom said when he vetoed the bill, adding that discrimination based on caste was already prohibited through categories in existing state law.