By CLEMENT AROCKIASAMY / The Hindu
Last year, the Union Government constituted a commission, headed by the former Chief Justice of India, K.G. Balakrishnan, to study the possibility of granting Scheduled Caste (SC) status to Dalit Christians. Recently, a resolution was adopted by the Tamil Nadu Assembly to amend the 1950 Presidential (SC) order in this regard. The Justice Ranganath Misra Commission (2007) recommended ‘permitting Dalits who converted to Christianity to avail of reservation benefits under the SC quota’. The findings arrived at by Deshpande and Bapna (2008) appointed by the National Commission for Minorities, stated that ‘there is no compelling evidence to justify denying them of SC status’.
It was B.R. Ambedkar who said, “To the ‘Untouchables’, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horror (Writings and Speeches, Volume 9, p.296)”. It was to escape this horror of discrimination that millions of Hindu Dalits converted to more egalitarian religions including Christianity, in the hope of escaping the clutches of casteism and experiencing the equality promised by such religions. The basic argument of this article is that the fundamental hope of equality — the reason why Hindu Dalits converted to Christianity — has not been realised to a large extent. This has resulted in contradictions and ambiguities with regard to their identity, and has not led to their expected upward social mobility. This is also because of the unwillingness of their co-religionists, non-Dalit converts to Christianity, to shed their age-old practice of untouchability in society and bring this into the church.
Intersectional burdens
The ‘Theory of Intersectionality’ shows the bigger picture of the Dalit Christian conundrum as it allows an understanding of caste with religion and a composite understanding of Dalit Christians as ‘Dalits’ and as a ‘religious minority group’. It also extrapolates an understanding of the inadequacy of the ’single-axis framework’ of the laws of the state of India that provides legal protection to isolated categories and discriminates against groups where categories overlap, such as Dalit Christians.
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