Valson Thampu

Seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things will be added to you. St. Matthew 6:33

The basic duty of a believer is to seek God’s justice. God’s justice, as against man’s justice, is justice prioritized to the poor and the oppressed. Man’s justice favours the privileged and the powerful.

The duty of a faith community is to ensure that justice is done to those who seek God’s justice. A religious community, especially Christians, betrays itself when it abandons those who fall victims in the quest for God’s justice for others.

The Crucifixion of Jesus, his walking alone the Way of Sorrow seeking God’s justice for humankind, is a perpetual reminder that disowning martyrs for justice denotes extreme spiritual aberration.

Today the Indian Christian community -beyond it, Christendom as a whole- faces a situation comparable to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Jesus was crucified as a criminal through a mock trial. Fr. Stan died in custody as one condemned without a trial. Two thousand years ago at least a charade of practising justice was gone through. Stan was condemned without even that. You might argue that Stan was not tried and condemned. Sure, he wasn’t; and that is the outrage. He died labelled ‘guilty,’ and denied a trial. As per the provisions of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the accused is presumed guilty until proved innocent. The innocence of Fr. Stan could have been, would have been, proved, if he were tried. He wasn’t. So? Should he die, and remain guilty forever; and that, without the fundamental right of a citizen to prove his innocence?

This is an order of injustice that no civilized society can afford to brook or gloss over.

The right to justice is affirmed in the Preamble to the Indian Constitution. It affirms justice as the cornerstone of the Constitution. Liberty, equality and fraternity follow, complementing it. You shall know a tree, Jesus said, by its fruit. If he were to speak today, he would have said: ‘You shall know a society by the victims of its injustice’. Also, you shall judge a faith community by its indifference to the victims of injustice.

The call to seek and secure justice for all is quintessential to the Christian community, if it is faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ. The core purpose of Christian mission is to incarnate God’s justice, which Fr. Stan was doing. He was in solidarity with the oppressed, struggling to make the justice of God real to them. The Good News to the poor is that their right to justice matters to God. Upholding their right to justice is, therefore, humanity’s spiritual mandate.

The Indian Christian community will condemn itself, if it disowns Fr. Stan and ‘looks the other way’ –as the priest and the Levite did in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Questions are already being asked by many –Christians and non-Christians- as to why the Church authorities stayed eerily indifferent to Fr. Stan’s plight. Given the draconian nature of the law under which he was booked, perhaps nothing much could have been achieved at once. But that isn’t an alibi for not doing what ought to have been done. Those who struggle in the thorny vineyards of the Lord know how re-assuring it is to feel that a community is in solidarity with them. (When soldiers are sent out into the battle-field, the entire country rises up in solidarity with them.) Basic to being Christian is the persevering faith in ‘knocking’ at doors that stay shut (St. Matthew 7:7). The door is shut, as of now; but it will open, if only we knock. But to pre-judge the outcome negatively, and to excuse oneself from the duty to knock at doors that seem slam-shut, betrays littleness of faith. It amounts to excuse-mongering.

Surely, something could have been attempted. Nothing was; as it seems from available evidence. Did a loss of nerves depress our response? Did the hierarchy of the community, for all their merits and competencies, lack the morale to face the issue? Truth, after all, is the engine of justice. It is impossible that a person, a community, cares for truth and yet stays indifferent to justice. Justice is the outworking of truth.

Be that as it may, it is indisputable that the Christian Community as a whole –not just the Catholics- has, through the self-sacrifice of Fr. Stan, come under the spiritual obligation to seek justice for the one who has laid down his life seeking God’s justice for the oppressed.

What Shall We Do?

The answer to this question depends on the nature of the injustice done to Fr. Stan. He confronts us as a moving example of the price one pays for struggling for justice to those who are denied justice.

Fr. Stan insisted that he was innocent. No shred of evidence exists to the contrary. That makes his case one of the crass denial of justice; a right guaranteed to citizens by the Constitution of India and every human rights convention in the world.

Fr. Stan is no longer there to prove his innocence. The difference between the plight of Fr. Stan and that of Jesus Christ is that Jesus was vindicated through his Resurrection. Fr. Stan too is entitled to the resurrection of his innocence, which has been murdered. It needs to happen through the Christian community. It is a sacred duty, which well-meaning people of all faiths are sure to endorse. Justice is not a communal issue. It is the universal imperative of humanity.

The Resurrection of Jesus happened as an act of God. God raised him from the dead. Since the inception of the church, this divine duty stands transferred to it. The Christian community is obliged to bear witness to the Resurrection of Jesus by staying committed to resurrecting justice for the martyrs of the faith who are crucified for their pursuit of justice to the poor. How it addresses Fr. Stan’s right to be vindicated will be the touchstone of its spiritual mettle.

Here’s what needs to be done urgently. In the interest of clarity, the task ahead can be considered broadly under two categories.

1. The legal and legislative task ahead.

The State has the right to protect itself; but it has no right to condemn the innocent, or deny due process of law to citizens. In the case of Fr. Stan, the State has undermined the spirit of justice by pitting the letter of the law against it. It is good for the State, if it believes in the rule of law, to reckon this reality, if it believes in the rule of law.

A process needs to be initiated, unprecedented though it is in our justice delivery system, to have Fr. Stan’s case tried expeditiously. No further ‘investigation’ is possible, or necessary, in his case. The likely argument that the moment the accused dies, pending legal procedures against him become infructuous, should not apply here. Though valid for other cases, it is unjust in Fr. Stan’s matter. Here the closure of legal procedure does injustice to the accused-deceased. In normal cases, the accused, who dies while the legal process is pending, dies presumed innocent; for he or she has not been proved guilty. In this case, the accused has died, presumed to be guilty. The State, not Fr. Stan, is responsible for this. Such a scenario fails the ends of justice for two reasons-

I. THE LEGAL

(a) The accused happens to be denied the opportunity to prove his innocence. He was in custody for nine months, without being interrogated even once. No court heard him on merit. Even though Fr. Stan stated explicitly that he would die in the jail, the warning went unheeded.

(b) Secondly, he died in custody. Clearly, the conditions of his incarceration hastened his death. If so, he was prevented, willy-nilly, from establishing his innocence. This is significant, given that the conviction-rate in UAPA cases is under 2%. That being the case, the process, as Justice Madan Lokur, retired Judge of the Supreme Court, said recently: the process is the punishment in such cases. Going by the learned Judge’s view, the UAPA turns out, in about 98% of cases, to be a means for shutting up inconvenient individuals for long periods of time.

The State is responsible for the life and security of the persons it hold in custody. In Fr. Stan’s case the State failed in this respect. No right-thinking person can accept, or live with, a situation in which a case of custodial death like Fr. Stan’s is closed, without establishing his guilt or innocence, as the case may be. This can be done only through a trial. Conducting such a trial is necessary to meet the ends of justice.

In this regard, here’s what needs to happen urgently.

1. A letter should be addressed to the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India by the heads of all churches as well as leaders of other religions, public intellectuals and prominent citizens, to order a speedy trial and disposal of the case.

2. Leaders of political parties need to be urged to move amendments to the UAPA in light of the indefensible anomaly latent in it as unveiled by Fr. Stan’s martyrdom in custody. It should become part of the statute that citizens who die under any law which presumes guilt rather than innocence in the accused must be provided the right, in case they die in custody, to have their innocence vindicated through their bona fide representatives. Neither the judiciary nor the legislature nor the executive should have any opposition to establishing the truth of the cases involved through due process of law.

3. Media focus should be sustained on this significant, land-mark issue. This is imperative given that the media of today is a domain of the ‘momentous and the momentary’.

The minimum goal to be achieved, if we are to do justice to the mission, memory and martyrdom of Fr. Stan is the humanisation of UAPA by making it consonant with the rubrics of human rights. Keeping individuals for years and years in custody, denying them the opportunity to vindicate themselves, is incompatible with the spirit of constitutional democracy in a sane and civilized society.

II. THE SPIRITUAL TASK

It is unwise and self-denigrating to separate the legal task in this context from the spiritual. Between what happens to a community and what a community does to itself as well as what it chooses to be, there is an organic connection. The first cannot be dealt with in isolation from the second.

A continually widening gulf exists in the Christian community between disciples of Jesus like Fr. Stan and the practitioners of nominal Christianity. Commitment to truth and justice, especially for the sake of those in other religions, is not a priority for the latter. Churches are not perceived as responsive to the cry for justice beyond its periphery. The perception is spreading that justice is not necessarily available to Christians themselves from their own churches. Isolated, stray events, no doubt, as responsible for this. But they do severe damage to the image of the community. This is aggravated further by the perception that the Christian hierarchy is in a state of compromise with the powers that be. This silences those who matter in the community from demanding justice even for its own. Fr. Stan’s plight could lend credibility to this apprehension.

Such perceptions do exist in wider context. It doesn’t help to live in denial in respect of them. If Fr Stan could be dealt with as callously as he was –denied, for long, even the use of a straw to drink water- without evoking a public outcry, surely, it is an index to the poor image of the community in public awareness. The responses a community evokes are determined by what a community is, or is perceived to be. A community of indifference can evoke only indifference from the larger context.

Given the above, consider the following-

1. The Christian community needs to do all it can to improve and widen its relationship with other religious communities. It might seem politically expedient to play up communal divides, as in the case of the love-jihad, or Tipu Sultan issues. But the more we resort to tactics like this, more we are seen as pseudo-Christians who mock the teachings of Jesus Christ, who taught to love one’s enemies. Also, fallacious and ill-advised moves of this kind cheapen us even in the eyes of the masters whose good will we seek to cultivate. Those who seek favours degrade themselves; especially if, in doing so, they cheapen fundamental rights into crumbs of charitable patronage by the powers that be.

2. The Christian community needs to become –in the words of Gandhi- the change it wishes to effect in the world. The chasm between our proclamations and our ‘ways’ must be addressed, lest we are condemned as hypocrites.

3. The Christian community needs to heal itself of its many inner divisions, mutual suspicions and jealousies, and attain a greater and higher degree of spiritual unity. Disunity, or conflict born of competing interests, generated the heat that killed Fr. Stan. The conflict between the State-corporates combine on the one hand, and the Dalits-adivasis survival on the other, stems from a clash of interests. The truth is that a similar clash of interests, though couched in a different mode, underlies the fragmentation of the Christian community along denominational lines. Christians comprise only 2.18% of India’s population. We are, besides, geographically dispersed, except in Kerala and the North-East. Denominational fissures debilitate us even further, marginalising us politically.

4. Christian unity must be distinguished from the unity that drives political mobilisations. We must not unite ‘against’, but unite ‘for’. We need to unite to make justice and peace prevail in the land. Hate, and its correlative of violence, are inadmissible to the Christian calling. How can we preach love and justice to the world, if we are unable to practice it among ourselves? The prime asset of a religious community is its spiritual strength and ethical credibility.

5. We need to become a response-able community. If we are the ‘salt of the earth and the light of the world’, surely we have to be a felt-presence for godly purposes. Ideals and values have no religious labels or limits. Right to justice is the bottom-line of humanity. If we react only when injustice befalls us, we prove ourselves to be a contradiction of the Way of Jesus, who has mandated us to love the neighbour like ourselves. Everyone is our responsibility.

6. Fr. Stan’s martyrdom is, thus, a call for the spiritual rejuvenation, the godly resurrection, of the Christian community. Only when that happens, would justice have finally been done to Fr Stan Swamy, who imagined himself as a bird that sings even from the cage. That’s the spirit of Christianity; the spirit that Jesus exemplified by praying for his tormentors from the Cross. The same spirit confronts us today through the martyrdom of Stan.

In conclusion-

The fundamental tasks to be addressed in the wake of Fr. Stan’s martyrdom are-

1. Focus the attention of the nation on the indefensibility of UAPA as it stands now. In this connection, highlight the need for reviewing urgently the plight of all who are shut up –many of them for years- under this law. It needs to be ensured that no one suffers legally for his conscience as Fr. Stan had to.

2. Bring about the much-needed spiritual rejuvenation of the Christian community; in particular, bridge the gulf that exists, as Jesus would have said, between ‘hearing’ and ‘doing’. The integration between faith and action constituted the power of Fr. Stan’s wordless witness to the Indian society. The need to shut him up would not have arisen, if he were an insipid, lukewarm presence. He has blazed the quintessential mission today. Quickening and equipping the Christian community as a whole must be deemed a priority and urgent task at the present time.