New Delhi: The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) has expressed serious concern over the increasing attacks against Dalits in various parts of the country.
Persecution of Dalits and backward caste people in the name of meat consumption and protection of cattle has become the “order of the day,” regrets CBCI president Cardinal Baselios Cleemis.
A press statement from the cardinal on July 22 urges those “in responsible position” to refrain from activities that deny citizens’ their dignity and equality guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.
Dalits, who have suffered marginalization and social backwardness for millennia, are further inflicted with more pain and deaths even in an independent and democratic India, says the head of the country’s more than 18 million Catholics.
The prelate cites the July 18 thrashing of a seven-member family in Una town of Gir Somnath district in Gujarat as the latest incident of attack against Dalits. A group of gau rakshaks (cow protectors) beat up the family for allegedly skinning a dead cow. Three of the alleged attackers were arrested the next day.
The beatings sparked the most serious protests by Dalits in years in Gujarat, with seven youths trying to kill themselves in protest by taking pesticide in different parts of the state, an act that further inflamed tempers.
In earlier case on July 9 in Odisha’s Kandhamal district, paramilitary forces gunned down six Dalit and tribal people, including a two-year-old child, under the pretext of combating Maoists. Cardinal Cleemis says this incident occurred when the massive killings of Dalit Christians in Kandhamal in 2008 were fresh in people’s memory.
The prelate’s statement points out that the country had recorded more than 27,000 cases of violence against Dalits in 2014 and that such cases saw a 29 percent increase in the past two years.
Expressing the Church’s solidarity with the Dalits, the cardinal urges the state and federal governments to take immediate action against those promoting violence against the Dalit people.
Turning to his own Church, the cardinal condemned the attack against Bishop Galela Prasad of Cuddapah, a Dalit, and demanded strong legal action against the prelate’s attackers, who are upper caste priests.
Bishop Gallela Prasad of Cuddapah was attacked on April 25 when he was returning from a religious function at Karunagari in Kadapa district. Kadapa is some 425 km south of Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana state. It was later revealed some priests of the diocese had masterminded the attack.