Jesuit Father Stanislaus Lourduswamy’s arrest on the night of Oct. 8 has caused a stir in India, especially in the country’s central and eastern region where the 83-year-old has spent half a century relentlessly fighting for the rights and values of indigenous people.
The police allege the Jesuit priest is a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and was involved in a conspiracy to instigate caste violence in the Bhima Koregaon village near Pune in 2018.
To those of us who have known Father Swamy, these claims are absurd.
To stand up and fight for justice and truth, no matter what religion, culture, and ethnicity one belongs to: That is the mantra of Stanislaus Lourduswamy, popularly known as Stan Swamy. What matters most for him is to be humane in all his relationships.
Born on April 26, 1937, in a village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirappalli, Swamy went to the well-known St. Joseph’s School in the district. Inspired by the work of the Jesuit priests with whom he came in touch with during his school days, Swamy decided to join the order — but in undivided Bihar.
He started religious studies on May 30, 1957, committing himself totally to the cause of the marginalized and the poor.
The real breakthrough with regard to his ideas about social action came in 1965, when he began his regency, the stage at which trainee Jesuits spend one or two years taking up works of the order. Swamy spent this time at St. Xavier’s High School Lupungutu, Chaibasa, West Singhbhum, now in Jharkhand state.
His experiences as a teacher and hostel prefect had a deep impact on him. He used to go to the weekly bazaar in Chaibasa on Tuesday (the Mangal-haat) with his students and saw for himself how the outsider merchants and their agents cheated the Adivasis. “I felt pain but could not do anything about it,” he recalled.
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