Caste System Adds New Dimension to Organizing Poor Into Political Blocs : Christian Activists Adapt Liberation Theology for Use in India

The Palmera movement began in 1979, when five men in a small Harijan community near here were killed by a mob.

Harijans are India’s untouchables. The word is translated as “children of God,” but the Harijans were, and continue to be, regarded as the children of some lesser god. The five were killed because they were trying to take part in a Hindu festival reserved for people of higher caste.

The killings took place in the village of Unjanai in the state of Tamil Nadu at the southern tip of India. Charges were brought against 86 men but were dropped on grounds that there was not enough evidence.

Organizing Untouchables

Afterward, a team of Roman Catholic priests and nuns moved into the region, known as Ramanathapuram after the largest city in the area, and they have been operating as the People’s Action and Liberation Movement, or Palmera. They are organizing the untouchables into a political bloc.

They have brought pressure on the state government and managed to get housing and roads for the people. In 1980 and again in 1984 they put up independent candidates for the state Assembly. Their candidates did not win, but they have shown growing strength.

The priests, inspired by activist priests in Latin America, are working for nothing less than social revolution. Their ultimate goal, one of them told a recent visitor, is the “fundamental restructuring of society.”

The setting for India’s liberation clergy is vastly different from that of their counterparts in Latin America. For one thing, the 22 million Christians in India are a tiny minority in a nation of 750 million or so people where Hindus and Muslims dominate. This means that the Christian activists must work mostly with people of other faiths.

India’s Christian activists almost never discuss their religion. And they are actively opposed to efforts by more traditional clergy to convert Hindus or Muslims to Christianity.

‘Stand Against Conversion’

“We take a very strong stand against conversion,” the Rev. Dhyanchand Carr said. “We don’t want to enlarge the church. We want to expand our views.”

Carr is an activist Lutheran minister in Madurai who joined with Roman Catholic clergy in January in a radical statement of liberation theology entitled “The Emerging Church of the Poor.”

“I have learned a great deal from the liberation theologists,” he said, “but most of liberation theology is in the context of Latin America, where more than 90% are Catholics. Here we must be more secular.”

A second difference, an even more important one, is India’s pervasive caste system. There are thousands of castes, each with its own status and rules of social mobility.

The caste system is not limited to the Hindus, with whom it originated. To a certain extent it extends to the Christians, the Sikhs and even the Muslims. It is less influential in the cities, but it dominates the life of most rural Indians.

Caste Inequalities

As a result, revolutionaries and social activists in India must not only contend with religious and economic differences; they also face staggering caste inequalities. Many of the Indian radical clergy are Marxists, but the caste system does not lend itself to classic Marxist analysis.

Thus the liberation theologists of India have had to devise different tactics. For example, in Ramanathapuram--”Ram Nad” for short--the priests and nuns have organized the Harijans against the upper castes.

“Caste is a unique phenomenon for India,” said Father Aloysius Irudayam, a Jesuit priest who founded the Palmera group. “Under traditional Marxist analysis, to organize the Harijans as Harijans would not be acceptable. But we have found in India that we have to organize them along caste lines and then hope to link them with other workers’ movements later.”

A colleague, Father Xavier Kanickaraj, said: “We have been inspired to think in terms of the local situation. So it is needed to ‘Indianize’ liberation theology.”

There are other, more conventional examples, of Christian activism in India. In Bombay, Jesuit priests are fighting on behalf of the pavement dwellers, street people who are born on the sidewalks and die on the sidewalks.

Farmers Organized

In the backward, corrupt state of Bihar, Catholics and Protestants are organizing tenant farmers against their almost feudal landlords, some of whom are so powerful that they maintain private armies.

And in Kerala, which Pope John Paul II visited on his tour of 14 Indian cities last month, Catholic clergymen are at the forefront of a movement to organize the fishermen. Priests and nuns have organized thousands of fishermen, who use small nets to take sardines, mackerel and other small fish in the shallow coastal waters, against mechanized trawlers that have moved into their area.

The movement has been violent at times. In several instances, trawlers have been attacked and burned. Yet out of sympathy for the fishermen, two nuns fasted for 15 days, and a priest headed the fishermen’s union for a while.

Father Louis Panikalangara, who served as president of the Kerala Independent Fishermen’s Union, said: “I never worked in a union before, but I saw that most of the fishermen’s families were very poor, struggling to make ends meet. Preaching from the pulpit is very easy. I felt I must go down and live their life and lead them, because often they need leadership.”

Pope’s Opposition

All these efforts fall into the category of liberation theology, a term said to have been coined by a priest in Peru, Father Gustavo Guttierez. Excesses in liberation theology are opposed by Pope John Paul II. Some of the people involved have a Marxist orientation that the Pope finds objectionable.

Still, the Pope traveled to Kottayam, a focal point of the Kerala fishermen’s movement, and to Bombay, the site of the pavement-dweller dispute. He did not comment on liberation theology at either place, however, nor did he confront its practitioners, as he has on tours to Central America.

The Christian community in India may be relatively small, but its impact on health care and education is great. Many of the top schools in the country are Catholic or Anglican institutions. Likewise, the impact of liberation theology, though a relatively small movement, is greater than the number of priests and nuns taking part might indicate.

Particularly in the state of Tamil Nadu, where theories are being tested in the Harijan organizing drive, the effort may answer longstanding questions about the possibility of bringing change to India’s complex society.

There are four main caste groups in India, identified by the work the people do: Brahmin (the priestly caste), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaisha (merchant) and Sudra (laborer). But except for the Brahmins, the highest and most privileged caste, most people are not identified in terms of these four groupings. Instead there are thousands of sub-castes, and often these change from one region to the next.

Outside all the castes and sub-castes are the Harijans, the untouchables. In Tamil Nadu, the Harijans are known as Thazh Thapathor, which means literally “those who have been lowered.”

In the 200 villages organized by the Palmera movement in Ram Nad, about 17% of the people are Harijans. The dominant element here is not Brahmin but Thevar, a former warrior caste that has evolved into farmers and police officials. The Thevar caste accounts for about 30% of the population.

Other leading upper caste groups include the Konars and Udayars, both mainly agricultural. Among the smaller castes are the Nadars (makers of rum toddy), Chettiyars (money lenders) and Vellalars (religious leaders).

The Palmera team of six Jesuit priests and four nuns chose this setting deliberately to carry out their revolutionary experiment.