The journalist, mother and long-time human
rights activist Mari Marcel Thekaekara spoke of the Adivasi people of Gujarat: "Narmada
uprooted many thousands of Adivasis from verdant, productive lands. The dammed
Narmada water goes to rich farmers and far-away cities while the evicted Adivasis
languish on barren, parched land in miserable makeshift huts. Entire
communities have been destroyed. Who gives the State or corrupt politicians the
right to annihilate these people in order to make life more comfortable for a
select elite? Who decides it is the
common good when farmers are thrown off their land for wealthy people to get a
second luxury home...? Where Adivasis struggle for drinking water, while rich
city kids splash in swimming pools all through a scorching summer on land that
was once adivasi, how is this right or just?"
Her concern is also for the
Dalits:
"Dalits continue to die every day, drowning in liquid faeces in manholes
all over India. They are burnt, beaten, stripped, raped and humiliated for
daring to claim the minimal freedom the Constitution promised them sixty odd
years ago. They don’t just die. They are being murdered, either deliberately by
dominant castes, for daring to defy village diktats, or by the State which requires
men and boys to jump to their deaths into sewage pits, because their lives
count for nothing in our country. Dalit women are raped every day. It’s a fact
of life for them. And the dominant society refuses to be moved by the daily
humiliation and degradation meted out to Dalits."
Fr Xavier Manjooran SJ has worked
among the Dalits for 25 years and among Adivasis for the last 13 years. He
commented: "The problems affecting indigenous and other marginalized
communities are too large and the causes very complicated. The solution cannot
be found locally or just by ourselves." Fr Xavier added, “Every human has
the right to live with dignity as a child of God. It is the duty of every human
being to help others to live with dignity.”
Together with a
group of like-minded people, Fr Xavier has recently helped a group of young Adivasis
walk towards a future of hope. “It all began last year on
1 July 2013. A young enthusiastic batch (average age 19 years) of over 60
Adivasi
youth (including 15 women) began their Career
Development Training (CDT) Course at Rajpipla Social Service Society (RSSS)
in Narmada in Gujarat State. Their
objectives were clear. They were eager to learn English and Computer skills, Karate, Leadership
and Personality development, Socio-cultural analysis etc. This was the
beginning of a long eleven-month journey that culminated on 31 May 2013. There
were 285 days of hard work out of 320 total days… a herculean task achieved!”
Education is
the doorway to dignity and self-respect. Karate seems a strange subject to
include with English and computer skills, but it enables young people to keep
fit, develop self-confidence and also to defend themselves in an environment
where they are constantly exposed to brutality and oppression.
Career
Development Training is a completely new collaborative initiative to prepare Adivasi youth for a career beyond peasant
farming, giving them dignity and the possibility of standing up to the
multi-national companies which regularly take over Adivasi lands. “A new hope was born, a new fire of faith enkindled to empower
the participants to grow and to seek new frontiers and goals as trainees found
themselves able to say ‘I can’ and ‘We can’. The trainers said, ‘We are not teaching you: it is you who
are learning.’”
Offer an
education to a group of youngsters who have never had the opportunity to go to
school and the chances are that they have a hunger and eagerness to learn which
excel those of their counterparts in Britain, compelled by law to attend school
and for whom much, if not all, of their education is taxpayer-funded.
Education, if
it is to be worthy of respect, must benefit others. Not only were the Adivasi
youth given the opportunity of a new future: they were expected to offer
similar chances to others. As they studied English, the youngsters were also assigned
to a residential primary school deep in the Adivasi tribal lands, to teach English (and karate!) to 393 children. Some even spent a week teaching English to High School children.
Why is it important for us to
support the people in distant lands whom we are never likely to meet? Fr Xavier
comments: “It is these groups who are in touch with real life. By coming to
know and hear them, the inhuman world will become a bit more human. So in order
to be more human and to have a humane world, we need the poor to tell us what
life is and how one can live with zest and happiness with minimum use of
material things and minimum exploitation of nature.”
Of course, from
the very start of his pontificate, Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken of the
poor and marginalised. He saw the ‘no hopers’ of Buenos Aires and knows full
well that, in the midst of their hardship, there are human hearts longing to make
a difference to their own lives and those of others. He commented, "Today,
and it breaks my heart to say it, finding a homeless person who has died of
cold, is not news. Today, the news is filled with scandal. That is news, but
the many children who don't have food - that's not news. This is grave. We
can't rest easy while things are this way."
Perhaps, to the
world at large, a certificate which has local holds little value. However, to
someone who never expected to study, who never expected to hold a certificate
of any kind, that paper is a treasure.
The Adivasi
youngsters whom Fr Xavier helps are not an abstract concept. Pope Francis
declared: "Look, you can't speak of poverty without having experience with
the poor. You can't speak of poverty in the abstract: that doesn't exist.
Poverty is the flesh of the poor Jesus, in that child who is hungry, in the one
who is sick, in those unjust social structures. Go forward; look there upon the
flesh of Jesus. But don't let wellbeing rob you of hope, that spirit of wellbeing
that, in the end, leads you to becoming a nothing in life. Young people should
bet on their high ideals."
As youngsters
across the world wait expectantly for exam results, in some of the poorest
parts of India, Fr Xavier’s students have already received their certificate, a
piece of paper that makes all the difference in the world.
