By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi, March 5, 2020: The leaders of more than 4,000 Jesuits in India have demanded immediate withdrawal of controversial moves on a process to determine citizenship in the country and called for initiating dialogue with all concerned.
Attempts to appropriate “nationhood and religion” for majoritarianism, supported by hate speeches and divisive politics, would lead to inconceivable consequences for the body politic, warn the Jesuit major superiors, who met February 23-29 at Godavari in Kathmandu.
The members of Jesuit Conference of South Asia urged the Indian government to immediately withdraw what they called the hastily enacted discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Population Register (NPR) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). Instead, they want the government to initiate a process of dialogue with all concerned.
The conference has issued a Godavari Statement where they have expressed anguish over the recent sectarian violence triggered by CAA in the Indian national capital that claimed at least 47 lives and wounded hundreds. “Many more are now made homeless with huge property losses,” they noted with dismay.
They also termed as deplorable “the apparent complicity” of the police forces in the violence and “the inexplicable postponement of legal procedures for four weeks.”
The Jesuit leaders say the anti-CAA movement would “sustain itself as long as it remains non-violent yet courageous, resistant yet listening, audacious yet non-divisive, fearless yet compassionate.”
They have invited all concerned citizens to start a process to bring reconciliation among people and religions.
For this, they want their own members and institutions to undertake a serious study and research on the ramifications of the CAA and NRC “for the conception of nation, citizenship and the Indian Constitution.
The Jesuit provincials urged their men and others to join peaceful protest movements opposing CAA-NPR-NRC “whenever and wherever possible.”
They also want these groups in Delhi to support the rescue and relief work in areas affected by the recent sectarian violence.
The Jesuit leaders have pledged to protect the integrity of the Indian Constitution and to preserve the ethos of “our nation” that has shaped by “the founding fathers and mothers of our motherland after prolonged struggles and sacrifices for independence, and has been nourished by sages and saints of many religions from time immemorial.”
“Now is the moment of reckoning for India to reassert its soul of diversity, variety and the eternal quest for the Ultimate,” asserted the Godavari Statement signed by Father George Pattery, president of the Jesuit Conference of South Asia.
The anti-CAA movement began after President Ram Nath Kovind signed the CAA, passed earlier by the two houses of the Indian parliament.
The act makes provisions for granting citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian communities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, who entered India before 2014. However, it excludes Muslims, making many to suspect the act as the first move toward creating a Hindu theocratic state in India.