Father Stan Swamy, an 83-year-old Jesuit priest, has been arrested and detained by India’s counterterrorism task force for “inciting caste-based violence.” Agents of the country’s National Investigative Agency showed up at his home in Jharkhand on October 8, escorted him to Mumbai, and remanded him into judicial custody.
Sadly, this is par for the course where Father Stan is concerned. He’s had his house raided twice in the last two years by security forces and, a few months ago, he was taken in for five days’ worth of questioning by the government. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party doesn’t take kindly to people who disrupt the country’s caste system.
For those who don’t know, the caste system is a 3,000-year-old Hindu theological idea, according to which people are grouped into five rigid and hierarchical social groups. Brahmins are the cream of the crop, followed by Kshatriyas, who together make up the country’s ruling classes. Vaishyas form the middle class, Shudras the laborers, and Dalits (literally “outcastes”) are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, mostly functioning as street sweepers, latrine cleaners, and the like. Caste is fixed at birth, determined by actions undertaken in a past life. Consequently, there’s little room for social mobility.
Father Stan is clearly thought of as a menace to this system by the powers that be in India, and unsurprisingly so. Arrest and imprisonment are occupational hazards for anyone hewing to even the most basic commandments of the Christian faith in a regime like this. After all, Jesus of Nazareth identified himself with “Dalits” throughout his ministry and even insisted that they had privileged access to God. The exaltation of such a man to the status of divinity would undermine the entire Hindu social order.
These fears on the part of the Bharatiya Janata Party are well-founded. The ascendency of Christianity thoroughly demolished the cosmic hierarchies of the classical Roman world, with which the caste system has a lot of its basic features in common. David Bentley Hart summarizes the theological-political architecture of pagan antiquity like this:
One could even say (to indulge in a very large generalization) that this was the sacred premise of the whole of Indo-European paganism: that the universe is an elaborate and complex regime, a hierarchy of power and eminence, atop which stood the Great God, and below whom, in a descending scale, stood a variety of subordinate orders, each holding a place dictated by divine necessity and fulfilling a cosmic function—greater and lesser gods and daemons, kings and nobles, priests and prophets, and so on, all the way down to slaves.
He also describes how the pagan rulers who sat atop this cosmic period greeted Christianity when it first appeared on the horizon of history:
Christians were—what could be more obvious?—enemies of society, impious, subversive, and irrational; and it was no more than civic prudence to detest them for refusing to honor the gods of their ancestors, for scorning the common good, and for advancing the grotesque and shameful claim that all gods and spirits had been made subject to a crucified criminal from Galilee—one who during his life had consorted with peasants and harlots, lepers and lunatics. This was far worse than mere irreverence; it was pure and misanthropic perversity; it was anarchy.
The same sentiments all these centuries later have been stirred up in the hearts of India’s rulers by men and women like Father Stan. When he stood before a judge on October 9 and said with arresting simplicity, “I dedicated my life to the development of my poor Adivasi sisters and brothers … I only wanted justice to be done to them as per the constitutional provisions and Supreme Court judgments,” he was greeted as a cosmic agitator. Now he finds himself behind bars, though still at the vanguard of a moral revolution. “My inmates are all from very poor families,” he wrote in a letter dated November 14. “Despite all odds, humanity is bubbling in Taloja Jail.”