“If we can get the pope and Bishop Tutu to speak on the discrimination and injustice against the Dalits, this can create a ripple in the global media,” said Vijaykumar Parmar of India’s National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights.
Parmar was speaking on March 23 as he reported recommendations from a conference workshop that had discussed ways of showing solidarity with Dalits in India and other South Asian nations.
The March 20-24 Bangkok gathering took place a month before a United Nations meeting in Geneva to review progress towards the goals set in Durban, South Africa, at a 2001 U.N. conference on racism.
The Bangkok gathering was organized by the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, with the Christian Conference of Asia acting as host.
In a message sent to the meeting, the general secretary of the Geneva-based LWF, Zimbabwean theologian the Rev. Ishmael Noko, noted that the Durban conference had failed to recognize explicitly “caste-based discrimination”.
“Governments that exclude a whole section of their own citizens, or allow them to be so treated, are incompetent to govern,” said Noko in a March 21 message read to the conference on his behalf by Peter Prove of the LWF international affairs and human rights office. “Members of the international community that know but ignore the issue are accomplices to the systemic violations of human rights resulting from this unjust system,” Noko stated.
On the task of getting support from Pope Benedict, Lesley Anderson, a Methodist and one of the presidents of the Caribbean Conference of Churches, said once he returned to Jamaica he would ask his Roman Catholic counterpart to present the proposal to the pontiff.
South African delegates said they would do the same with Archbishop Tutu, who is the former head of the Anglican Church in South Africa, and known, as delegates noted, for his prominent media profile.
Bishop Zephania Kameeta of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia and an LWF vice-president, compared the situation Dalits faced to the apartheid system that South Africa had imposed on his country until independence in 1990. “I’m shocked to know that these indignities and injustice against our brother and sister Dalits still exist even in this age of information technology,” Kameeta said.
