Ode to Sr Valsa John

Uphold the living as we remember martyr Valsa, a victim of Coalgate

JOHN DAYAL

The “Coalgate” scam is not just about financial corruption in the auctions of mining blocks by central and state governments. If dug deep enough, the scandal will also expose human victims – the many Tribals and marginalised farmers who lost their land to the mining companies, the women who were exploited, the children who lost an opportunity in life as their parents were forced to relocate, and human rights activists who suffered jail or, worse, death at the hands of hired goons because they had asked a question too many, challenged a management too often.

Catholic nun Valsa John, of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, was one such. And as church functionaries and Rights groups observed the anniversary of her brutal murder in the Dumka region of Jharkhand a year ago, the focus was not just on the continuing mystery of who killed her. She had died a lonely death, hacked by sharp sword and axe like weapons by a group of men, as she slept in a small hut deep inside the village. The killers fled into the night, leaving behind a terrified village, which has been numbed, into silence.

An important aspect of the tributes paid to her was to bring to the public realm the circumstances in which rights defenders and a broad section of Christian activists, specially religious catholic Nuns, priests sand others work in areas of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Andhra, and to a lesser extent in the forest and mining areas of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

The murder, of course, remains the main issue. Although half a dozen local people, many of them from the same village, have been arrested, it is not clear why the investigating agencies have not explored the possibility of a larger conspiracy involving not just the actual killers but the people who run the mining company.  It is now becoming increasingly clear that the mining contract was possibly not above board even though the main “owner” of the block was a publics sector agency, the Punjab State electricity Board which needs a very large volume of coal to keep its thermal power plants operational to feed the increasing demands of Chandigarh and the growing industrial cities of the state.  Instead of doing the actual mining itself, the Punjab Company went into a partnership with a little known company from West Bengal to do the actual mining. A study of the actual operations makes it clear that he second company in turn wet leases the heavy earth moving machinery complete with operators. This could have been done by PSEB itself instead of giving a fat fee to the intermediate company.  An adjunct of this outsourcing has been the proliferation of several other middle men and contractors who milk the PSEB for profits without any sense of responsibility to the welfare of the local people.

It was to end the exploitation of the local people, and to ensure that they got their due in rehabilitation and reparation including education for the children that Sr. Valsa, a Kerala born activist who has pent all her working mission life with the Santhals, forced the company to sign a memorandum of understanding with the villagers. She was on a return visit to the village to assess how faithfully the MoU had been implemented when she was done to death.

Valsa is not s rare phenomenon in the church, especially in the Catholic faith.  With almost 150,000 men and women religious, including diocesan priests, the Catholic community has several thousand of its activists working in almost every state and certainly in all areas where there is large-scale human displacement or exploitation, be it in the forest areas of central or south India or in the coastal belt where fishermen and boatmen an their families have been targeted, displaced or threatened by industry or massive public projects. Among such major projects are such hazardous ones as the nuclear power plant art Koodmakulam in Tamil Nadu.

This article is not in praise of the individual priest brother, Nun or lay activist, and therefore I will name no names though there are dozens of them now acknowledged by their peers as pioneering defender who have collectively birthed the civil society that we see active in India. But there is need to record and celebrate the impact of the collective effort, as also there is need to question church and society if they have been given the recognition and support they need to be able to fulfill their calling in an appropriate and optimum manner.

Civil society and the Catholic community have, for the most, remained either ignorant or aloof about such activists. The Catholic middle class, like their counterparts in the protestant church and in the lager national community, seem not to be aware of the trials and tribulation of the Tribals, the Dalits and the marginalised farmers. They read the newspapers, but do not digest the enormity of the crime of human displacement, of mass hunger and child deaths.

Even religious communities, barring perhaps some of the more radicalized ones such as the Jesuits, also do not understand the importance of the work their own members are doing.

The result is that often enough, the Priest or Nun is isolated and forced to work all alone with the rest of his or her companions in the community looking at him with amusement or with bewilderment. Worse, some communities see their activist members as threads to the equilibrium whose actions, seeming anti government, anti authority, will bring the wrath of the political and administrative forces on their institutions, making their normal working charism under threat.

It is time for the communities, religious and secular, to come out of this almost paranoiac fear complex that they will be targeted if they speak for the common man.

That is their God given calling, and if they make the chief minister, chief secretary state party president or the superintendent of police angry, so be it. The loss of an Foreign Contribution Regulation Act may threaten all church originated development work on first sight, but surely there is activism and village level work in mobilization and serving the common poor which does not bank on foreign grants or even Indian government funds.

Above all, religious communities and the Lay must celebrate and honour the Nuns and priests who go out and put their necks on the block. Each one of us who call themselves Christian’s and Catholics should have been ready to take that risk. We have not outsourced sacrifice to the religious, but in as much as they are the cutting edge of the social action of the church, they have to be celebrated. They must be upheld when they are alive and working. No merely eulogized when murdered.