In courts and scholarship, an erasure: Is a caste atrocity against Dalit Christians invisible?

A Christian Reddy family assaults a pastor because he is Dalit; and when the police read it as an atrocity, the same family furnishes proof that the man cannot be Dalit, for he is Christian

In 1972, scholar Imtiaz Ahmad identified a curious feature in scholarship on Indian society. While sociologists took great pains to understand how different castes were situated in hierarchy with one another, it was as if, Ahmad noted, non-Hindu communities “exist in Indian society as separate and isolated entities.” For instance, when M N Srinivas wrote his influential account of a Mysore village’s “social system,” he left Muslims — who constituted 11 per cent of the village — outside that hierarchy. It was as if the moment people became Muslim or Christian, their existence as barbers, fisherpersons, or landlords became irrelevant to understanding Indian society.

I was reminded of this while reading the Supreme Court judgment in Chintada Anand vs State of Andhra Pradesh. On March 24, a two-judge bench told a Dalit Christian man that the Prevention of Atrocities Act is not meant to protect him. In 2020, Anand, a resident of Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, started being threatened by a Christian Reddy family. The Reddys demanded that Anand discontinue his practice as a pastor since he was Dalit. Anand belongs to the Madiga community, historically associated with leather tanning, scavenging, and artisanship. In January 2021, Anand was stopped on the way home by a mob of 30 persons: “his mobile phone and vehicle keys were snatched, he was dragged, beaten and abused by caste name in public view, and threatened with death. It is also alleged that threats were extended to kill his family members and kidnap his children.”

This is a textbook example of how caste violence operates: a Dalit person punished for simply asserting himself as an equal citizen. The Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989 was precisely enacted recognising this: caste was not merely a disability but, as K. Satyanarayana writes, “a form of power and dominance, and the upper castes invoked traditional caste norms to assert their authority in the present”. The POA treated caste as a contemporary force, outside the patronising realm of religion and reform. If a thing such as a caste atrocity exists, Anand was subjected to it.

A read-through of the SC judgment shows that the apex Court found this matter a textbook case as well, albeit of a different genre. “In the present case,” the judgment said, “the facts are unequivocal”. Since one, the Scheduled Castes Order, 1950 restricts Scheduled Caste status to persons professing the Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist religion; two, Anand does not belong to either of these, professing Christianity (he is even a pastor!); and three, “Christianity, by its very theological foundation, does not recognize or incorporate the institution of caste”.

The unequivocality with which the Court views a Dalit Christian subjected to a caste atrocity is revealing. First, the 1950 Order does exclude Christians and Muslims. However, multiple matters challenging it have been floundering before the Court since at least 2004. In 2022, a series of tagged matters were listed with Ghazi Saaduddin v State of Maharashtra to be heard by a three-judge bench, but have not yet been taken up.

Second, the entire weight of the judgment is in establishing that Anand professes Christianity. The details of the atrocity, the usage of caste slurs, “untouchability” faced by Madiga Christians, documented histories of caste atrocities against them, are of no use to the analysis. The judgment does not consider the nature of the violence, nor engage with jurisprudence on the POA Act.

In other words, the Court has decided not to get bogged down by empirical evidence. Why bother, when a reference to Christianity can explain the lives of people, apparently? Christianity does not have caste, the Court says. And Dalit Christians in Andhra live within Christianity, surely? They must live in Christian air, Christian water, and wake up, sleep and work Christian? A Christian Reddy family assaults a pastor because he is Dalit; and when the police read it as an atrocity, the same family furnishes proof that the man cannot be Dalit, for he is Christian. By denying Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Christians, thus, the state effectively enables caste violence. Further, caste denial is not merely religious discrimination; it necessitates the erasure of Christian and Muslim lives from the imagination of a “larger” Indian society.

The writer is affiliated with the National Law School of India University