California Governor Gavin Newsom on Saturday vetoed a bill passed recently by the state legislature to explicitly ban ‘caste discrimination’, citing existing laws that already prohibit ancestry discrimination, which made the bill unnecessary.”

“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,” Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

“That is why California already prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, colour, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics, and state law specifies that these civil rights protections shall be liberally construed. Because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited under these existing categories, this bill is unnecessary,” Newsom added.

Had Newsom signed the bill, officially called Senate Bill 403 or SB 403, California would have become the first US state to explicitly ban ‘caste discrimination’.

The governor’s move has been welcomed by Hindu Americans who were opposing the bill. “This has been months of concern and stress that we’ve been carrying about the impact that this would have on the civil rights of all South Asians regardless of background, and we’re glad the governor saw the problems with it,” said Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation.

“With the stroke of his pen, Governor Newsom has averted a civil rights and constitutional disaster that would have put a target on hundreds of thousands of Californians simply because of their ethnicity or their religious identity, as well as create a slippery slope of facially discriminatory laws,” said Samir Kalra, managing director of Hindu American Foundation.