Tag Archives: Christianity

The demand to remove Christian Adivasis from the Scheduled Tribe list has moved from the margins of Hindutva advocacy toward the centre of national politics. On May 24, around 50,000 tribal persons gathered at Delhi’s Red Fort for a rally organised by the RSS-linked Janjati Suraksha Manch (JSM), where speakers called for the de-listing of Christian Adivasis from the Scheduled Tribe category. The presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah transformed the event from an organisational mobilisation into a signal of political endorsement.

What was presented as a defence of tribal culture carries wider political implications. The campaign serves two connected functions. It assists the incorporation of tribal populations into a Hindutva political framework by constructing Christianity as a threat to tribal identity. At the same time, it weakens forms of Adivasi politics that have historically centred on land, forests, resources, self-governance and autonomy. The controversy over de-listing therefore reaches far beyond reservations. It concerns who gets to define Adivasi identity and what kinds of political claims can be made in its name.

This is not a new conflict. For decades, organisations associated with the Sangh Parivar have attempted to reshape the political vocabulary through which tribal communities are understood. The preference for the term “Vanvasi” over “Adivasi” is part of that project. Naming is never a neutral exercise. The term “Adivasi” became associated with political movements that understood tribal communities as possessing distinct histories, social formations and relationships to territory that cannot be reduced to the categories of the postcolonial Indian state. It also came to be linked with struggles over land, autonomy, self-representation and cultural rights. “Vanvasi,” by contrast, has been promoted by RSS-affiliated organisations as part of an effort to situate tribal communities within a broader Hindu civilisational framework. The dispute over terminology concerns who has the authority to define tribal identity and whether tribal politics will be articulated through its own historical experiences and political demands or incorporated into a larger majoritarian narrative.

The de-listing campaign emerges from this history. It seeks to make religious affiliation increasingly central to the way tribal identity is understood and recognised. Its supporters argue that conversion to Christianity severs individuals from tribal traditions and therefore undermines the basis on which constitutional protections were granted. Yet once religious affiliation becomes the basis for determining who is a legitimate member of the political community, the implications extend well beyond Christianity.

Across central and eastern India, the strongest currents within Adivasi politics have historically developed around struggles over land, displacement, mining, forests and self-governance. Whether in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha or Maharashtra, tribal movements have repeatedly confronted state institutions, extractive industries and dominant social groups over control of territory and resources. Opposition to mining projects and industrial land acquisition, struggles over the implementation of the Forest Rights Act and PESA, demands for a separate Sarna religious code, and movements against displacement have all shaped contemporary Adivasi politics. These mobilisations have generally been organised around questions of land, governance, cultural recognition and collective rights. The Fifth Schedule, PESA, forest rights legislation and movements against displacement emerged from these material struggles. They did not emerge from divisions between Christian and non-Christian Adivasis.

That is precisely what makes the current campaign politically consequential. It redirects attention away from conflicts over land, extraction and governance and toward conflicts within Adivasi communities themselves. Christian Adivasis become a separate political category whose claims can be isolated from those of the wider community. Such divisions weaken collective mobilisation against displacement, mining expansion, land alienation and other forms of dispossession. They also benefit those who have long sought a more fragmented and manageable Adivasi politics, whether in the service of electoral consolidation or the continued extraction of resources from tribal regions.

These concerns have been repeatedly voiced by Adivasi organisations across Jharkhand. More than one hundred tribal leaders, academics, activists and community organisations called for a boycott of the Delhi conclave before it took place. Their objections reflected a broader pattern. Campaigns around de-listing receive substantial organisational energy and political support, while struggles over land alienation, mining expansion, displacement and forest rights rarely attract comparable urgency from the same actors. That contrast raises an obvious question: why are religious differences within Adivasi communities relevant at all while ongoing conflicts over land, forests and resources are not?

The campaign also seeks to alter the constitutional terms through which tribal identity is recognised. Scheduled Tribe recognition was never designed as a reward for adherence to a particular religion. Article 342 contains no religious qualification, and Adivasi status does not disappear because an individual changes faith.

The constitutional histories of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are different, but neither category was originally conceived as contingent on religious affiliation. Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims continue to challenge their exclusion from Scheduled Caste status on the grounds that caste oppression survives conversion. Rather than correcting that injustice, the demand to de-list Christian Adivasis seeks to extend a similar logic of religious exclusion into a constitutional category where it has historically had no place. Recent judicial and political developments have made such efforts appear increasingly plausible, contributing to a broader perception that protections available to historically oppressed communities are open to reinterpretation through the language of religious belonging.

The de-listing campaign also reveals the conditions under which Hindutva is prepared to recognise tribal distinctiveness. Organisations associated with the Sangh Parivar have long sought to incorporate Adivasi communities into a broader Hindu civilisational framework while simultaneously acknowledging them as culturally distinct. The demand to remove Christian Adivasis from the Scheduled Tribe list narrows the space for that distinctiveness. Tribal identity remains legitimate so long as it can be accommodated within a majoritarian political project; conversion is treated as a point at which recognition becomes conditional.

Christianity has undoubtedly transformed many tribal societies over the past century, as have education, migration, urbanisation and countless other social processes. Those transformations do not erase histories of marginalisation, nor do they justify making religious affiliation the basis of constitutional recognition.

At stake in the controversy is more than the status of Christian Adivasis alone. The demand seeks to normalise the idea that constitutional protections can be conditioned by religious affiliation and that communities historically recognised because of marginalisation can be reorganised through the language of religious belonging. The immediate target may be Christian Adivasis, but the wider effect is the weakening of political traditions organised around land, resources, self-governance and collective rights. In regions where Adivasi communities continue to confront displacement, mining expansion and the erosion of democratic control over local resources, such fragmentation serves interests far more powerful than the communities being asked to embrace it.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

On 13 March 2026, the Freedom of Religion Bill was tabled in the Maharashtra State Assembly — the eleventh state that may have such legislation since independence. Ten similar laws in the states of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Haryana have already been enacted; one in Tamil Nadu has been repealed. Two others in Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan were never enacted despite formulation. Home Minister Amit Shah has made an election promise that the law would be enacted in the State of Punjab as well. The stated purpose is a familiar trope: preventing conversions obtained through force, fraud, or inducement. The language is legal and respectable. The real targets are Dalits and other oppressed castes.

These laws have nothing to do with coercive religious practice. They are instruments designed to prevent the emancipation of oppressed castes from dominant castes’ hegemony — and to ensure that the dominant caste establishment’s social, economic, and civilizational hegemony, which that order has sustained for two millennia, remains intact.

Caste is not merely a social phenomenon. It is a religious system of control, encoded in the Manusmriti as a spiritual, social, and economic order and sanctified by Brahminical Hinduism for two millennia. It has structured every material dimension of life: occupation, property, education, marriage, and public space. Spiritual inequality was the foundational condition from which all socio-economic deprivation followed. The Dalit-Bahujan communities did not merely occupy the bottom of a social hierarchy — they were theologically assigned to it. Any faith that rejected that assignment was, therefore, not merely a spiritual alternative. It was a structural threat to those who benefited from the arrangement.

That is the context in which every anti-conversion law, which includes conversion to any faith, must be read.

The legislative history begins not in 1967, when Odisha enacted India’s first anti-conversion law, but in 1950, when the Presidential Order quietly excluded converts to minority faiths from the reservation protections established under Article 341 of the Constitution. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, originally limited SC status to those professing Hinduism, and later extended it to Sikhism and Buddhism. Converts to Christianity and Islam, which form the bulk of non-Buddhist converts, lose SC status under this order, as affirmed by recent Supreme Court interpretation citing the 1950 Presidential Order in a case pertaining to Andhra Pradesh, even as a petition concerning reservation benefits for Dalit Muslims and Christians has been pending before a three-member bench of the Supreme Court since January 2011.

In 1950, this was not debated. It was not declared. It was done quietly, and widely attributed to K. M. Munshi, a Constituent Assembly member with known Manuwadi leanings, who openly opposed extending reservations to those who left the Hindu fold. The purpose was malignant.

The most consequential test of that logic came six years later. On 14 October 1956, B. R. Ambedkar — the man who had written the Constitution those same dominant caste legislators are now subverting — converted to Buddhism along with approximately half a million of his followers in Nagpur. Ambedkar had spent decades arguing that caste could not be reformed from within Hinduism because it was not an aberration within Brahminical theology but its direct product. Conversion was not apostasy. It was the exercise of the precise freedom the Constitution guaranteed. The 1950 Presidential Order had already moved to penalise that choice economically. Had these state anti-conversion laws existed in 1956, Ambedkar’s event at Nagpur — the largest mass act of religious self-determination in modern Indian history — would have required prior government approval under the very constitutional order he had designed. The extension of SC status to Navayana Buddhism only happened in 1990 under the V. P. Singh government. That is not an irony, it is the point. These laws are aimed, in their structure and intent, at preventing socio-economic outcomes exactly like what Ambedkar fought for in that spiritual and social context.

Christianity’s presence in India is not a colonial imposition. St. Thomas arrived on the Malabar Coast in the first century AD. Catholicism spread along India’s western coast after the Portuguese conquest of Goa in 1510, and later inland, focusing on the emancipation of oppressed castes, even as they had their own interests in doing so. During colonial rule, Protestant missionaries added to the work Catholics were doing — running schools and hospitals where none existed and agitating against oppressive caste practices, among them the requirement in parts of South India that Dalit women leave their breasts uncovered as a mark of caste subordination. The tangible improvements these missions delivered to Dalits are documented. The Savarna response to those improvements has also been documented, including in the form of every anti-conversion law that followed.

The rhetorical device used to delegitimise this history is the accusation of “ricebag Christians” — the claim that conversions were purchased with food rather than chosen in conscience. When people are starving, providing food alongside a theology that affirms their equality before God is not inducement. It is the practical application of that theology that responds to social reality.

In 1956, the Madhya Pradesh government appointed a committee under Hindu nationalist former judge M. B. Niyogi to examine missionary activities in the state. The Committee was formed in response to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s “Anti-Foreign Missionary Week” protest. Set up by a Congress government, it recommended legally prohibiting conversions that were not fully voluntary, but the proposal was not implemented at the time, as it would have been difficult to enforce without violating constitutional religious freedoms. The Niyogi Report was not an inquiry. It was a brief for the prosecution, prepared in advance of charges not yet formally filed. It catalogued missionary schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social service institutions — and then attributed to all of it a calculated programme of conversion through inducement. It did not disprove the emancipatory value of these institutions to oppressed castes. It simply recast that value as evidence of conspiracy. The Niyogi Report provided the ideological and legislative scaffolding for the Odisha anti-conversion law of 1967, and its logic has been reproduced in every state law enacted since.

The constitutional foundation for these laws was established by the Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Rev. Stanislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, which held that the right to “propagate” religion under Article 25 does not include a right to convert another person. This distinction, applied carefully, is reasonable. Applied as it has been in practice, it is not. The right to convert another person was never what the church claimed.

By constructing its judgment around the prevention of an act that was not in dispute, the Court gave legislative cover to restrict the proclamation of faith itself — and since the state now determined what constitutes illegitimate persuasion, any message compelling enough to move oppressed caste persons toward a different understanding of their own worth can be prosecuted as inducement. The Allahabad High Court has recently reaffirmed the right to propagate and proclaim one’s faith, which amounts to an implicit rebuke of how the Stanislaus judgment has been operationalised.

With the BJP’s rise to national power in 1999 and its consolidation under Narendra Modi in 2014 — whose political formation within the Sangh Parivar is defined by the goal of a Hindu Rashtra, which implicitly requires the maintenance of the caste hierarchy that Brahminical Hinduism produced — seven additional states enacted anti-conversion laws. Each successive iteration grew more elaborate in its administrative requirements.

The most recent versions require prior government approval, inserting a state official between a citizen and a decision of personal conscience in direct tension with Article 21 of the Constitution. An oppressed caste person who wishes to leave the faith that theologically sanctions their subordination must now obtain permission from an apparatus largely controlled by the communities that have historically benefited from that subordination.

The Tamil Nadu precedent is sometimes cited to argue that anti-conversion legislation crosses party lines. In 2002, the AIADMK government enacted a similar law. This requires little explanation: the AIADMK was then a coalition partner in the BJP-led NDA government and enacted the law to sustain that alliance. Tamil Nadu has one of India’s oldest and most rooted Christian populations. The law was repealed in 2004 when the UPA came to power, under pressure from Christian communities — confirming that it had no independent political logic in the state and was adopted purely as a coalition obligation. Nonetheless, this signals the state’s willingness to compromise constitutional freedoms for political expediency.

When the complete sequence is examined together — the 1950 Presidential Order, the Niyogi Report, the Stanislaus judgment, and the cascade of state laws — the pattern is coherent and consistent. The RSS, Jana Sangh, Janata Party, and BJP share an unbroken ideological lineage rooted in a Brahminical Hindu nationalist vision, combining a project of social dominance over internal subaltern communities with a resistance to religious influences perceived as external threats.

Over seventy percent of India’s population — the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes combined — belong to communities that Christian social and educational institutions most consistently serve. It is precisely the emancipation of these communities — economic, educational, and spiritual — that strikes at the material interests of the Savarna establishment that has historically thrived on their exploitation. The Mandal Commission’s implementation dismantled the Savarna monopoly over state employment and political power. The Church in India, through civil society institutions, has been eroding their civilisational dominance for far longer. Anti-conversion laws are the establishment’s response to both.

The Church is not above scrutiny in this account. Caste has penetrated Christian institutions in India in ways that contradict the theology that made those institutions work for oppressed caste communities in the first place — separate cemeteries, separate seating, upper-caste dominance of church hierarchies still continue in diminishing measures, with Dalit theology now in vogue in seminaries, gradually dissipating these anomalies. That contradiction is real and must be named.

Yet this does not change the fact that the laws are designed not to reform Christian institutions from within, but to prevent oppressed caste communities from accessing them at all. The internal failures of the Church are a problem the Church must answer for. The anti-conversion laws are a problem the state must answer for. Conflating the two serves only those who drafted the legislation.

There is a reason no central anti-conversion law has been passed at the national level: it would face a full constitutional bench and would not survive the judicial test. The state laws function as instruments of attrition — they harass clerics and communities, deter others from exercising their rights, create a climate of legal uncertainty, and signal to oppressed castes that the price of emancipation will be as high as the state can make it. Their authors are not constitutionally naive. They know better than to invite a definitive national ruling.

The multiplication of these laws since 1999 is evidence that they are not impeding Christian emancipation efforts. If oppressed castes had stopped choosing emancipation, new laws would be unnecessary. If earlier laws had effectively blocked the exit, elaboration would be redundant. The inclusion of administrative approval requirements in the most recent iterations — including the Maharashtra Bill now passed in both the Houses and awaiting Governor Jishnu Dev Varma’s assent — confirms that those prosecuting this project are aware it is failing socially and are escalating in response. Escalation in the face of failure is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that the outcome they feared is continuing regardless.

A nation that directs its legislative energy toward preventing the emancipation of the majority of its population — the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes who together constitute over seventy percent of India’s people — in order to protect the privileges of numerically smaller Savarnas at the top cannot expect that arrangement to produce equitable development. The evidence is already visible in the widening gap between India’s claims to being the world’s fifth-largest economy and the material conditions of the oppressed castes whose labour has always underwritten that economy.

The courts will, hopefully, eventually confirm what the constitutional record already shows: these laws were not enacted with confidence in their constitutionality. They were enacted with confidence in political impunity to impede the emancipation of oppressed caste communities. That foundation is far more fragile than it appears.

The emancipation of oppressed castes is not a process that can be permanently arrested by administrative procedure. Ambedkar understood this. The six hundred thousand people who walked with him in Nagpur in 1956 understood it. The millions who have followed in the decades since understand it. History does not offer a single example of a project designed to lock human beings into inherited degradation that finally succeeded. The architects of this one will find no exception to that record.

Oliver D’Souza is a former journalist and an author.

On 24 March 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered a judgment that appears, at first glance, to simply restate settled constitutional law. Scheduled Caste status, it held, is limited to Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, and conversion to any other religion results in its “immediate and complete loss.” In doing so, the Court upheld an earlier Andhra Pradesh High Court ruling that denied a Christian pastor protection under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act after he alleged caste abuse and threats to his life. The reasoning was categorical. Caste, for the purposes of constitutional protection, cannot survive religious conversion. Christianity, the Court asserted, does not recognise caste. The legal consequence is stark. A person born into caste oppression can lose the law’s recognition of that oppression simply by changing faith.

This judgment is not merely a technical reiteration of Clause 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950. It is a political act that redefines the relationship between caste, religion, and the state. It insists that caste is a bounded, religion-specific phenomenon rather than a pervasive social structure. It collapses the distinction between theology and lived reality, and in doing so, it weakens one of the most significant legal architectures available to confront caste violence in India.

Pastor Chintada Anand Paul approached the courts alleging casteist abuse and threats under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. His argument was simple and empirically grounded. Caste is a matter of birth, social location, and historical disadvantage. Conversion does not erase stigma, occupation, or the violence that structures everyday life. The Court rejected this claim. It held that one cannot simultaneously profess Christianity and claim Scheduled Caste status, as the two are “mutually exclusive.” It further imposed a stringent burden on those who seek reconversion, demanding proof not just of religious change but of total dissociation from the prior faith and acceptance by the original caste community. The effect is to transform caste from a lived structure of oppression into a matter of formal religious identity. This move is conceptually flawed and politically dangerous.

Caste in India has never been reducible to theology. It is a system that organises labour, space, marriage, and dignity across centuries. It determines who cleans, who owns land, who is touched, who is excluded, and who is killed. Conversion may alter belief, but it does not alter these material conditions. A person who has historically been forced into sanitation work does not cease to be socially marked because they now pray in a church or a mosque. Their neighbours do not forget. Their employers do not forget. The state itself does not forget, as evidenced by the continued concentration of Dalit-origin communities, including Muslim and Christian groups, in sanitation labour.

We need a clearer understanding of what conversion has meant in anti-caste politics, particularly keeping in mind the legacy of B. R. Ambedkar, whose political choices have defined anti-caste possibilities for many of us. Conversion was never a naive belief that caste would simply disappear with a change of religion. It was a political act, a refusal of graded inequality, and an assertion of dignity against a system that denied it. What the present judgment reveals is not the failure of that strategy, but the persistence of caste as a social structure that exceeds religious boundaries, and the state’s refusal to recognise that persistence.

Empirical evidence across regions confirms this persistence. Studies of Muslim and Christian communities show entrenched hierarchies, occupational segregation, endogamy, and practices analogous to untouchability. Dalit Muslims report being denied access to shared burial grounds, segregated in schools, and excluded from social interaction by both Hindus and upper caste Muslims. Rural poverty and landlessness among these communities are significantly higher than among upper caste Muslims, placing them at the bottom of an already marginalised population. Similar patterns exist among Dalit Christians. The continuity is not accidental.

The Court’s assertion that Christianity does not recognise caste is therefore beside the point. The question is not whether religious texts endorse caste, but whether social life reproduces it. By privileging theology over sociology, the judgment adopts an abstract view of religion while ignoring empirical reality. It mistakes doctrine for practice and, in doing so, denies protection to those who continue to experience caste violence.

This denial has deep historical roots. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 restricted SC status to Hindus, later expanded in 1956 to include Sikhs and in 1990, under the V. P. Singh government, to include Navayana Buddhists. Muslims and Christians had been excluded since the beginning, with a petition seeking reservation benefits for Dalit Muslims and Christians pending before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court since January 2011. This exclusion was not a neutral reflection of social reality, but a product of political choices that sought to contain caste within a “Hindu” frame. It allowed the state to acknowledge caste where it was unavoidable while maintaining the fiction of a casteless modernity elsewhere. The result has been a long-standing invisibilisation of caste among religious minorities.

This invisibilisation has served multiple purposes. It has enabled upper caste dominance within minority communities by suppressing internal hierarchies. It has allowed the state to deny the universality of caste oppression. And it has fractured anti-caste politics by creating differential access to legal recognition and protection.

A troubling dimension of this moment is the relative silence, and at times loud opposition, from sections of anti-caste movements themselves. This hesitation is often rooted in a politics of scarcity, where access to reservations and legal protections is treated as a finite resource to be defended rather than expanded. In this frame, the inclusion of Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians is seen not as a necessary correction of historical injustice, but as a potential dilution of already inadequate entitlements. This logic mirrors, in unsettling ways, the very arguments long deployed by upper caste groups against reservations, where claims of merit, competition, and limited opportunity are mobilised to resist redistribution. When anti-caste politics adopts this grammar, it risks reproducing the exclusions it seeks to dismantle. Instead of challenging the state to expand its commitment to justice, it internalises constraint and turns marginalised communities into competitors, when the demands of justice should be deployed toward the state, which fails to adequately provide mechanisms of dignity for all. The consequence is a fragmented politics that weakens the collective force required to confront caste as a structural system, allowing decisions like this judgment to stand with far less resistance than they should provoke.

The present judgment intensifies this fragmentation. By insisting that caste is only related to Indic religions, it effectively tells Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims that their oppression is either illusory or legally irrelevant. By denying them access to the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, it removes a crucial mechanism for addressing violence that is explicitly caste-based in nature.

This has serious consequences for anti-caste politics. The SC category has historically functioned as more than a system of reservations. It has been a framework through which the state acknowledges caste as a structural injustice. It provides what has been described as a minimum moral and legal vocabulary to name oppression. To restrict this framework along religious lines is to weaken its conceptual foundation. It suggests that caste is not a pervasive social system, but a bounded religious phenomenon. This undermines the possibility of building solidarities across communities that experience similar forms of violence.

The judgment also produces perverse incentives. It penalises those who sought escape from caste through conversion by stripping them of legal protections. It creates a situation where individuals must choose between religious freedom and access to justice. This is in direct tension with the constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom of religion. It also ignores the historical reality that many conversions were attempts to escape caste oppression, not evidence of its disappearance.

Further, the Court’s approach to Scheduled Tribes reveals the inconsistency of its reasoning. While SC status is treated as rigidly tied to religion, ST status is assessed through social and cultural criteria, including community recognition and continuity of practices. This distinction implicitly acknowledges that identity is not reducible to formal religious affiliation. Yet the same logic is denied to Scheduled Castes. The result is an incoherent framework that treats similar questions differently without sufficient justification.

The requirement of “unimpeachable proof” for reconversion further entrenches exclusion. It places an onerous burden on individuals to demonstrate not only a change in faith, but acceptance by caste communities that have historically excluded them. It effectively grants caste groups the power to determine who can re-enter, reinforcing the very hierarchies the law is supposed to dismantle.

At a broader level, the judgment reflects a deeper anxiety within the Indian state, which has more and more started resembling the ‘Republic of Caste’. Recognising caste across religions would require acknowledging its totalising presence in society. It would necessitate expanding the scope of affirmative action and anti-discrimination measures beyond what has been available since Ambedkar’s time. By maintaining the current framework, the state, lazily at best and maliciously at worst, avoids these challenges.

Caste is a system of graded inequality that structures life chances across communities. To deny its existence in certain contexts is to deny the experiences of those who live it daily. The Supreme Court had an opportunity to move beyond the limitations of a 1950 framework and align constitutional interpretation with these realities. Instead, it has reaffirmed a restrictive reading that privileges formal categories.

If anti-caste politics is to remain meaningful, it must resist this narrowing. We must insist that caste is a shared structure of oppression that cuts across religious boundaries. We must demand that legal frameworks reflect this reality. And we must challenge the idea that dignity and protection can be contingent on faith. The question, ultimately, is not whether caste exists within a particular religion. It is whether the state is willing to recognise and confront caste wherever it operates.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

[Testimony to delegates to the Seventh Assembly of the Christian Conference of Asia held in Bangalore, from May 18, 1981 given by D.M. Thimmarayappa, Convener, Karnataka Dalit Action Committee, Bangalore, on behalf of the untouchables of India.]. 

Sisters and brothers,  

We represent the above organisation comprising mainly the untouchables. Ours is a militant group wedded to the philosophy of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, not only the greatest leader of untouchables but the greatest Indian born in India after the Buddha, whose name is a household word in the whole of Asia.  

Ambedkar said untouchables are reduced to slaves in India because of Hindu religion and therefore, he quit Hinduism and became a Buddhist.  

Hundreds of untouchables all over India have got converted to Christianity. Buddhism and Islam, Sikhism, etc. because of this oppressive Hindu religion.  

CLOSELY GUARDED SECRET  

The problem of the untouchables, forming almost a third of India’s 800 million population, is not so simple as to state it in a note like this.  

There is no problem in the whole world more serious than the problem of the Indian Apartheid. However, it remains a closely guarded secret. Every day untouchables are kicked, killed, burnt, raped and their property destroyed all over India which prides itself as the largest democracy in the world-the land of Gandhi, non-violence and what not. But nobody talks about it in India. The ruling class keeps this as a closely guarded secret. The Hindu hypocrites make much of the racial discrimination in US., U.K., Africa, etc. ‘But the most naked form of race hatred is here in India. 

Caste war is spreading all over India and we are thinking of approaching the UNO and the Human Rights Commission to fight for our demands of separate homeland or Dalitasthan  

The entire wealth of the country is produced by this servant class. They carry the burden of the whole land as sweepers, scavengers, tanners, agricultural labourers.

Untouchability is born out of prejudice. Therefore, it is more dangerous than any other problem because it is invisible You cannot racially make out a person belonging to the untouchable class. Therefore, it is a problem born out of prejudice. And this mental prejudice has reduced a third of the Indian population to be economically the poorest, socially the lowest, physically the weakest, culturally the most deprived, mutually divided, totally illiterate, landless, dumb-driven cattle. A living dead-the largest persecuted minority in the world.  

THE POISON OF HINDUISM  

The poison of the Hindu religion has infected the untouchables as well. They are also divided into several sub-castes. There are untouchables among untouchables.  

Although the untouchables are the original inhabitants of India, before the Aryans invaded India and established Brahminism (Hinduism), they too got polluted by this religion and further degenerated themselves. Once kept out of the Hindu religion the Hindu revivalist (fascist) organisations are doing their best to ‘Hinduise’ the untouchables, so that they will not quit the Hindu fold and swell the ranks of Christianity and Islam.

It is these very same Hindu revivalist organisations who are now and then raising the bogey of conversion. The Christians are charged with “forcible” conversion The Hindu religion despises the untouchable and tortures him as long as he is inside the Hindu religion. But the moment he thinks of quitting because of this torture and seeks social respectability by getting converted, the “ruling class” of India punishes him by withdrawing “reservations” given to him in the Constitution.  

ROLE OF BRAHMINS  

Both ways the untouchable is punished. He can neither live nor die. It is a living death. Have you ever heard of a parallel to this in any part of the world?  

In other societies and cultures, the status of a person is decided on the basis of his qualification, scholarship, power he is enjoying, the bank balance he is holding. None will have all this right at birth. They are all acquired. But in Hindu India status comes right at the birth. It is the birth that decides the status The Hindu society divided into several castes-ascending order of reverence and descending order of contempt-has no respect for scholarship or intellect.  

Here in India, the status is decided not on the basis of one’s office. Even a Deputy Prime Minister of India (Jagjivan Ram) was once insulted by the high caste Brahmin boys because he was an untouchable. Status in Hindu India is decided on the basis of birth and caste. Have you ever heard about this anywhere? Even dogs and cats are allowed inside the houses but not untouchables. Humans have no value in Hindu India.  

We have animal-lovers club, tree-lovers club, bird-lovers club. But no human-lovers club. It is a vast desert where the milk of human kindness has dried up.  

The untouchables of India have hardly any friends inside the country. The Press is hostile, police are its main enemy, the Government is not bothered. Every opportunity is barred. Therefore, we have no other go but to seek friends outside.  

And if there is one section in India which is responsible for creating this world’s greatest mayhemed minority it is the Brahmins-India’s ruling class. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, had come to this conclusion after years of research and practical experience.

There is no deprivation greater than cultural deprivation Brahmins have blown the brain out of the untouchables. The Brahmin religion of Hinduism has mesmerised the untouchables and emasculated them into the most culturally deprived race in the world Can there be a greater crime than this?  

CHURCH CRITICISED  

It is said that poverty breeds communism If so the entire lot of these wretched of the earth should have been in Communist parties They should have been the first to join the Communist parties. But alas, even the Indian Marxist leadership has double-crossed them.  

Because, the leadership of the parties is also in the hands of Brahmins and other high castes. That is the reason for India not having a revolution,  

From centuries, the high castes of India have used them as slaves and serfs. The creed of non-violence is solely intended to keep them disarmed, emasculated. The Hindu religion has drugged them with the opium of “Karma”-the destiny-fate. That is why they can’t even think of protest, let alone rebel. They do and die without ever questioning how and why.  

Therefore, the Christians owe a duty to save this wretched of the earth. We admit that nobody has done greater service to the untouchables of India as the Christians. That is why thousands of them have embraced this religion.  

But unfortunately, even after conversion, they continue to be untouchables. This is yet another tragedy. Christianity therefore, failed to fully liberate them-still in many parts of India, converted untouchables have separate churches, segregated graveyards Segregation continues even after conversion. It is here that the Christians should do some heart-searching and plain-speaking.  

The CCA must address itself to this grave problem. It must also give the highest priority to the liberation of untouchables by treating it as the world’s greatest problem needing the immediate attention of the Church.  

Liberation of untouchables should be the No. 1 item in the Christian agenda. And we assure our fullest co-operation in this most humanitarian task.  

[The speech was greeted with prolonged cheers and the chairman said they were deeply touched by the Apartheid in India and the church would do everything to liberate the untouchables.]