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December 21, 2007

Indians hail assurances on ending Christian Dalits’ discrimination

by Anto Akkara
Ecumenical News International

BANGALORE, India — Church groups and activists have welcomed assurances from the Indian government that discrimination will be ended against Christian Dalits that does not affect their Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh counterparts.

“The entire Christian community will be grateful if the government acts swiftly in the coming months,” said the National Coordination Committee for Dalit Christians in a Dec. 17 statement.

India’s home affairs minister Shivraj Patil is reported to have told Archbishop Daniel Acharuparambil, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Council of Kerala state, that the government was initiating steps to end the discrimination against Christian Dalits and others.

The Dalit Christians’ national coordination committee is a forum of the mainly Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant National Council of Churches in India and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.

Dalit (meaning “trampled upon” in Sanskrit) refers to low castes treated as untouchables under the caste system in India that enjoins them to carry out degrading and often dehumanizing jobs.

Hindu Dalits were made eligible in 1950 for free education and reserved government jobs to improve their social status. Such benefits were extended to Sikh Dalits in 1956 and then to Buddhist Dalits in 1990. However, Christian Dalits who account for two thirds of some 27 million Christians in India, as well as Muslim Dalits, are denied these rights. A decade-old Christian campaign to end what has been labeled an apartheid system has not yet succeeded.

“Caste is the primary identity of all Indians. Caste has affected all peoples and all communities in India. Indian Christianity and Islam have caste discrimination within them,” the Dalit Christians’ committee pointed out in welcoming the federal minister’s assurances.

“We hope the government will fulfill the promise this time,” the Rev. Cosmon Arokiaraj, the convenor of the ecumenical group and executive secretary of the Dalit Commission of the Catholic Church, told Ecumenical News International on Dec. 19.

Successive Indian governments had in the past promised to end this form of discrimination against Christian Dalits, but opposition from Hindu groups was seen as making the government dither in passing the necessary constitutional amendment. Some Hindu nationalists, led by upper castes, were believed to have feared mass conversion to Christianity if the statutory rights given to Hindu Dalits were extended to Christian Dalits.

Franklin Caesar, a Dalit Christian lawyer, whose petition challenging the “undeclared apartheid” against his group is currently being heard in the federal supreme court, said discrimination against Christian Dalits is “a constitutional fraud.”