Academics and social activists, Christian as well as from civil society, have challenged the data on the economic development of the Dalit Christian community in India produced for the Justice Mishra National Commission by a private research group, the New Delhi- based Centre for Research, Planning and Action. (CRPA).

The participants in a seminar organised by the Centre at the India International Centre on 10 July 2006 also challenged the attitude of bureaucrats of CRPA and of the Mishra Commission on the reality of Dalit Christians. There was outrage that there was no effort to collect data on Dalit Christians and in fact, officials were seeking to play down repeated demands that the impoverished Dalit and Tribal Christians who had been ignored by  the highly opinionated Census enumerations [which do not accept the concept of Dalits in any religion other than Hinduism].

This data was rejected as `warped, skewed or just irrelevant,' by scholars. There must be no religious bigotry against Dalits, who must get the same privileges as Indian citizens whether they are Hindu, Sikh or Christian, the participants insisted.

Asha Das, the member secretary of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities - which has been given the issue of Dalit Christians for its opinion by the Central Government which in turn is responding to a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court - seemed to persist with her rejection of impoverishment and social marginalisation of Dalits whose statistical data found no place in the surveys.

At this, the First Member of the Commission, eminent Jurist Prof Tahir Mahmood, himself a former Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, had to speak up and say those were her personal opinions and the Commission was yet to make up its mind. The commission is to give its report by October 2006

Justice Mishra and Commission members Prof Mahmood, Dr Anil Wilson and Dr Mohinder Singh attended the seminar. Christian speakers included National Integration Council member Dr John Dayal, Catholic Bishops Conference Education Commission secretary Fr P George, former CBCI Dalit Affairs Commission secretary Fr Philomen Raj, All India Christian Council Delhi region secretary Rev Madhu Chandra and Philip Jadhav of the National Council of Churches. Scholars who spoke included Delhi University professors Dr Shamshul Islam, Dr Manoj Jha and Jawaharlal Nehru University teacher Susan Vishwanathan.

Dr John Dayal repeated an earlier demand that the Indian Government enquire into the economic and development status of all Christians by setting up a Special committee as had been done in the case of Muslims whose status was being assessed by the Justice Sachchar panel appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The National Commission has organised a similar seminar at the Tata Institute in Mumbai on 18-19 August 2006. Earlier, it had held hearings in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities. It has also received several thousand representations from Dalit Christian groups from across the country demanding the Scheduled Caste status - and not OBC title - for Dalit converts from untouchable castes.

Prof Tahir Mahmood said Christians must make common cause with Muslim Dalits who are also making a similar demand for Scheduled Caste status.

The following is a synopsis of Dr John Dayal's Intervention:

Mr Justice Mishra,

Three questions bother me. They continue to nag my conscience, gnawing at the margins of my consciousness, as I travel, record and report national and international events in my work as a journalist and writer. These are simple questions, complicated only in the fact that there seem to be no answers forthcoming.

1. Just how many Christians would there be among the two or three thousand or more farmers who have committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in the last two years?

2. At the behest of the people and the Church - Catholic or Buddhist -- the governments of Sri Lanka and the Philippines long ago set up national structures in the 1980s to oversee  that migrant woman workers, mostly maids had someone to turn to in the face of rampant sexual exploitation in the countries of West Asia, or the Gulf states, and even Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of China) where they worked. India had tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of women nurses working in these countries in the same social matrix, but Church, Family and State were bonded in an inexplicable conspiracy of silence in which the only sound was of the foreign exchange being counted by tellers in banks in south India. For that matter, there is a similar conspiracy of silence about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of young women out or Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand working in new Delhi, Punjab and other urban traps, part bonded labour, part slaves, part just pure victims.

3. The third question is the simplest of them all - Just how many Christians are there among the  Dalit scavengers who even in this age - 2006 AD - still carry the night soil o dry latrines in the semi urban colonies of Gujarat and Punjab?

The lack of answers lie in the fact that the Church and  State have, for their own reasons, never dared seek an honest development profile, or snapshot, of the Indian Christians - Dalit, MBC, OBC or self-styled Brahminical in descent.

When the BJP-ruled National Development Alliance government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee ordered the Tenth Five Year Plan, they invited some of us, tokens, I believe, to be on sub committees looking at the issue of minorities. We did not know whether to laugh, or to cry at the official document which said: "In general, the economic activities pursued by the minorities (in India) as distinct groups may be summed up as: a) Of the total Muslim population, more than 70 per cent live in the rural areas. However, a slightly higher percentage than the national average are urban dwellers and are engaged in traditional trades, handicrafts, petty small businesses, non-agriculture labour, etc.

b) The Christians normally inhabit the urban areas and are engaged in running institutions, hospitals and small businesses c) The Sikhs are mainly engaged in agriculture, transport business, hotels/restaurants, fabrication businesses and small trades d) The Buddhists are normally engaged in traditional activities such as handicrafts, agriculture labour and carrying out petty trades and businesses. e)  The Parsees are generally rich and are mainly in service and have their own businesses/ establishments. However some Parsees near Surat in Gujarat are reported to be very poor."

The statements presented to the Sub-Group were of course preceded by a disclaimer - barring the case of Muslims in which a few academic works are available, there is no study to fall back on in the case of others. The Planning Commission was perhaps going by perceptions gathered in the stereotype of Hindi films than by any pretence at socio economic demographic sampling.

The bureaucracy that drafted the all-important recommendations apparently did not know that a substantial number of Christians lived in the tribal belt stretching from Gujarat in the West to Jharkhand in the East, and that southern Dalit Christians were essentially a rural and semi rural product as much as the Christians of Gurdaspur district in the Punjab. The hospitals and schools were run by the Church (read Bishops and Congregations) and not by poor Christians as proprietary firms, and the small businesses were only in areas where the community had a substantial district or taluka level base, as in Goa, the Bandra region of Mumbai, Mangalore, or in the Travancore and Trissur areas of Kerala apart from the smaller three of the seven states of the North East -- Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram. Not surprisingly, as predicted then, the Tenth Plan has little more than a pious promise to the minorities. Nothing is substantial.  

Much of the blame for the lack of genuine statistical data lies with the government itself. Barring a broad district level demography in which it gives the numbers of persons belonging to various religions, the government has never really fully published religious data. Its sample surveys remain almost entirely ignorant of stratification within religions. Experts have pointed out that in census data, the figures on religion are among the last to be released and that too in general terms.

It suits the Government not to study and publish the incidence of poverty among the religious minorities. The studies sponsored by an emerging enlightened group among the Muslims more than confirms that poverty levels among the poor of the minorities - leaving the rich Sikh farmers of Punjab and Udham Singh Nagar and the businessmen of Delhi and Mumbai out of it - are comparatively more than the poverty levels in a national average. This is disturbing news, for it means that in the process of marginalisation, the minorities seem more prone to be left out of the development process.

The Church too must share in the blame for the absence of a data base or index of poverty, under employment or other forms of deprivation among the Christians of the country. The Parish priest -- and the small community pastor -- does know the poor of his flock; if the religious leadership would merely total up the statistics from the parishes and the small churches, the figures would stun the hierarchy and religious establishment out of its complacency. That, and the denominational divide, is perhaps why no one has really bothered to survey the reality. The results could be inconvenient, if not outright embarrassing.

The ground reality is that the Christian community, on an all-India basis and barring island of affluence or stability, lacks a real middle class that can sustain an Indian church while continuing its commitment to social uplift of all marginalised, it lacks a technocrat, artisan and craftsmen spectrum that can claim to be really self-employable and which can absorb state or commercial finance availability by way of loans, venture and bridge capital, and in its large presence amongst Dalit and Tribals, it lacks a big or middle level land owning community. The truth is that the Christian community for the most is economically fragile. This precipitates its inability both to strengthen itself in Faith, and to join in the struggles of other communities for a better future. Integral empirical surveys - even a sample survey in the Dalit, Tribal region, would be an excellent first step to show a mirror to the Government and the Christian establishment, and demand new policies, a new argument in favour of Dalit Christians as we formulate an economic agenda for our community in this new century - an agenda not on the alternating doles and rebukes of a mai-baap paternal State or Church.

In this context, when the Congress-led UPA Government announced the setting up of the Justice Sachchar Commission - which is now creating such ripples by simply asking for some basic data about Muslims – I wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for a similar Commission for Christians. I , inter alia, said:

"We welcome the Government of India's efforts to collect information in areas where there is lack of authentic information such as in the case of the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India which comes in the way of planning, formulating and implementing specific interventions, policies and programmes to address the issues relating to the socio-economic backwardness of this community.

"We also welcome the Terms of Reference, which, inter alia, include questions such as (1). In which States, Regions, Districts and Blocks do Muslims of India mostly live? (2) What is the geographical pattern of their economic activity, i.e. what do they mostly do for a living in various States, Regions and Districts? (3) What are their asset base and income levels relative to other groups across various States and Regions? (4). (a) What is the level of their socio-economic development in terms of relevant indicators such as literacy rate, dropout rate, Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR), Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) etc.? (b) How does this compare with other communities in various States? 5. (a) What is the Muslims' relative share in public and private sector employment? (b) Does it vary across States? (c) What is the pattern of such variations? (d) Is the share in employment in proportion to their population in various States? 6. (a) What is the proportion of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) from the Muslim community in the total OBC population in various States? (b) Are the Muslim OBCs listed in the comprehensive list of OBCs prepared by the National and State Backward Classes Commissions and adopted by the Central and State Governments for reservation for various purposes? (c) What is the share of Muslim OBCs in the total public sector employment for OBCs in the Centre and various States in various years? 7.(a) Does the Muslim community have adequate access to (i) education (ii) health services (iii) municipal infrastructure (iv) bank credit and (v) other services provided by Government / public sector entities?

"These are all excellent questions. These questions also apply to the vast majority of Christians in India. They specially apply to Christians of Dalit Origins, as well as to Tribal Christians. Dalit Christians comprise a full 60 per cent or more of the entire population of 2.5 crore Christians. They are over 75 per cent in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Punjab and some other parts. Apart from `Islands of development" in certain pockets of Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore, Cochin, Thrissur, Kottayam, Chennai, and possibly Kolkata, the Christian community is amongst the poorest of the poor.

"As per our studies, the Christian community does not have an entrepreneur class, nor does it have an artisan class of people who could be self employed. The urban population is entirely in the service sector, grossly under employed.  The Rural population, mostly Dalit, is landless peasantry, pauperized landless labour and others dependent on seasonal and inadequate employment. The 2001 Census also showed that despite the comparative overall high education levels of the community (urban), the levels of education in the rural and tribal areas were dismally low, specially relating to the girl child in tribal areas. The migration of women from tribal areas to the metropolitan cities for jobs, and their sexual and economic exploitation is unparalleled in any community. Archbishop Vincent Concessao, the Archbishop of Delhi, and I had the privilege of conveying some of these concerns to the Planning Commission during the drafting of the current Plan. A comprehensive study of the economic disempowerment of the Christian community would be en eye opener to us all, including the government and the leadership of the Churches.

“I am writing this letter to pray for the following:

1.  That you suo motu expand the terms of reference of the Sachchar Committee to include all Christians or at least the Dalit Christians in your survey.

2   Or, that you set up a separate and similar committee to study the economic situation of Christians."

Need I say there was no response. Earlier this month, the newly constituted National Commission for Minorities called some of us for a consultation. I will forgive someone saying Christians must not live in minority ghettos. We do not. We live with the rest of our countrymen. In their slums, ghettos, `Cheris" or Dalit Bastees, and in their unauthorized colonies.

Once on the eve of the 2001 National Census, I had moved the High Court of Delhi against the Registrar General of India for the bigotry in its demographic lexicon. Its belief that everyone was a Hindu unless he could prove he was someone else. And that only Hindus had caste and social stratification. Nothing much came out of the move.

But the result of such bigotry is a fully skewed census, and data that is asymmetrical. In politically keeping Christians of Dalit origin out of reckoning, you have killed valuable data. The states which bar Tribals born in other states and Scheduled Tribes in their own states [or work places] commit economic and developmental murder.

And the Church which is happy to be praised for running so many thousand educational institutions forgets that perhaps 60 per cent or more Tribal and Dalit women remain illiterate  and up to 60 per cent of Dalit, tribal and landless workers professing our faith remain below the poverty line.

This is why, the call for a White Paper on Development issues of the Community tops even the demand for a White Paper on anti Christian violence in the list we gave to the national Commission for Minorities and to the Government.

The organised church and the laity have no money for such studies. The government has. It must tell us the economic status not of the Syrian community of Kerala or the Christians of Mumbai and Panaji. It must tell us the Developmental Status of:

1. The Fisherfolk and boat people, Latin Christians, from Gujarat to the Hooghly along the coast of India; 2. The Tribals of the Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand; 3.  The MBCs of Tamil Nadu; 4.  The SC and ST Christian communities of  Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu; 5. The mystery behind the thinning out of Oraon and other surnames from the list of successful Scheduled Tribes candidates in UPSC and State Public Service Commissions’ selections in the last six years; 6. The devolution of funds to the Christian community from the National Minorities Development Fund and the Religious Minority components of ministerial funds under the revised Prime Minister's 15 point programme; 7. The number of Christians in the Panchayati Raj leadership system; 8. Credit from the Banking, Para banking and cooperative sector; 9. Employment data, including data under the guaranteed minimum employment schemes announced by the UPA government  relating to Christians; and lastly 10. Confirm whether Christians rate just above Muslims [who are at the bottom] in terms of the Development index with Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs being far above even the national average. These would constitute about 80 per cent of the Christians in India.