Father Stan Swamy, a courageous Jesuit priest, succumbed to illness at 84, his condition made worse by the brute and callous treatment at Taloja Central Jail; after his medical condition –a fallout of the deadly Corona virus he was released on medical bail in May 2021; he finally succumbed on July 5, 2021 at the Holy Family Hospital where he was undergoing treatment.
Political economist, Parakala Prabhakar delivered the Father Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture, St. Patrick’s High School, Secunderabad July 11, 2026. Here is the full text of the lecture:
Dignitaries on the dais and my dear friends,
I felt sad, was moved to tears, when Father Stan Swamy died. There was a chapter on him in my book, The Crooked Timber of New India. The title of the chapter is ‘Who Killed Father Stan Swamy?’ You would have noticed that I asked, ‘who killed’ Stan Swamy’. I meant that he did not simply die. I meant that he was, indeed, killed.
Today I am not asking the same question. I am asking a different one: ‘Who is afraid of Stan Swamy?’ I further ask, ‘Why are they afraid of him?’
In April this year, I went to Bagaicha, Namkum, on the outskirts of Ranchi. I spent two days there. I delivered a lecture on the occasion of his Jayanthi. It was called ‘Stan Swamy Jayanthi Vimarsa.’
Today I am here not to share my sorrow with you. I am here to celebrate the life of Father Stan Swamy, and together with you to draw inspiration from the values he stood for, and his work to uphold them.
I am grateful to the organisers for giving me an opportunity to speak on this occasion.
A Few Concerns
Before I proceed further, I would like to caution you all about a few things that worry me these days. Some of you might have come across these alarm bells. I say these cautionary words whenever I get an opportunity to address a gathering, big or small. Those who heard these few lines before should forgive me for repeating. I repeat them because I strongly feel that they are important, and bear repetition.
First caution. If some people in this gathering think that we can continue to hold this kind of meetings in future, I appeal to them to shed that delusion. Even now in many parts of the country it is becoming increasingly difficult to air our views freely, and without consequences. If things go the way they are going now, soon it will be impossible to impossible to hold such meetings.
Second. This year it is nearly certain that our beloved tricolour will fly on the Red Fort on our Independence Day. But come next year, I am not sure. Anyone here can guess the colour of the flag that is a likely to fly.
Third. Recently the Union Home Ministry has issued a circular. It makes the singing of all the six stanzas of Vandemataram, compulsory. It also specified that it should be sung before Jana Gana Mana. If the present drift continues unchecked, sooner than later, Jana Gana Mana could be gradually phased out. If the ten-hour marathon debate on Vandemataram in our Lok Sabha tells us anything, it is this.
Our Parliament does not discuss people’s issues any longer. It has no time for them. There has been no discussion on unemployment, price rise, situation in Manipur, rural distress in the country, falling exchange value of the rupee, operation Sindoor, Chinese occupation of large tracts of our territory, falling domestic investment, and many such urgent issues. But our Lok Sabha found time for a ten-hour marathon discussion on Vande Mataram.
If we let the present drift continue unchecked, these three dangerous possibilities would soon be realities.
There is one more danger in the making, the fourth. Recently the government has constituted a High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes (HLCDC). You have to read its terms of reference to understand its import and what it could do to our society. The repeated use of the term ‘illegal immigration’ is a giveaway of the present dispensation’s intentions behind embarking on an exercise like this.
Our Values
When I remember Father Stan Swamy and think of how we look at him and the regime looked at him, I am reminded of William Blake’s words:
A tree that moves some to tears is to others a green thing that stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.
We all share a set of values and ideals. The best expression of those values was given by Father Stan Swamy just before his arrest on October 8, 2020.
This is what he said:
“Over the last two decades, I have identified myself with the Adivasi people and their struggle for a life of dignity and self-respect… In this process, I have clearly expressed my dissent over several policies and laws enacted by the government in light of the Indian Constitution. I have questioned the validity, legality, and justness of several steps taken by the government and the ruling class. If this makes me a ‘deshdrohi,’ then so be it. We are part of the process. In a way, I am happy to be part of this process. I am not a silent spectator, but part of the game and ready to pay the price, whatever it may be… I/we must be ready to face the consequences. I would just add that what is happening to me is not unique. Many activists, lawyers, writers, journalists, student leaders, poets, intellectuals, and others who stand for the rights of Adivasis, Dalits, and the marginalised and express their dissent to the ruling powers are being targeted. I am grateful to all who have stood in solidarity with me all these years.”
Let me take out the important words and expressions from what he said and make a list of them.
Adivasis; Dalits; the marginalised; ruling powers; struggle for a life of dignity and self-respect; dissent; solidarity; Indian Constitution; validity; legality; justness; deshdrohi; silent spectator; pay the price; face the consequences.
Situation in the Country
Economy
There are some stubbornly enduring features of the present dispensation in the economic domain. It is not able to shed them even well into its third consecutive term: Ad hoc-ism in policy making, reluctance to learn from past mistakes, denial of lived economic reality of the common people, massaging of data to present a rosy picture of the economy, believing its own propaganda (though it is initially meant for setting PR narratives), wrongly interpreting its electoral successes as an endorsement, if not an outcome, of its record of economic performance.
The government remains resolute in sticking to the denial mode. It takes little note of the economic slowdown, the tapering off of capital inflows into the country, flight of capital from India, decline in the domestic private investment despite reduction in corporate taxes, the much-hyped Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme and the so-called ‘crowding in’ of public investment. The unorganised sector in the country is largely in decline or in stagnation is no concern to it. We all know that this is the sector that can give at least subsistence incomes to the vast majority of our people.
Instead, the present dispensation is spending time ideating on how to ‘add more momentum to the reforms journey’, ensure ‘ease of living’ and ‘ease of doing business’. For whom?
Evidently, for a few of its cronies.
Much of the credit offtake in the country is now for consumption. Problems such as rising cost of living especially for the poor and the marginalised, unacceptably high youth unemployment and unemployment among the educated do not matter to it. One of the high-profile economic policy makers is on record saying that it was not the lack of opportunities but lack of aspiration that kept our young people out of work.
Little did he realise that both the organised and unorganised sectors are unable to absorb the labour force. Rising economic inequality matters little to the dispensation. Its policy wonks even exhort us ‘not to lose sleep over inequality’.
The present dispensation lacks appetite for an honest review of its past initiatives and for course correction. That demonetisation has done little to serve any objective, assuming it had even one. It decimated thousands of small businesses and establishments in the unorganised sector. That ghastly experience offered no lessons to it. Even the after-thought sort of objective of reducing cash transactions in the economy remains unserved nearly eight years after the measure. One glance at the disaggregated data of UPI transactions is enough to tell us that.
The dispensation is tone deaf to the plight of the poor and the marginalised.
That damage itself is difficult to undo. But what accompanied that damage is more serious: the institutional compromise that occurred and continues even today. The foremost is the compromise of our economic data infrastructure. Our national accounts estimates have become questionable. They are contestable not merely from the methodological and base-year points of view. Their integrity in collection, lazy erroneous proxying, reporting, analysing and computing have come under a cloud.
Our statistical architecture is now undependable. It is recognised as untrustworthy by global financial agencies. The Planning Commission was perhaps oversized and might not have been the most efficient institution. But at least it did not give the government of the day inaccurate data tailored to suit its political needs. Its replacement, the NITI Aayog, is yet to do anything worthwhile in the last twelve years other than that.
The Reserve Bank of India has been bleeding billions of dollars to protect the rupee’s exchange rate vis-a-vis the US dollar. However, its intervention could only prevent a sudden steep fall but not arrest the currency’s steep slide. Rupee continues to reach newer lows every trading day. The government does not seem to have come to grips with the fundamental problems plaguing the rupee and figure out why it is the worst performing Asian currency today. It is in denial. It wants to look for reasons only in the global headwinds.
The present dispensation is genetically unfit to getting the economy right. Its sole preoccupation is to recast the polity in a majoritarian mould. It has no economic project for the country. Its sole aim seems to be the enrichment of a few of its cronies.
It would be a mistake to think that the last twelve years have been bad for the country’s economic performance alone.
The present dispensation is fundamentally altering the political society of the country. That is equally a serious problem.
Polity: Dismantling Secular, Inclusive India
The present dispensation is fiendishly working to dismantle the idea of India as a secular, plural, and federal state that pledged itself to delivering liberty, equality, justice and fraternity to its people and to foster a humane society. The idea of India embedded in our 1947 tryst with destiny and the political compact enshrined in our 1950 constitution are now in mortal danger.
The secular, plural, democratic conception of India has been the target of unrelenting assaults from this dispensation and several other past-worshipping obscurantist platforms. They have been openly and doggedly championing an unequal social order. Their project is to seek India’s future in its past; to recover from that imaginary past a fabricated pristine glory; to turn the secular, democratic Republic into a culturally, linguistically, religiously homogenized nation. The idea that Indian civilization is a synthesis, and a palimpsest, is abhorrent to them. Their project’s notion of India seeks to obliterate the rich diversity of cultures, languages, lifestyles, eating habits, sartorial practices, ways of worship and syncretism that our country is blessed with.
A flattened India is their notion of a ‘civilizational’ state. That is the goal of the current dispensation.
Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is but one key element in a grand project that seeks to assert exclusive Hindu ownership of the Indian nation, to make that Hindu-owned nation the sole rightful resident in the territory of the Indian state – and turn it into a Hindu nation-state, a Hindu Rashtra. It seeks to redefine the country’s identity as ‘Hindu nation-state’. In that configuration ‘savarna’ is deliberately muted and made illegible for the time being for tactical reasons.
Eventually, when constraints are broken, it would be unveiled as a full-blooded, unapologetic, wall to wall ‘savarna Hindu Rashtra’. Make no mistake.
Bloodless Political Genocide
When we became a Republic, our founding parents made it a home for everyone who lived in its territory. Membership of the Republic, and citizenship, were not predicated on religion, caste, gender, language, culture, region of residence, colour, economic status, educational qualifications and such other attributes. Everyone who chose India as their land of residence was a citizen, also a voter, and thus a full-fledged member of the country’s political society. Denominational attributes did not privilege one or the other as rightful owners of the nation. Everybody was. Janmabhumi was the sole criterion. We did not entertain Punyabhumi as a criterion for our citizenship or membership of our political society.
Europe went through a different experience when nation states were formed. There were people who rightfully belonged and those who were ‘others’ or minorities. That was the basis of European nation-states. There were majorities and minorities. Not political, but on the basis of birth, race, religion, language, culture. Minorities’ residence was predicated on their becoming tolerable to the majorities. European countries, and countries which adopted that model of building their nation-states, either subjugated minorities, pushed them out of their territories, or even exterminated them. Beginning from the cleansing of the Iberian peninsula in the mid and late 15th century until the ethnic cleansing that Israel carries out today, history is witness to many bloody attempts to forge homogenized nations. Nazi gas chambers were the most dastardly consequence of this project.
But in India our founding parents and freedom fighters chose a different path. They designed our collective life in a way that the state gave room for everyone, despite their diversity, to live together and thrive.
But ideologies in India that draw their inspiration from the inhumane European concept of nation-owned state want our Republic too to be turned into a state, owned by one nation – the Hindu nation. The present dispensation belongs to that ideological stable. In its conception of a Republic, the ‘others’ needed to be assimilated to the point of obliterating their respective identities, pushed out of the territory of the nation-state, or exterminated through genocide.
Remember, the ideological formulation articulated by the current ruling dispensation a few years ago? It said that there are three ways to deal with the minorities: Tiraskar (Rejection), Puraskar (Appeasement), Samskar (Reform and assimilation).
Initially when the country’s secular consensus was strong, it said that it was not practical to reject a large minority. So Tiraskar was ruled out then. But at the same time, it said, that appeasement or Puraskar was not an ideal option. It wanted to work on the gradual assimilation of minorities, Samskar, into the Hindu fold to the extent that their religious identity and other markers are completely obliterated. You may have heard, expressions from some majoritarians, like, ‘that individual is a Christian, but a good person; that person is a Muslim, but a good individual.’ Meaning, despite being a Christian or a Muslim, ‘they are like us and therefore, tolerable and acceptable.’ That is the harmless looking beginning to the formulation that others had to become ‘tolerable’ and ‘acceptable’ to earn their right to be part of India.
After a few years of unsuccessful dabbling in that experiment, the current dispensation’s ideology finally brought back the initially discarded option on to the top of its political agenda: Rejection, Tiraskar. With the weakening of the secular consensus, or even its breakdown, Rejection has now morphed into Ejection. Ejection from the country’s political society.
Remember, what Shri LK Advani used to say with reference to Muslim minority? He said, ‘with you, without you, in spite of you’. Meaning, ‘if they come along, with them; if they don’t, without them; and if they oppose, in spite of them’ That is a pointer to exclusion of minorities if they do not play along and assimilate or accept an unequal and subordinate place in the country’s political, economic and social life. Lynchings, bulldozing of houses, vandalizing churches on Christmas Eve are physical expressions of these formulations.
Today, look at the political reality in our country. For the first time in the history of independent India, the union council of ministers has no representative from either the Muslim or the Christian minority community. A few weeks ago, even the token presence of a Christian minority presence in the union ministry was dispensed with. The ministry is now composed exclusively of persons from the so-called Indic religions. The task of exclusion in the domain of political representation in the executive is more or less accomplished.
But what could be done about the political society? In the present-day India, both the pushing out and physical extermination of unassimilated minorities are politically impractical.
However, extermination of a political kind of the others is possible.
Instead of exterminating the citizen, citizenship could be exterminated. The ongoing SIR is the weapon forged for that kind of extermination. It exterminates citizenship of those unwanted, impure elements by exterminating their franchise. It is clear that without franchise, citizenship is hollow, without substance. Disenfranchisement hollows out citizenship.
Therefore, SIR is nothing but a bloodless political genocide. It exterminates citizenship, pushes people out of the political society, makes people stateless even as they continue to live within the borders of the Indian state. What CAA-NRC could not do, SIR is tasked to accomplish.
The idea of India as a state-nation (in contradistinction to a nation-state) that is home to diverse peoples, cultures, languages and religions is being dismantled at a fiendish pace.
Stan Swamy’s words once again
This is the place where we need to recall the key words that I listed out from the statement made by Father Stan Swamy just before he was taken into custody on 8 October 2020.
Let me utter those words once again here:
Adivasis; Dalits; the marginalised; ruling powers; struggle for a life of dignity and self-respect; dissent; solidarity; Indian Constitution; validity; legality; justness; deshdrohi; silent spectator; pay the price; face the consequences.
Many studies have already clearly established that it is the Adivasis, the Dalits, the marginalized sections and specifically women among them who are being systematically targeted for deletion in the ongoing process of SIR.
Father Stan Swamy would have stood for them.
Today many in both the rural and urban India are battling for a life of dignity and self-respect.
Father Stan Swamy would have helped them wage their battles.
He would have given them the much-needed solidarity.
Our country’s social compact of secularism, plurality, federalism, diversity, justice, fraternity, equality and liberty are in mortal danger today.
Fr Stan Swamy would not have been a silent spectator in the face of an onslaught on these core values of our Constitution.
He would have risked being called a Deshdrohi and spoken out for them.
He was already called that. He would not have minded being called a Deshdrohi a thousand times over, and pay the price, if he were to express his dissent and face the consequences.
Whatever they might be.
I am sure, he would want us to do that.
Father Stan Swamy did not make noise. He was quietly working in the remote and neglected parts of the country.
The current dispensation was afraid of a frail, unwell, octogenarian.
That is because he personified all the values that are needed for our country, that are dear to us but are inimical to the project of the powers that be in Delhi.
Thank you for your attention.
Related:
Did Indian Democracy fail Father Stan Swamy?
To a living Saint, now dead five years: Meeting to commemorate July 5