Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
October 2005 – For many Christians, the good news of the Gospel began with the words of St. John, or some other New Testament book. But for many of the most oppressed people of India, the Gospel often begins in Genesis, where they hear for the first time that they were created in the image of God.
That’s because for the 250 million oppressed Dalits in that nation, Hinduism has taught them that they are subhuman and rejected by God.
According to Joseph D’Souza, president of the All India Christian Council (AICC), one of the largest interdenominational alliances of Christians dealing with national and human rights issues, the Dalits want out of Hinduism.
That presents to Christians in India and around the world a historic opportunity to present Jesus Christ to a people thirsting for spiritual freedom – and the sociopolitical freedom that often comes with it.
Hindu bondage
D’Souza, an Indian Christian and author of Dalit Freedom – Now and Forever, told AFA that India’s oppressive society is the direct result of the teachings of Hinduism, a 3,000-year-old faith and the nation’s majority religion.
As D’Souza explains in Dalit Freedom, the Hindu faith recognizes millions of gods. However, there are three main gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, with the former being the first and chief of the three.
According to Hinduism, he said, God created man unequally. People are innately divided into four groups, called “castes.” The Brahmins, or priestly caste, represent the head of God; the Kshatriya, or warrior caste, represent the shoulders and arms of the Divine; the Vaishya, or business caste, represent God’s belly/thighs; while the Sudra, the “supportive workers serving the upper three castes,” represent the legs and feet.
The first three castes form 15% of the Hindu population. “They are pure, they have all rights within the Hindu caste system,” D’Souza said. “All religious, all economic, all spiritual rights.”
The servant caste makes up nearly 50%. “That is the worker class – the people behind India’s industrialization, the guys who pull the rickshaws, the guys who work in the fields, the farmers, etc.,” he said.
Less than human
Outside the caste system – that is, the “outcastes” – are the Dalits. They are not even included in this picture of God, D’Souza said. Considered by Hinduism as unclean – they are known as “Untouchables” – the Dalits are not connected to God. They are less then human beings, even lower in status than animals, and they don’t have a soul. They are 25% of the population.
This status as essentially little more than the refuse of God is the result of an ideology that has existed for three millennia. It is so deeply rooted in Indian culture that its tendrils have trapped the Dalits in a dark oppression rarely seen in human history.
“Dalits accepted their fate, believing they had done unspeakable acts in previous lives, that God did not love them, that they were born to serve the upper castes, and that they had no rights,” D’Souza said.
As seems inherent in the fallen nature of mankind, those with power have used this ideology to exploit and oppress the Dalits. They cannot own land. They are forced to do the jobs no one else will do, such as clean toilets, sweep the streets and pick up dead animals. For the most part they are illiterate, since children are usually pulled out of school and sold into the job market. They are denied electricity and the use of public wells, and are frequently denied access to public places.
The Dalit plight under Hindu oppression has led to horrific abuses, according to Smita Narula, researcher for the Asian Division of Human Rights Watch, in her book Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s Untouchables.
“Thousands of untouchable female children (between six and eight years old) are forced to become maidens of God. … They are taken from their families, never to see them again,” she said. “They are later raped by the temple priest and finally auctioned secretly into prostitution and ultimately die from AIDS.”
According to estimates by the United Nations, Narula said “that 5,000 to 15,000 girls are auctioned secretly every year.”
Dalit girls who escape this fate grow up to be Dalit women who also face abuse. “Making women eat human defecation, parading them naked, gang rapes, these are women-specific crimes,” Narula said. “Gang rapes are mostly of Dalit women.”
It is no wonder, then, that even the name itself, “Dalit,” expresses the despair that these Indian people feel. It is a name the Dalits have given to themselves, D’Souza said, and it means “broken,” “crushed,” and “smashed beyond repair.”
“It is a word that describes what has been their state for 3,000 years,” he said.
A spiritual slavery
Technically, the Constitution of India bans the discrimination underlying the concept of “Untouchability,” but D’Souza said there are two weaknesses in the attempt to find a political fix for the oppression of the Dalit people.
First, the Constitution does not outlaw the caste system, making it possible for the ideology to keep its roots in Indian culture. “The caste system is so deeply ingrained in the Indian cultural worldview through thousands of years of reinforcement that these attempts at granting equality have been largely ineffective,” he said.
Moreover, where the law does address caste-based discrimination, D’Souza said penalties for violations are “enforced rarely because those responsible for enforcing the law are often the upper castes who are themselves biased by caste.”
As oppressive as the culture is, however, the Dalits seem to realize that it is the Hindu faith that has enslaved them. Dalit scholars and speakers, D’Souza said, have recognized that India’s poverty problem “is a spiritual issue, and this needs spiritual answers. Because what we have is a dark spiritual ideology that has been imposed upon and has gripped millions of people.”
And the Dalits want out. A half century ago, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, whom D’Souza described as the Dalits’ “Martin Luther,” declared: “I was born a Hindu, but I’m not going to die a Hindu.”
Because of this systematic discrimination, D’Souza said, “the silent exodus of the Dalits from the [Hindu] social order continues unabated. It is critical to understand that this is an exodus of revolt against an evil and sinful structure. Those who are ‘sinned against’ are freely and willingly striking back at their oppressors spiritually and socially.”
But where to go?
A half century ago, the Christian church in India had an opportunity to open its doors and offer the Dalits a place of refuge. Ambedkar himself considered both Christianity and Buddhism as alternative faiths, before settling on the latter.
Sadly, D’Souza relates in Dalit Freedom, it was because the church had itself embraced the caste system that Ambedkar decided on Buddhism. “Ambedkar recognized the fact that Jesus stood out against the caste system. However, he also saw that Indian Christianity had been poisoned by caste-based oppression,” D’Souza said. “He could not accept the fragmented Church which was riddled with its own form of caste-based politics.”
This was, D’Souza realized, unacceptable. “Caste discrimination within the Church was a shame and stigma to the life and message of Jesus,” he said. “It was a betrayal of Jesus’ mission itself.”
It is a mistake that D’Souza and other Indian Christians refuse to make again. As he told the Indian media following a rally by Christians in support of the Dalit quest for emancipation: “It is our moral duty to stand by the Dalits. If the Church says only one thing, that Jesus Christ loves them, it’s the message the Dalit community most needs to hear. They have been told for 3,000 years that God doesn’t love them!”
Hindu extremists strike back
The Christian support for Dalit freedom has not gone uncontested, however. Violence committed by Hindu extremists against Christians is growing, including beatings, kidnappings, rapes and murder. Crimes against property are also common, such as the destruction of churches, Christian schools and cemeteries, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Perhaps the most publicized incident occurred in 1999, when Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons, ages eight and 10, were brutally murdered.
Staines, who had worked among Indian lepers for 34 years, had been working with local Christians, which resulted in vocal opposition from Hindus. One night following a religious service, as Staines and his boys slept in their Jeep, a Hindu mob burned down the village church, and then poured gasoline on Staines’ vehicle and set it ablaze. The mob kept the three Christians from escaping, and beat back other villagers who attempted to rescue the missionary and his sons. (Staines’ wife and daughter were in another town.)
D’Souza said Hindu extremists have been trying to instill “violent fear into the heart and mind of the Church. They want the Church to shut its doors to the oppressed millions who seek holistic liberation and salvation.”
But, he added, this time the church will not fail the Dalits. “In the goodness and mercy of God, we have seen in the last 10 years, God visiting the Dalit people. We have seen God delivering sovereignly, spiritually from heaven, the Dalit people. And across the nation they are meeting God in a variety of ways, and they are turning to Christ,” D’Souza said. “So the process of breaking this spiritual darkness has begun.” 
To learn more, visit the Dalit Freedom Network (www.dalitnetwork.org). AFA also works with Compassion International, through which people may sponsor a needy child in India. Contact: Compassion International, Colorado Springs, CO 80997, 1-800-336-7676, www.compassion.com.
