Dalit Christians invisible – Why bother, when the context of Christianity can clearly explain people’s lives? The court says that there is no caste in Christianity. And Dalit Christians in Andhra certainly live within Christianity? In 1972, scholar Imtiaz Ahmed identified a unique feature in scholarship on Indian society.

While sociologists have had to work hard to understand how different castes were located hierarchically next to each other, Ahmed said, it seems that non-Hindu communities “existed as separate and distinct entities in Indian society. ” For example, when M. N.

Srinivas wrote his influential account of the “social system” of a Mysore village, he left Muslims—who constituted 11 percent of the village—out of that hierarchy. It was as if as soon as people became Muslims or Christians, their existence as barbers, fishermen or landlords became irrelevant to understanding Indian society. I was reminded of this while reading the Supreme Court judgment in Chintada Anand vs.

State of Andhra Pradesh. On March 24, a two-judge bench told a Dalit Christian man that the Prevention of Atrocities Act was not meant to protect him. In 2020, Anand, a resident of Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, started being threatened by a Christian Reddy family.

The Reddys demanded that Anand stop his practice as a priest because he is a Dalit. Anand belongs to the Madiga community, which is historically associated with leather tanning, cleaning and workmanship. In January 2021, Anand was stopped by a mob of 30 people while on his way home: “His mobile phone and vehicle keys were snatched, he was dragged, beaten and publicly insulted with caste-related slurs and death threats were made.

It is also alleged that threats were made to kill his family members and kidnap his children. “.