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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In a passing, the larger picture of dispossession -Chitrangada Choudhury

In a passing, the larger picture of dispossession -Chitrangada Choudhury

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published Published on Jul 9, 2021   modified Modified on Jul 9, 2021

-The Hindu

Blaming ‘the system’ alone for Father Stan 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.

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.

Adivasis and loss

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.

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The Hindu, 9 July, 2021, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/in-a-passing-the-larger-picture-of-dispossession/article35223864.ece?homepage=true


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