Chitrangada Choudhury: In a passing, the larger picture of dispossession
Blaming ‘the system’ alone for Fr. Swamy’s death obscures how India’s political economy is linked to deprival. When an officer from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) came to interrogate Father Stan Swamy last monsoon, the Jesuit sociologist, then 83, in turn asked him about police integrity, and why a father-son duo (P. Jayaraj and Bennicks) should die of custodial torture in a Tamil Nadu police lock-up. It was quintessential Fr. Swamy: unafraid, outspoken, and questioning injustice.
Fr. Swamy was sent to
Taloja Jail in October 2020 in the Bhima Koregaon case, where some of his
co-accused have now spent more than three years without bail or trial. All have
been charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), a widely
misused tool for governments to criminalise lawful dissent and hold ideological
opponents in prolonged incarceration. For all the talk by authorities of a
terrorist conspiracy, Fr. Swamy was never interrogated in nine months of
custody. His arrest in the middle of the pandemic, over two years after the
first raid on his spartan one-room residence, seems like targeted viciousness.
The Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought...
All Indians have dignity, not just the wealthy and the privileged. This belief guided Fr. Swamy’s life-long concern for justice, as I saw in my interactions with him over the years as a journalist. When he first came to West Singhbhum from his native Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s, living among the Adivasi communities profoundly shaped him. He had told me in an interview, “I underwent an awakening, looking at Adivasi values of equality, community, and decision-making by consensus.” His work firmly rejected the prejudice of Adivasi ‘backwardness’, and tirelessly pointed out how violence and dispossession was pushed down their throats and called development: “Adivasis lived on lands full of minerals. Others took these out and enriched themselves, but Adivasis did not get anything.”
In a decade-long
tenure as Director of Bengaluru’s Indian Social Institute, he trained countless
grass-roots activists. He continued this work when he co-founded the
Ranchi-based Bagaicha in 2006 — a centre for research, training and social
action dedicated to working with Adivasi and other marginalised communities and
legally empowering their struggles for justice and dignity. As long-time
friends and colleagues testify, Fr. Swamy wanted it to be a place which the
marginalised felt was their own. A statue of Birsa Munda and a megalith with
the names of those killed in anti-displacement protests marked Bagaicha’s
central ground. Its one room library contained reports, studies and files of
newspaper cuttings on issues such as forced displacement, hunger deaths,
extra-judicial killings and grassroots protests — a buried history of India’s
democracy.
When I first met Fr.
Swamy in 2013, his team was immersed in efforts for poor undertrials in prisons
across Jharkhand against a raging armed conflict. After three years of
painstaking research based on prison visits, meeting police officials and
villagers, and Right to Information Act requests, his team released a report
that included the case studies of over 100 UAPA undertrials. Overwhelmingly,
they were Adivasis and Dalits, and in some cases they had languished in the
criminal justice system for up to 10 years. About 59% of the households of
undertrials, the report found, earned under ₹3,000 per month and were forced to
sell assets such as goats to meet bail conditions or legal expenses. Fr. Swamy
also filed a public interest litigation on the basis of his team’s findings,
which is still being heard in the Jharkhand High Court. As he publicly stated
before his arrest, he believed that such efforts to challenge an unjust status
quo led the state to target him.
Fr. Swamy’s demise has
led to a public outpouring of sadness and anger at the cruelty of our criminal
justice system. Ever self-effacing, he would have wanted this attention not on
him but on the resource grabs that continue to inflict staggering violence
against Adivasis and other marginalised groups, fill our prisons with people
with little access to justice, and necessitate draconian laws such as the UAPA.
To blame ‘the system’ or ‘the government’ alone for his death is to overlook
how we are implicated in this political economy founded on dispossession, and
the ever-expanding criminalisation of demands for social and environmental
justice as conspiracies against the state.
The human rights
activist, K. Balagopal, had argued that an abiding legacy of liberalisation is
the delegitimisation of concern for the oppressed. This is why a man who strove
all his life for solidarity, fraternity and justice in real terms stands
accused by our government of promoting enmity. And why his death, while
foretold, transcends textual analyses of the UAPA, courtroom proceedings and
prison reforms.
Fr. Swamy had one
chance to appear in court, when a Bombay High Court Bench asked for him to be
presented via video-conferencing from Taloja jail on the afternoon of May 21.
Battling multiple ailments including Parkinson’s disease, diminished hearing,
and by then COVID-19 contracted in prison, he was visibly ailing but as
always full of self-respect.
He told the court that
prison conditions were steadily destroying his abilities to read, write and
walk, and that he be granted bail to return to Ranchi to be with his own. In
rejecting the judges’ suggestion that they send him to hospital for a few days,
Fr. Swamy asserted his dignity and innocence, and registered a moral protest
against being effectively made to serve a death sentence, as an indefinitely
imprisoned undertrial.
As now well known, a
dying man’s final wish to return to Jharkhand, to the people he loved and with
whose struggles he had become one for over five decades, went unheard. These
struggles will keep Father Stan Swamy’s quest for a more democratic India
alive.
Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution
ASHUTOSH
BHARDWAJ: Latest war cries against Naxals are absurd. Go visit Bastar, a war is
already on
Jairus Banaji on the Indian corporate strategy of subordinating
farm households and family labor
Chitrangada Choudhury - 50 days after security forces charged
with gangrape...
CHITRANGADA CHOUDHURY - Arrested tortured, jailed in south
Bastar...
Chitrangada Choudhury, Ajay Dandekar – dealing with Maoists...
Chitrangada Choudhury Aga - Illegal mining's ground zero ...
Supriya
Sharma - The story the Chhattisgarh police does not want you to read
Atul Dev
- The attack on Soni Sori follows her attempts at holding the police in Bastar
accountable
K.Balagopal:
Political violence & human rights: Naxalism in A.P.
Dilip
Simeon: The Other side of Maoism
Maoism
and the philosophy of insurrection
The Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought...
WANTED:
Immediate Justice in the Bhima-Koregaon Conspiracy. By Cedric Prakash
Father
Stan Swamy: I’d rather suffer, possibly die if things go on as it is
Gujarati
Poet Parul Khakkar Blames 'Naked King' for Corpses Floating in the Ganga
