Responding to the Chief Justice of India to get justice for Dalit Christians

Your honour, we discriminate

HT, August 24, 2007 Mumbai edition Op-Ed page

George Menezes


I AM responding to an embarrassing question asked by the Chief Justice of India while disposing of our case for equal rights for Dalit Christians. He asked whether Christians also practise the caste system. He gave the Centre eight weeks to respond to the Court.
The case has reached this point, after over 57 years of peaceful agitation. The process has seen several judicial interventions and an unbelievable number of Commissions studying the problem.
I have been a part of the process since 1986 as National President of the All India Catholic Union, and, in the last few years, from the sidelines watching and advising a massive grassroots movement involving several lay organisations, both Catholic and non-Catholic, supported very strongly by the Bishops Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
I speak in this piece only about the Catholic Church, and I have to say to the honourable Chief Justice, hanging down my head in shame like Tom Dooley, that there has been a rampant caste system, both in the community and in the hierarchical Church.
Today an activist judiciary almost walks the talk. I am therefore tempted to take Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan for a walk. Let us walk into the villages, where dalits live together no matter what religion they belong to. Let us enter the hut of the Chamar family. Ramesh Chamar and his parents are Hindus. His brother John befriended some Salesian priests, studied in the Don Bosco School and became a Catholic. The whole family continues to be discriminated against in humiliating ways, by the upper castes Hindus, as well as by upper caste Catholics in the village.
But there is discrimination, not just from the community, but from the Government. Ramesh gets all the benefits reserved for Hindu Dalits. John gets none. Ironically, the upper-class Catholics in the area would never consider marrying their daughter to him.
Let me take a longer walk. I am presiding over a meeting of the Working Committee of the All India Catholic Union in a Diocese in Southern India. Suddenly a group of Catholic Dalits from the Diocese barge into the meeting and shout slogans against us.
They ask me to stop the meeting and walk with them through the Diocese. They take me to the Church and show me the "side" their only access to the Church and the benches at the back earmarked only for them. They take me to the cemetery, where a wall separates the burial place of the Dalits from that of the upper castes. Due to space constraints I am listing only a very few of the acts of discrimination they are subjected to. I get really mad and feel terribly ashamed. Together with members of the Working Committee, we break the wall and invite being arrested by the police for trespass. I notice with sadness that the upper caste members of my Working Committee are reluctant to join me in breaking the wall.
No doubt, things have changed since then and both the Catholic community and the Church are aware of the mortal sins they are committing. But the progress is slow, and therefore even today, in answer to the question of the Chief Justice, I have reluctantly to admit that the Catholic community and the hierarchical Church are discriminating against Dalit Catholics. That this is happening is natural in a country like India. The Church is not an island. It lives and breathes in the social milieu in which it exists. The Hindu upper caste discrimination against Dalits has a natural fall out on the Church. The economic exploitation, cultural suppression and political domination of the Dalits in the whole country for hundreds of years have their own repercussions on the Catholic Church dominated by an upper caste clergy.
Christianity has certainly made a difference and diluted the effect of the presence of caste discrimination. But it still exists and needs to be taken cognisance of by the Supreme Court. If special benefits provided in the Constitution have been given to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhist Dalits, based not on religion but on social discrimination, there is no reason why the Christian Dalits who still suffer indescribable social ostracisation, despite their Christianity, should not be included in the Presidential Order of 1950, and get the same benefits.
Fifty seven years is a long time to wait, your Honour.
George Menezes is President Emeritus, All India Catholic Union