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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."

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February (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45