Step Up

Talk on Creative Evening 2013

Readings: Isaiah 58: 6-10; Mark 11:15-18

I realize that the brutal gang-rape incident which occurred in December is on the top of everyone’s mind, and that you are expecting me to speak about it. I will, in just a while.

But before I come to that, I want to share with you something about living as followers of Jesus, some things that I have learnt over the years. Jesus said- I am the truth, the light and the way. Today, I want to focus on the first part, and within that, on our role as followers of Jesus, in spreading the truth, in speaking the truth, and in standing up for the truth.

Recently I read three rather chilling books which gave an insight into the mechanics of totalitarianism. You might be familiar with George Orwell’s ‘1984’. The other was a book on the Warsaw Uprising in a Jewish ghetto during the second World War, when Poland was occupied by Nazis. The third is a graphic novel called ‘Palestine’ by Joe Sacco, which describes life in the occupied territories of Palestine.

One thing that struck me is the use of untruth, or the obfuscation of truth, doublespeak, to advance the regime. So in 1984, the INGSOC headed by a non-existent Big Brother has three slogans- War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.

Nazi rule in Poland and other parts of Europe used a lot of doublespeak. Concentration camps were referred to as ‘labour camps’; gas chambers were referred to as ‘sanitation areas’ and the extermination of Jews was called ‘dispensation of special treatment’. In fact, Jews, and the other discards from Aryan society, such as gay people, disabled, communists, etc. were referred to as ‘sub-humans’.

But both these are in the realm of imagination and history. Palestine, on the other hand, describes a perversion of truth which is happening now; occupying Israeli forces have driven the Palestinians into a life of fear and insecurity and hopelessness, inside resettlement camps which are little better than slums. The Israelis assert their right over these territories, based on the promise of God to Abraham in the Old Testament. And based on that, their right to drive the people of Palestine to lives covered, literally, in mud.

Each of these regimes, one fictional, one historical, and one present, used doublespeak to confuse, hide, create illusions, but more importantly, to provide a veil to what they knew was wrong/ unjust/ evil. Thousands of people, including the Church itself, allowed these atrocities to continue, hiding behind these veils of untruth, in what is called “a conspiracy of silence”.

Maybe you are thinking, we live in a democratic country, we have a healthy 8% growth rate and a functioning judiciary and civil society, this “conspiracy of silence” business is not relevant for us.

You would be wrong. The same kinds of obfuscations continue to be very present around us today, the truth is veiled in layers of sophisticated explanations, and injustice on a massive scale continues today. For example, more than 50% of our population lives below the poverty line, even while the Planning Commission argues that Rs. 27 per person per day is sufficient for survival. 80 million tribals who live in forests face constant brutal attacks upon their lands and their culture and their lives because of massive mining and other industrial operations, often by foreign companies, and if they fight they are labeled naxalites and either killed or thrown into jail. Women are raped day in and day out while the world heaps the blame upon her—she was out with her boyfriend at night, she was wearing revealing clothes, she did not recite the Gayatri mantra, she was asking for it…..The conviction rate for rape is an unbelievable 26%, which means that 74% of women who manage to file FIRs about their rapes are dismissed as liars! Dalits, construction workers, people with HIV/ AIDS, drug addicts, face all manner of discrimination and hate crimes every day. And if we go beyond our borders, we see political unrest of a different proportion, starvation, violence.

Why are these things continuing? I think one of the key reasons is obfuscation of truth, doublespeak, where ruling elites make all kinds of excuses for the oppression they mete out on those less fortunate than themselves. As a lawyer, the framework of the legal system very often confronts me with the reality that these untruths, through judicial fiat, become the truth. As students, doctors, economists, sociologists, teachers, we are all confronted with situations where untruths are held out as truth, and barefaced lies cover up any manner of unacceptable behavior.
A little over a month ago, we celebrated Christmas, decorating our homes, enjoying food and parties and carol singing, making nativity scenes, celebrating the birth of Baby Jesus. Yes, it’s great, we must celebrate the birth of our Lord. But let us not forget that our Lord is 2000 years old. 2012 years old this December, to be precise. He is a living Lord, and fortunately for all of us, he remained a baby very briefly, he grew up. When we are children, our parents tell us we should be ‘mild obedient good as he’. Let’s look at the grown up Jesus—now this is a hard act to follow!!! In the Philippines, there is a cult that worships the Baby Jesus, and refuses to allow him to grow up. A baby is sweet and soft and tender and easy to manipulate.

Not so the Jesus we meet in the passage from Mark read earlier today. I’d like you to imagine this scene for a minute, just take a look at this man. He’s clearly quite emotional during this time. Just outside the gates of Jerusalem, he saw a fig tree without fruit and cursed it, causing it to wither and die. He stood on a hill looking over Jerusalem and wept, one of only two occasions the New Testament records him weeping. Then he shows up at the Temple and creates a right old scene. I know I am stepping into a theological minefield here, and must restrain myself from saying something which may be unscriptural. The only thing I want to point to is that this is a Jesus who is furious, at the way in which his Father’s Temple has been desecrated, defiled, and he speaks out, he acts out, he makes his anger known.

Throughout the New Testament we see glimpses of this angry man. He calls the Pharisees and the Sadducees “you hypocrites” to their faces. This Jesus is not a “mild obedient” person. And perhaps the picture is too unpleasant for us to focus on. But I urge you to look at this picture of an angry Jesus a little closely with me. At these times, he is revealing to us the pain he feels when he sees injustice, exclusion, and obfuscation of the truth. Always, he is speaking out for someone who has been trampled upon, who has been left to rot in pain alone, who has been left out of the inner circle, and at the whole charade of explanations and excuses that support such unsupportable behavior. In this Jesus we see the heart of God, which is grieved by injustice and oppression of the people he loves.
And this means all people. Jesus came for “all the world”. The Bible says- for God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish…. No-one is excluded from his heart, from the pain he feels when he sees injustice.

Now I can see some of you saying to yourselves- we are not people without compassion, not at all. When our own are hurt/ attacked/ oppressed, we are quick to respond. But all too often, we are moved only to help ‘people like us’, and this definition can get narrower and narrower—from people who are Christians, to Christians of our denomination, to Christians of our class and background, to our own Church, to our group of friends in our Church, to our immediate family.

Narrowing down our sphere of compassion is not Biblical, this I can say without fearing any theological blunder. Look at Jesus’ life. He spends his time helping and reaching out to prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans, adulterers, diseased, broken people, fishermen, shepherds, the discards of society are his beloved. Not only does he heal them, he restores them by speaking out for them, demolishing the doublespeak of the religious elites which had permitted their oppression in the first place. Eventually, this kind of behavior got him killed, as he knew it would. But he did not let that stop him from stepping up to speak the truth, from being the voice that made a difference.
Today, we are called to follow his footsteps. Be that voice that makes a difference. All round us, we see untruth, doublespeak, obfuscation. I will give you two examples from my court cases.

1. Manual scavengers- while the practice continues unabated across the country, and the people who use them hide behind the lie that these are sub-humans, or have through their bad Karma been born to a life of manual scavenging. This process of invisibalisation infected also the judiciary and the administration, which refused to believe, and therefore refused to act. The Indian Railways, which is the largest employer of manual scavengers in the country, engaging thousands of lower caste people to clean shit from the railway tracks, till today denies their existence, and thereby denies them access to even the miniscule schemes for rehabilitation which the government has provided. It has taken many, many tough encounters with many judges, one of them a Chief Justice of India, himself a dalit, where I had to keep on pushing the Court to look at these soul-defying pictures, look at the faces of these brutalized people, this is wrong, stop it. After 10 years, slowly the tide is turning.
2. Encounter killings in Gujarat- Ishrat Jahan, a nineteen year old girl, sole breadwinner of her family, deeply loved and looked up to by her younger siblings. Shot like a dog, probably tortured by policemen in a farmhouse by police thugs before that. What did they say? That she’s a Muslim, a terrorist, she had an illicit relationship with her colleague, she came to kill the Chief Minister, that she and the others attacked the police and were shot in self defence— 7 bullet injuries on her body alone, not a single injury on a policeman. For years we struggled to break this web of lies. Eventually it took one unsung Magistrate who wrote a report stating- she was shot at close range, the forensic evidence shows this. Somewhere, one unnamed lab assistant wrote an honest report regarding the size of the entry wound. He spoke the truth.

We don’t have time to get into more examples, but it is my experience that whenever evil is committed, there is a cover-up. Nobody says ‘I killed this man in cold blood’, or ‘I raped this woman’, or ‘I made this dalit lift my shit’. Everyone hides behind excuses, veils. This itself means that when we lift these veils, when we uncover these untruths, when we straighten out the obfuscation, it makes a difference. This is why your voice against injustice is important.
This can be done in many ways, it is not necessary to be a firebrand, tilting-at-windmills type. You can speak through your life, through the choices you make, through the people you love and spend time with, through your work, there are so many ways.

When the Warsaw ghetto was burning, set fire to by Nazi bombers even while 40,000 Jews were still living there, what was the Christian population of Poland doing? They were celebrating Easter. I am sorry to say, this fills me with great shame and anger. In the passage we heard earlier from Isaiah, God deprecates this very thing. Turning up in church with a pious expression on our faces, showing everyone how holy we are, this is not what God is asking of us. Instead, he says, offer me this kind of fasting- where you loosen the chains of the slave and free the oppressed from injustice. Clearly, he is not asking us only to free the chains of ‘people like us’, but of the people who are not like us, whom he loves just as much.

Today, many of you are agitated about the gang-rape incident. Some of you have gone for the demonstrations, maybe made submissions before the Verma Committee. But I want to ask you a difficult question now. Do you know that when she regained consciousness for the first time, she asked her mother to tell her friends that she is “out of town”; she did not want them to know that she had been raped. This heartbreaking request captures in a single capsule the web of lies and untruths and patriarchal conditioning which subsumes the crime of rape.

This world is filled with lies, untruths, obfuscations and rationalizations.

As followers of Christ, we are called to separate from this world, and therefore separate from the untruth that surrounds us. But we are also called into this world, to speak out, step up, and make a difference. It’s a war out there, and God is calling each and every one of you to be a warrior for him in this war.
Right. So let’s get those guns and lathis and our best artillery of hurtful words, and get going. Right?
Wrong.

At this point, I would like to shift gears, and share with you something I have learnt the hard way in a life spent speaking out against injustice. I have learnt that the one I follow, the one you follow, Jesus, is a God of love. And therefore all our actions, thoughts, strivings, yearnings, must bow down before his ultimate purpose- love.
Now that is sudden track change for a talk that has been focusing on injustice and untruth. But don’t be surprised. Think back to the picture I drew for you earlier of an angry Jesus. He is angry because he loves. And his anger is always, completely and utterly, steeped in love.

Bob Pierce, a missionary, said these beautiful words: “Let my heart be broken for the things that break the heart of God.” Our God of love is angered because of the great love he has for us, and we must strive to understand and connect with his love and pain. Listen to God’s heart, it is a heart of justice, and he’s hurting. Indeed, when we draw close to God’s heart, we will be encouraged and strengthened to speak out against the injustices suffered by all people, because of love.

The Bible reminds us of this again and again. Be angry, but do not sin in anger. The Lord says, vengeance is mine. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Hate the sin, not the sinner. These are not mere platitudes. An eye for an eye does, in fact, make the whole world blind, and we are not fighting for new world full of blind people!!
In my experience the foundation of love is pivotal in the fight against injustice. Now this is a completely counter-cultural approach and it can be very hard. Therefore, even as we seek transparency and integrity in public life, and punishment for those who have betrayed our laws and our Constitution, we must struggle for better prison conditions. And even as we strive for an end to economic oppression of the poor and disadvantaged by the dominant classes, we must search for ways in which the oppressors can be redeemed. And even as we call for strict punishment for rapists, we must oppose the death penalty, chemical castration, and other brutal punishments.

In conclusion, I would like to share with you a quote from a book “Plan Be’ by Dave Andrews:

“Every act of truth is a victory over lies. Every act of love is a victory over hatred. Every act of justice is a victory over brutality. Every act of peace is a victory over bloodshed. And every risk a person takes to make a stand, no matter how small it may be, is a victory in the battle to build a better world.”

And finally, I would like to bless you with this Franciscan benediction from the 14th century:

“May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships,
So that you may live deep within your heart.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done,
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.”

Thank you, and God bless you all.

Shomona Khanna
Shomona Khanna is a lawyer practicing in the Supreme Court of India and Delhi High Court, associated with numerous civil and democratic rights issues since 1991 both as a lawyer and as a writer, and continue to handle several human rights cases in the courts. She has most recently written a book about indigenous peoples and the Indian Constitution and law. She is a member of the Naga Christian Fellowship, Delhi. Some of her clients include Campaign for Survival and Dignity (a federation of peoples organisations of forest dwellers), Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Plachimada Solifarity Committee, and many ordinary people.