Ecumenical Solidarity on a Journey to Liberation

Delegates at Dalit Conference Affirm Commitment to Global Advocacy

When Elske vanGorkum took up her first job in a Dalit community in India, her hosts could hardly believe what they heard when she said there were no castes in her native Netherlands. "For them, a society without castes is unthinkable,” van Gorkum says, “but coming from an egalitarian society, I also had difficulty at first understanding 'untouchability'." Van Gorkum, a development worker with the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation, a Dutch aid organization, shared her experience at an international ecumenical conference on justice for Dalits held in Bangkok,Thailand, in late March.

Organized by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the conference, which gathered95 leaders and representatives of churches and organizations worldwide, was hosted by the Christian Conference of Asia. The conference sought to generate solidarity and support within churches and ecumenical organizations worldwide by bringing into focus the plight of Dalits, who have suffered from caste-based discrimination for 3,500 years.

There are some 260 million Dalits worldwide, 200 million of them in India. As part of the International Dalit Solidarity Network, vanGorkum lobbies her government and the European Union to put caste-based discrimination at the center of the political,economic and development relations with the countries where these human right violations occur. "Learning about the suffering and atrocities Dalits have endured gives me dedication and commitment to stand beside them in solidarity," says van Gorkum, who has been working with Dalitssince 2005.

Accompaniment Generating such commitment to stand beside the Dalits in their struggles is the essence of global ecumenical solidarity and one of the strategic goals of the Bangkok conference. "It is up to us all to determine the outcome of this conference,but we should be guided by the principle of solidarity and accompaniment rather than mere compassion and charity for theDalits," stresses Rev. Dr Deenabandhu Manchala, who heads the WCC Just and Inclusive Communities Programme and is a Dalit himself.

Prof. Maake Masango of the University of Pretoria in South Africa agrees, saying, "Advocacy does not mean taking over the lives of people for whom we are advocating. It is instead helping empower them. So we have to join and journey with them in solidarity." Awakening Many of the delegates to the Bangkok conference admitted they knew little about the story of the Dalits. The conference thus awakened them to do their part in helping spread the narratives they heard as living stories. "Our churches are hardly aware of the situation of the Dalits,and they tend to dismiss the caste system as part of the freedom of religion," says Mr Dennis Frado of the Lutheran Office for World Community at the United Nations in New York.

"After listening to the stories of the Dalits in this conference, we have to tell these to our people, especially the issues relatedto human rights." Conference participants learnt about discrimination and atrocities such as those that occurred in the Indian state of Orissa in 2008, where a Catholic nun was gang-raped, nearly 50people were killed, 15,000 people displaced, and property of Dalit and tribal Christians was destroyed or damaged during a wave of violence unleashed by Hindu fundamentalists. Affirming his commitment to helping revitalize the Dalit movement in the United States through his church network, Fradosaid he would help facilitate meetings between Dalit communities and the US government, and seek to bring cases of human rights' violations to the UN.

Children of Global Solidarity Other participants who had experienced discrimination and abuse themselves, could easily empathize with the Dalits. "We leave this conference with a sense of urgency to become a voice for the voiceless Dalits," said Rev. Roxanne Jordan of the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa, who related the Dalits' plight with experiences of discrimination and exclusion under the apartheid white minority rule in her country. For Bishop Dr Zephania Kameeta of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia, accompanying the Dalits and other victims of oppression in their journey toward liberation is his church's way of saying "thank you" to other people of the world who helped his country's liberation struggle.

"We, too, are children of global ecumenical solidarity. Without the many peoples who accompanied us in our journey towards freedom, we might have been obliterated," says Kameeta, who is LWF vice president for the African region. "So we are accompanying the Dalits not as a favor, but as a Christian duty,"he adds.