Church, Civil Society and Human Rights

Is it too hard to follow Christ’s examples of justice for the underdog?


John Dayal

6 January 2011
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“Let justice roll like a river (Amos 5:24-27). Prior to Vatican II, no Roman Catholic treatise would have begun with scripture. It would start with the definition of justice – Suu, cuique tradere – to render to each one’s due. Specially with the 1971 Synod, justice became a call to the Christians from the God of the two Testaments. [From The New Dictionary of theology, edited by Joseph Komonhak and others]

“As one of the first Christian voices against slavery, St. Patrick, himself a former slave, has a special relationship to the modern quest for human rights. [Philip S. Johnson]


“Christians for Justice – Stop Targetting Binayak Sen and Teesta Setalvad” {A banner at the Christian candle light demonstration on 4th January 2011 in support of the human rights defenders organised in the national capital by activists of Catholic, protestant and Evangelical Churches.]
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I think I met my first Catholic Religious human rights activist sometime in 1976 in the rural areas of the “steel belt” that runs through what was then undivided Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Jharkhand where all the big steel plants, coal mines, and the steel trade is located.

Those were turbulent times. Indira Gandhi had declared a state of national Emergency [1975-77], almost suspended the Constitution, got the Supreme Court to rule that that there could be no cause for habeas corpus and that normal human rights as we understand them, the right to life and liberty and the rule of law, would not be available to the common man. Indira Gandhi was a Prime Minister fighting to save her regime after the Allahabad High Court overturned her election to the Lok Sabha. But it was his younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, aided and abetted by a coterie of self-serving senior officers and a gang of Youth Congress leaders, who had emerged as the real, albeit extra-constitutional, centre of authority.

Their actions saw forcible sterilisations of men as old as sixty, and as young as sixteen, and demolitions of Muslim qasbas, and about 1,400 clusters, scattered across the city of Delhi, which were bulldozed out of existence. Close to 200,000 families were hastily given barren and tiny plots of land in about 40 so called resettlement colonies, and lived or months without adequate water and toilets, and with tarpaulin sheets to save them from the heat, the cold and the rains that are always so excessive in Delhi. By the way, barring a muted voice or two, I did not find the Church in India, Cardinals, archbishops or their organisations in any denomination; pass a resolution against the Emergency. Safety first, for sure, and always be on the right side of the ruling party. Nothing much has changed.

But I digress. This is not about the Emergency, though one is sore tempted to write more on the because of the recent Congress party autobiography in which it admits the excesses, and even puts a bit of the blame on Sanjay Gandhi, whose wife Maneka Gandhi and son Varun are now leading lights of the opposition Bharatiya Janata parity. Another leading light of the BJP and a former Union minister in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government, Jagmohan who was once a Sanjay Gandhi acolyte, has risen to the defence of his old chum and master, writing a fiery piece in the editorial page of the Hindustan Times. I know something of the Emergency excesses and had written about them in a book For Reasons of State, Delhi under the Emergency which I authorised with my then colleague in the Patriot newspaper, Ajoy Bose, later of the Guardian, UK.

I was in the central Indian badlands researching the major technology step by Indira Gandhi after the later “implosion” of a successful nuclear bomb. This was the SITE, or Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, which brought TV to remote villages with promises of new agro techniques and doles given by the government. The messages were subtle, meant to bring the rural masses to the government’s fold. Hundreds of psychologists monitored the popular response. Their findings have since been used successfully “to fool most of the people most of the time,” as someone once said. On a positive side, the current saturation of dish and cable TV has its roots in that experiment.

But the difference between promise and actual benefits given by the government also brought about distrust of the government, and sometimes unrest. Trade unions, curbed under the Emergency, had gone underground, for labour unrest was frequent where ever employers, including big government and private sector bosses, sought to short change the working class.

It was in this context that I saw young scholastics moving around with the workers, expressing solidarity, extending moral support. I am not sure if they were Jesuits or Divine Word missionaries, possibly both. But I was happy to see they were involved in the struggles of the common man, at the grassroots, far away from the publicity and the glare of the media which now sometimes motivated some human rights activists.

I regret to say that barring rare exceptions through the decades and the last half of the 20th Century, and some personal experience in the new decade involving Kandhamal and Orissa, I have not seen the Church in a leadership role as a human rights defender, or motivator.

It is time that the Church itself, and others who want it to grow in strength, subject it to a close examination as to why it has not only failed itself but has prevented its common members from seeing themselves as major constituents of the nation’s civil society.

The few times the Church has been active has been when its own vested interests were involved. Cardinals and bishops, quite correctly, exhorted the parishioners to take to the streets, albeit in peaceful processions, to challenge the government of the State of Kerala which sought to control the managements of private colleges, many of which were owned by the Church, or when it meddled in text books. Back in 1998, 4th December to be precise, the Church called for a nation wide closure of its schools and mass rallies protesting the sudden violence unleashed on the community by elements of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and others closely allied with the Bharatiya Janata party which was then ruling in New Delhi and several other states.

And last year, the Religious for Justice, the Conference of Religious and individual activists, especially lawyers, from men and women Congregations, took up the imitative to see that justice was done to the victims of Kandhamal because the Fast Track Courts were letting off one murderer after another. The initiative will hopefully bring the Supreme Court to bring its weight to bear on the situation so that the miscarriage of justice is brought to a speedy end, and justice is done.

Another community issue, the cause of the Christian of Dalit origin demanding a reversal of the 1950 Presidential order which robbed them of the rights to be called Scheduled castes with concomitant loss of benefits of reservations in employment and education, has also seen the Church go about at tortoise speed. Although the Catholic and Protestant Churches collaborated in the 1991 massive Dalit Christian rally at India Gate – the biggest ever by the community -- they have not been able to repeat it. It cannot be for want of resources. The Church has a-plenty. It must then be attributed to a lack of desire. The movement is now being carried forward by a few men – among them Jesuit Fr Bosco, the CBCI secretary Fr Cosmon, the activist Franklin Caesar and some others from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. The rallies have taken on appearances of tokenism with barely 500 – three hundred of them brought from the southern states – ever present, and Bishops making a “photo opportunity” attendance. Barely any laity or clerical group joins from Delhi.

Dalit activists will argue that they are doing their best under the circumstances. They have to be praised for regularly going to the Supreme Court where their writs are pending before the Bench of the Chief Justice of India. Fate, government apathy and political opposition have all contributed to a situation where the writ does not come up any more for hearing, and only the most committed feel there will be any justice done in the near future.

Arguably, if the entire Church had backed the Dalit Christian demand – and they could have taken lessons in agitation advocacy from the Gurjars, the Sikhs and others who bring Union and state governments to their knees within a few days of jamming rail and road traffic on major routes - the issue would have possibly been long resolved. It remains a controversial argument within Church circles and the poor Dalits continue to agitate at Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street four times a year when Parliament meets for its sessions. The efforts by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and the National Council of Churches in India to feed Christian MPs at official dinners during the sessions, as a short cut in advocacy -- had borne no fruit, as the MPs too keep a low profile on the Dalit rights issue. Anyway, the major Church support for the Dalit Christian issue is not more than ten years old.

In the same light, the Church support for the cause of the domestic workers, most of them Catholic girls from Ranchi, Chhatisgarh and Orissa tribal areas employed in homes in metropolitan areas of Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, can be traced to their religious affinity, rather that their ethnic origins. The Church is not very visible in the agitations of tribals against monopolists and foreign interests denuding forests in Orissa, or stealing the mines in the tribal lands in other states.

If this is the situation where Christian communities are concerned, and if this is how the Church behaves towards it own, is there any one surprised if we look in vain for major Church advocacy in favour of other religious minorities, or the marginalised. Agreed there is a CBCI document committing itself to the marginalised. Agreed that in recent years, the CBCI has seminars on the Right to Food, and agreed that Caritas and CASA and Eficor are among the first to go whenever there is an earthquake or a tsunami – physically challenging and dangerous even, but political not just safe but productive – they remain far behind the firing line in mass movements where the people are asserting for their rights, sometimes for their right to life itself.

No wonder that the Church was invisible when the Sikhs were being burnt alive in Delhi and other cities, when Kashmir Hindus were pushed out of the valley by a combination of Islamic fundaments elements and the political strategy of the governor of that time, or when the Muslims were brutalised repeatedly from Nellie, Meerut, Moradabad all the way to Gujarat 2002. A few convents may have opened their doors to refugees and victims, but the Church metaphorically kept its doors closed, its conscience shut. All it did was way of charity. Not open protest, as Jesus perhaps would have wanted it to.

The argument that this will be political activity and will bring the Church or the Christian community in direct conflict with the government and the law and order machinery has to be debated, and the Church fears have to be confronted and defeated.

As a practising Catholic, I do not want the Church to suffer the consequences of some foolhardy action, or some thoughtless agitation. I certainly do not want to see bishops or priests in jail even though it is my dream that Cardinals lead some pro-people movement against corruption, for food, for a living wage, and above all, for human dignity. What a grand sight that would be.

But I do want the Church in India – Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecost, and Independent – to understand that it must support human dignity and human aspirations, specially of the poor, beyond lip service. Human dignity cannot be brought about by acts of charity. No among of building houses by Caritas, or medical relief couriered from the West to an Indian site of a natural disaster, will add an iota to the sum total of human rights in India.

What is required is for the Church to understand what it takes to be to be a part of Civil society, not just a part but the very super structure of a national nervous system that responds to the pain of the people.

What are issues agitating civil society at the moment? One has to merely read the daily newspapers, apathetic as they are and guided as they are to their urban middle class markets, to find out. The rapine in Delhi and unsolved murders in Delhi are the tip of the iceberg. India is shot through and through with a jungle law of might is right which aggravates the more one moves away from the city. Dalits in village sleep the night in terror. Their women are easy targets. The tribals are being robbed of their birthright. Dissent is met with murder by hired goons, caste thugs, or by the police. Custodial death is rampant.

Corruption in high cost construction or information technology contracts like the 2 G scandal many make the headlines, but the common man has to face corruption in the lower courts which make a total mockery of the justice dispensation system. Policemen who have to give a bribe to their superiors to get a job or a new posting need to make that money somewhere. Corruption in the money market, the food market and in the job market leads to farmer’s suicides and mass pauperisation of the hinterland. Landless peasantry sells its soul, and its body, for the privilege of being able to live the day. But surely the Church knows it first hand – for do not many of them pay a bribe to keep their FCRA permit alive.

How many remain uneducated and how many remain sick under the shadow of our 50,000 educational and medical institutions? No one knows, because no one cares. The parish system would have enabled to Church to develop an information system which even the government could not beat. But there has never been the effort. The Church does not know how many Christians are below the poverty line.

Needless to say, it is time the situation changed. It is time remedial measures were taken.

You have to look nowhere but at the life and message of Jesus Christ to understand our role in upholding human rights and becoming the foundation of a genuine civil society. Once this is understood, and finds it way into seminaries and formation schools, the situation will change – for the better. I will not have o listen to the senior Religious, heading a major institute, who told me and a group of my colleagues, that if he investigated human rights violations, he was afraid his institution – with its huge stone-walled buildings – would be pelted by stones by angry right wing groups! Surely the buildings would have survived.

It was Christ, in his parables and in his own deeds, who spelled out the common minimum of civil society – to love the neighbour not just as ourselves, but to go a step forward and love him as Christ has loved us – at the cost of his life.

It is this vision which triggered the movement after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, of a new jurisprudence concerned with the defence of human rights, culminating in the Charter of the United nations on Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950.

I am not a theologian, not by a long stretch. But I was struck by a note in my email referring to John Warwick Montgomery, a human rights specialist who served as Director of Studies at the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg from 1979-81. The webpage said Montgomery has written extensively in the field tackling such subjects as the Marxist approach to human rights, the philosophical justification for human rights, and right-to-life issues. Montgomery was in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and has written about the problem of human rights in China.

He pointed out Christians had been subjected to persecution and torture at the hands of the Roman Imperial legal system. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote against the use of torture in obtaining confessions. Pope Gregory the Great echoed his stance in the sixth century and Pope Nicholas I did the same in the ninth century. In 928 AD 'good King Wenceslas' of Bohemia destroyed instruments of torture. In the twelfth century Decretum of Gratian likewise repudiated torture.

The English common law tradition developed out of Biblical principles of law, such as the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' Golden Rule that you do to others as you would be done by them. The Magna Carta, which also reflected Biblical truths, originated from the work of Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Incidentally, common law tradition prohibited secret trials and the extraction of confessions by torture.

“God's perspective on human rights can be grounded in Biblical revelation. Both the theology of the creation and the incarnation of Christ provide the grounds for justifying rights. The rights are entitlements given to us by God. “

If that be so, than it is the duty of the Church to expresses solidarity with human rights, and with those who defend human rights.

The small candle light procession at the historic India gate by the Christian community of Delhi – led by activist of the Federation of Catholic Associations of Delhi, the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Fellowship of India and the all India Christian Council, brightened not just the darkness surrounding the extraordinary punishment meted out to popular doctor Binayak Sen working with the tribals of Chhatisgarh and lawyer Teesta Setalvad fighting for the victims of the Gujarat government and RSS pogrom against Muslims, but also lit a spark in the hearts of many in the Church that bitter cold evening.

I would like to hope that it ignites a major revolution in the Church which sees it move away from cheque-based charity to become the cornerstone of a vibrant civil society which alone can monitor powerful governments and dangerous extremist groups to ensure that dignity, freedom, liberty and life is assured to the poorest of the poor, the helpless and the hapless. Once it reaches that stage, its own properties, its own institutions, schools and colleges will also be automatically safe from predation and persecution.

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