The Christian Conundrum: Minority Citizens and the Incivility of Caste

Abstract

The question of what constitutes the content of civility even as we seek to empty it of rigidly conceptualised Western understandings remains important. An interesting possibility is to reanimate the idea of civility with the notion of trust, but that again begs the question: ‘what is trust?’ My thinking on this subject is framed by constitutional values, and from that perspective, I perceive the ‘civility–trust’ dyad as being the social evocation or impression of the constitutional value of fraternity about which Ambedkar spoke in the Constituent Assembly. He suggested something of a content to fraternity which can then be employed to think through our understanding of civility. Against this backdrop, I listen to the voices of Tamil-speaking Dalit Christians and activists and the ways in which they try to come to terms with and struggle against the forms of incivility and ‘second-class’ citizenship they are up against, and how they make any sense of this with regard to constitutional values and Christian ones, both of which they should be able to lay claim to, but in which they are denied full participation.