New Delhi: Various organisations today staged a demonstration at Jantar Mantar here demanding that Scheduled Caste (SC) status be extended to Dalit Christians and Muslims as well.
“We are seeking the scrapping of Para 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Caste) Order, 1950, which excludes Dalits among Christians and Muslims from its purview,” said Samuel Jeyakumar, executive secretary of the National Council of Churches in India.
The demand for including Christian and Muslim Dalits in the SC category has been earlier endorsed by bodies like National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities as well as the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), but it is yet to be realised due to lack of political will, he claimed.
At the protest organised by the National Coordination Committee for Dalit Christians, Christian religious heads, including Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, president of Catholic Bishops Conference of India, G Dyvasirvadam, Moderator, Churches of South India and Alwyn Messih, general secretary of Churches of North India, appealed to the government to end the discrimination based on religion.