We, the undersigned individuals, seek your urgent intervention to investigate the California Civil Rights Department (CRD, formerly known as the DFEH) for prosecutorial abuse and wanton and reckless disregard for the civil rights of Californians in the tech industry.

In June 2020, CRD filed suit in Superior Court of the state of California alleging that Cisco Systems and two engineers of Indian origin, Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella, engaged in discrimination and harassment on the basis of caste. After a protracted three-year battle, where the CRD with activist collaborators launched an unprecedented publicity campaign vilifying the engineers. The CRD withdrew its case against them after the agency was served a motion for sanctions.

The Motion for Sanctions sheds light on a shocking number of procedural, factual, and legal irregularities and errors made by the CRD. To highlight just a few:  

1. Court records indicate CRD’s actions were motivated by malice accompanied by a blatant disregard for the First Amendment and Due Process rights of the individual defendants, the 40+ other Cisco employees who worked with the individual defendants, as well as every Hindu and/or person of Indian origin living or working in the State of California. The CRD made racist stereotypes about Indians and Hindus at Cisco as bigots, who were adherents of an equally bigoted religion, Hinduism. They didn’t bother interviewing most of the Cisco co-workers of Indian origin whom they smeared and implicated as engaging in unlawful conduct. 
2. A public repository of official records points to 40+ corrupt actions, fabrications of 5+ deliberate fabrications, 6 intentional tampering of dates, extortion, and many other violations of law. What was equally egregious was the disingenuous allegation of caste discrimination and harassment of an individual identifying as “Dalit” in a group where every leadership position was first awarded to another individual who also identified as “Dalit”. The CRD willfully ignored and remained unresponsive to repeated requests and earnest pleas, both in private and public spheres,  from affected employees, failing to even acknowledge the harm caused by its intentional disregard of exculpatory, verifiable facts. 
3. The CRD assigned a religion and an alleged religious practice - caste, to an openly irreligious manager. The CRD labelled other Indian American coworkers of various faiths like Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, and Atheists as "upper castes". These blatant First Amendment violations by the state are deeply concerning to all 40 Million Californians. 
4. The CRD, in coordination with an openly anti-Hindu hate group (who calls Hindus the original Nazis), further racially profiled Hindu and Indian Americans blanketly accusing them six times in court of committing physical assaults and rapes of 1 in 4 Dalit Americans with absolutely zero evidence. Despite a California judge rejecting these baseless allegations, the CRD has doubled down on these false and unverified allegations, and continues to perpetuate xenophobic comments about Indian Americans. This three-year state-funded smear campaign targeting Indian Americans, which has unleashed hate against Indian Americans throughout the state and in print and social media around the world, is unpardonable for an agency which is tasked with fighting hate in California. 

Unfortunately, all of this has occurred under your tenure as Governor, in spite of public statements you’ve made recognizing the struggles faced by immigrant AAPI communities, who have been targets of violence, disenfranchisement, and xenophobic policies at the federal, state, and local levels.

We acknowledge and appreciate that just last year you took decisive action against two of the CRD’s lead prosecutors for their unethical conduct in an unrelated case. These are the very same prosecutors who filed the case against Cisco, Iyer and Kompella, ignoring, amongst many things, their duty to not only enforce civil rights law, but to uphold it.  With a well documented history of egregious behavior against other California companies that has garnered national attention, CRD’s audacity in the Cisco case eclipses its past misconduct and abuse of power. 

Without consequences, the CRD stands poised to harm rather than help Californians -- ruining the lives of individuals either by pursuing false and politicized claims that lack factual or legal merit or eroding public trust in the law and making it that much more difficult for workers who have faced actual discrimination or harassment to obtain redress.

We, the people of California, cannot have the state agency tasked with upholding civil rights, trampling all over them. As such, we request that the CRD’s unethical, reckless, and harmful conduct against Cisco Systems, Sundar Iyer, and Ramana Kompella be investigated and addressed to ensure that other Californians are not similarly and unfairly targeted by the State, and more broadly, for the well-being and future prosperity of our state and its people.