Author: Anto Akkara in New Delhi
Publication: www.ChristianityToday.com
Date: February 3, 2001
URL: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/109/56.0.html
Only Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist members
of "untouchable" caste being counted.
India's churches have threatened
to take legal action against the government unless the discrimination against
low-caste Christians and other minorities in the national census "is set
right."
"We demand that the classification
related to castes and tribes be delinked from religious categorization
if the categorization does not include all religions," the National Council
of Churches in India (NCCI) said in a statement February 23.
The census of India's billion citizens,
which is taken once every 10 years, was held from February 9 to 28 with
2.4 million "enumerators" visiting 200 million households. Churches have
declared that the form prepared by India's census commissioner for the
nation-wide head-count is discriminatory.
The source of the churches' anger
is the government's refusal to recognize that among the total population
of 250 million Dalits (low-caste Indians), there are about 14 million Christians.
Muslim Dalits, who account for most of India's 130 million Muslims, were
also ignored in the census.
Numerous church activists have described
the "manipulation" of the census as part of the government's ongoing refusal
to grant to Christian Dalits privileges accorded long ago to Dalits who
belong to the country's Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist faiths. Church officials
believe that the root cause of this discrimination is prejudice towards
Christianity which many powerful Hindus detest as a videshi (foreign) religion.
Muslim Dalits are the victims of similar prejudices. (Hardline Hindu groups
treat both Buddhism and Sikhism as offshoots of Hinduism.)
Expressing the concern of its 29
Orthodox and Protestant member churches, the NCCI said it was "appalled
at the manner in which the present census is being conducted [excluding]
Dalits who do not belong to the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist faiths."
Ipe Joseph, NCCI's general secretary,
told ENI: "They can collect any nonsense. But, we will challenge publishing
that as a [government] document."
During the weeks of the census,
Christians and Muslims have protested at a question in the census form
which states that "Scheduled Castes can be only among Hindus, Sikhs and
Buddhists."
Scheduled Caste (SC) is the official
name given by the government to the Dalits who comprise a quarter of India's
population of one billion.
In 1950 the federal government granted
rights such as free education and quotas in government jobs and legislatures
to Hindu Dalits in a bid to improve their social status. The same rights
were later extended to Sikh and Buddhist Dalits. But Christian and Muslim
Dalits are yet to be granted these rights.
In New Delhi on 23 February, leaders
of the Church of North India (CNI) and the Roman Catholic Church told a
joint press conference of their "apprehension" over the apparent attempt
to "deprive" Christians Dalits of their identity. They called for a freeze
on the data collected in the "flawed" census forms.
"Why is it that if one is a Dalit,
he can be only a Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh?" asked Archbishop Vincent Concessao
of Delhi, vice- president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India.
"Dalits should have the freedom
to belong to any religion. Why are they being deprived of this fundamental
right guaranteed under the constitution?" the archbishop said.
The CNI's bishop of Delhi, Karam
Masih, said he "endorsed" Archbishop Concessao's declarations and added
that the census was flawed as it had "violated" the fundamental rights
of Christians.
A statement released by the Catholic
bishops said that "there are ulterior motives in several questions which
seem to vitiate the authenticity of the entire census, therefore seriously
compromising its scientific demographic veracity."
Archbishop Concessao said that if
the government did not address the Christian grievance, the churches would
launch a "mass movement of Dalits of all faiths" to protest against the
denial of their identity.
The archbishop said the question
in the census violated "the fundamental freedom to profess, practice and
propagate the religion of one's choice" under the Indian constitution.
"The hidden agenda behind this is
that Christians will have to wait for another 10 years to record their
[Dalit] percentage in government records," a prominent Dalit activist and
CNI pastor, James Massey, told the press conference.
Massey, who is general secretary
of Dalit Solidarity Peoples (DSP), told ENI: "They [the government] are
trying to isolate Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Dalits from Christian and Muslim
Dalits."
This attempt, Massey said, was based
on the Hindu fundamentalists' argument that Christianity and Islam were
"foreign religions" which did not approve of the caste system in India.
However, Massey said, "caste is
not a problem confined to any religion. It is a social reality. Whatever
your religion may be, a Dalit always remains a Dalit."
Father S. Lourduswamy, executive
secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Commission for Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribals, told ENI that the manipulation of the census "is a step
in declaring that India is a Hindutva [Hindu nationalist] country to keep
all Dalits under the Hindu clutches."
In an article published in several
magazines, John Dayal, a leading campaigner for Christian rights, declared
that "the great Indian census has turned into a Great Identity Theft as
tens of millions of Dalits and Tribals are forced into religious identities
dictated neither by law nor by statute, but purely by the bigotry of a
partisan government and the cultural illiteracy of a pliant bureaucracy."
However, the Christian appeals to
India's Census Commissioner "to suspend the census until proper amendment
is made" fell on deaf ears.
The NCCI executive committee will
hold an emergency meeting in New Delhi late this month to plan the churches'
response to the census "manipulation."
