Kolkata: We are distressed and troubled at the violation of human rights in the arrest of 83-year-old Father Stan Lourdu Swamy. He was arrested October 8 in Ranchi, taken to Mumbai the next day, and then sent to judicial custody at Taloja central jail in the city until October 23.

We express our deep concern over the arrest and demand his immediate release.

Father Stan’s is a member of the Jamshedpur province of the Society of Jesus. He is a veteran tribal rights activist who has worked for over five decades in Jharkhand, fighting for the rights of the Adivasi community. He was part of the Jharkhand Organisation against Uranium Radiation (JOAR), a campaign against Uranium Corporation India Limited in 1996.

The social worker was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) from his Ranchi residence. He was produced before the special court in Mumbai on October 9 which remanded the octogenarian to judicial custody in connection with the Elgar Parishad case that had alleged Maoist links.

The violence in Bhima Koregaon, a village near Pune, occurred in January 2018.

The Jesuit priest is the 16th person to be arrested in the case, in which people have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the anti-terror law UAPA.

Father Swamy, who was questioned twice earlier by Pune Police and the NIA, was taken from his Ranchi residence in a cloak-and-dagger operation, leaving the local police and the administration in the dark.

Rights activists from across the country have condemned his arrest. In Ranchi, activists held a solidarity march later to protest against his detention and Jharkhand’s Hemant Soren-led Government’s silence on the manner the priest was picked up.

In a video posted before his arrest, Swamy said, the NIA had been interrogating him and had questioned him for 15 hours for five days.

“Now they want me to go to Mumbai, which I have said that I won’t go,” he said, citing his advanced age and the pandemic.

“I have never been to Bhima Koregaon for which I am being made an accused,” he said. He added that he had asked for questioning through video conference and hoped that better “human sense” would prevail.

“…what is happening to me is not something unique happening to me alone, it is a broader process taking place all over the country. We all are aware of how prominent intellectuals, lawyers, writers, poets, activists, student leaders are put in jail because they have expressed their dissent or raised questions about the ruling powers of India,” Father Swamy said in the video.

He said he was part of the process and, in a way, happy to be so because he was not a “silent spectator.”

“I am ready to pay the price whatever be it,” he added.

NIA officials claimed that investigations have established that the Jesuit priest was actively involved in the activities of the CPI (Maoist). The NIA also alleged that he was in contact with conspirators–Sudhir Dhawale, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Hany Babu, Shoma Sen, Mahesh Raut, Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde to further the group’s activities.

The Bhima Koregaon case was taken over by the NIA on January 24 this year. The Pune Police have alleged that the violence was caused following speeches given by members of the Elgar Parishad on December 31, 2017, on the eve of the 200th anniversary of the Bhima Koregaon battle victory.

Father Swamy has often raised his voice against alleged police excesses in Jharkhand, and what he describes as the government’s failure to properly implement the fifth schedule of the Constitution in the state.

The fifth schedule stipulates that a ‘Tribes Advisory Council (TAC)’ composed solely of members from the Adivasi community advises governors of tribal-inhabited states on their well-being and development.

Father Swamy has claimed that none of the governors — the discretionary heads of these councils — has ever reached out to Adivasis to understand and work on their problems.

The priest has also taken exception to how the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act [PESA], 1996, has been “neatly ignored” and “deliberately… left unimplemented in all the nine states” with a tribal population.

The Act, according to him, was the first to recognize the fact that the Adivasi communities in India have had a rich social and cultural tradition of self-governance through the gram sabha (village council).

In 2017, Father Swamy mobilized the Adivasis to fight for the rights granted to them under PESA, and this led to the Pathalgadi movement. The priest and many others were booked for alleged sedition for the movement by Jharkhand’s previous BJP government, but the cases have been revoked under the current JMM-Congress dispensation.

Father Swamy has also been a vocal advocate for the release of under-trials. He says they have been unfairly lodged in jails and labeled Maoists. In 2010, he published a book about this, titled, ‘Jail Mein Band Qaidiyon ka Sach (The truth of undertrials).’

In the book, he states that the family income of the youths arrested was less than 5,000 rupees in 97 percent of the cases, and they could not afford lawyers to represent them. He claimed 98 percent of those arrested were falsely implicated and had no links to the Naxal (Maoist) Movement.

Father Swamy has also sought to represent those who are yet to get rights to land under the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, which seeks to recognize forest-dwelling communities’ claim to the land they have inhabited for generations.

He wrote in 2018 that, between 2006 and 2011, about 3 million applications for title deeds were made under the FRA all over the country, of which 1.1 million were approved and 1.4 million rejected, while 500,000 remain pending.

In a September 2018 interview to Caravan magazine, he alleged that those who raised questions were being termed anti-national.

“If you take up these issues, these are the things you have to face. The mahaul (current environment) in Jharkhand, adjoining states, and the country is that if you raise questions and find facts, you are anti-development. If you are anti-development, you are anti-government. If you are anti-government, you are anti-national. That is the logic being followed here,” he said.

Father Swamy has appealed to Indian people to fight a worrying trend that undermines the nation’s fundamental principles of socialism, secularism and democracy.

This is the right time all of us to stand together for Stan and demand his immediate release with a hope that we shall overcome.

(Jesuit Father J Felix Raj is the vice chancellor of St Xavier’s University, Kolkata.)