Despite guidelines supporting Dalit Christians – formerly known as “untouchable” – not every church leader is working in their defense, according to one Indian bishop.

“We still have to clean up our own house,” Bishop Sarat Chandra Nayak told Crux. “In some places, sadly, the caste system is still there, in spite of us being Christians, and Dalit Christians suffer because of it still. It’s a very scandalous image of the church, but it’s there.”

“I don’t see so much of a hardship, but a continuation of persecution that we’ve faced. But we also have to trust in our judiciary system: If someone is accused of something, you have to go to the court.

Our challenge is that even in the case of the Khandamal violence, we had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get permission to help our own people, because the local judges wouldn’t allow us to. We had to fight it out.

That’s still happening today: We have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. This is the case of rights for Dalit Christians, that has been in the Court for over 15 years. They represent some 20 million people, who are suffering exclusion in the name of religion, but nobody seems to be taking it seriously and the government is lingering.

However, the information we have is that in the month of September there will be a hearing.

“At a bishops’ conference level, we released a series of policies on Dalit Christians, but in the end, it’s up to each bishop and each diocese to guarantee that these don’t remain as just a document. And on the bishops doing more at a local level, I believe there’s still much to be done. We still have to clean up our own house. In some places, sadly, the caste system is still there, in spite of us being Christians, and Dalit Christians suffer because of it still. It’s a very scandalous image of the Church, but it’s there.”