Can the Government Take Away My Indian Citizenship?

 

CONSCIENCE AT CROSSROADS

Can the Government Take Away My Indian Citizenship?

Understanding the Law Behind the Fear

Savio Saldanha SJ

28-06-2026

DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.21010403

 

"If Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship, and even a passport is not considered conclusive proof, then how do I prove that I am an Indian citizen?"

            This question is being asked quietly across the country right now. In June 2026, the Ministry of External Affairs clarified that a passport is a travel document, not a legal certificate of citizenship. This came soon after the Supreme Court, while hearing matters connected to the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls, observed that Aadhaar is also not conclusive proof of citizenship. For most people, these were the only documents they had ever needed. Learning that neither one settles the question of “Are you Indian?” understandably feels unsettling.

            I will not pretend that there is nothing to think about. There is. But I shall attempt to respond to it in a manner that will not feed panic either. My aim for this article is simple: explain what the law actually says, and offer a steadier way to think and act when the subject itself makes people afraid.

1. Who Is an Indian Citizen?

            Citizenship is a legal status, not just a feeling of belonging. It is defined by the Constitution of India and a law called the Citizenship Act, 1955. The law sets out five ways a person becomes a citizen: by birth, by descent, by registration, by naturalisation, or by the incorporation of new territory into India. Most Indians fall into the first category — citizenship by birth — which is the focus of this article.

2. Citizenship by Birth: Why Your Date of Birth Matters

If you were born...	The rule that applies to you
26 January 1950 – 30 June 1987	Citizen by birth, simply by being born in India (a few narrow exceptions, such as children of foreign diplomats)
1 July 1987 – 2 December 2004	Citizen by birth only if at least one parent was an Indian citizen at the time of birth
On or after 3 December 2004	Citizen by birth only if one parent was Indian and the other was not an illegal migrant

            The rules became more detailed over time because the Parliament wanted to stop illegal migration from automatically creating citizenship for the next generation. If you were born in India before 1 July 1987, the law is on your side in the simplest way possible: you do not need to prove anything about your parents at all.

3. What Documents Actually Prove Citizenship?

India does not issue one universal “citizenship card” to every citizen. This surprises many people, but it is true. Recent statements have simply made the legal position explicit:

•         Aadhaar proves identity and residence, not citizenship. It can be issued to non-citizens too.

•    A passport is issued only to citizens and is strong evidence, but it is not treated as final, unchallengeable proof.

•         PAN cards and driving licences say nothing about nationality.

•    Voter ID proves you are registered to vote. By law, only citizens may be registered — but registration is a light-touch process (a household visit, a form, basic supporting ID), not a full citizenship check. That gap is exactly why errors creep into voter rolls, and exactly why correction drives like SIR exist. Because of this, a Voter ID is good supporting evidence, but the law does not treat it as the final, unchallengeable word on citizenship.

            So what actually counts? In practice, authorities look at the complete picture: your birth certificate (usually the strongest single document), school records, passport, Aadhaar, Voter ID, and other long-standing government records, taken together. No single paper is the whole answer. A consistent trail built up over years is what makes a citizenship claim strong.

4. Why Are People Afraid Right Now?

            Three real things have come together. First, recent government clarifications about Aadhaar and passports were technically accurate but landed on the public with little context, after a lifetime of treating these documents as good enough. Second, the SIR exercise — a large voter-list verification drive that began in Bihar in 2025 and has since expanded to many states — has removed names that officials could not verify, even though the Supreme Court ruled in May 2026 that being excluded from a voter list is not the same as being declared a non-citizen. Third, this process has affected some communities more visibly than others — particularly in border states, and among people who, due to poverty or migration history, have a thinner paper trail. This worry is genuine and deserves to be taken seriously, not waved away, even as the next section explains what the law does, and does not, actually allow.

5. Can the Government or a Court Simply Cancel My Citizenship?

            Long before India existed as a republic, philosophers were already asking a related question: what protects a person when there is no organised power to enforce their rights at all? In 1651, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave one of history's most famous answers, in his book Leviathan. Hobbes argued that without any government, people live in what he called a “state of nature” — a condition with no laws, no enforced rights, and constant insecurity, where life is, in his own words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” His solution was the social contract: people agree to give a sovereign authority real power over them, in exchange for protection, order, and the very existence of rights and laws. Before that agreement, Hobbes said, nothing is truly “yours” — not even your safety. Afterward, the state is what makes “citizen,” “right,” and “law” mean anything at all. This is a useful way to understand citizenship itself. It is not simply a feeling — it is a status the state creates and is supposed to protect. That is exactly the kind of thing Hobbes was describing.

            But Hobbes also believed the sovereign needed almost total, unchecked power to keep that order — and this is where his idea becomes a warning rather than a comfort. Critics, starting in his own lifetime, pointed out that this reasoning could justify a government with no real limits on its power over its own people, including the power to decide, without question, who belongs and who doesn't. Hobbes himself wrote a blunt line worth remembering here: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” His point was that a promise written on paper means nothing unless real power stands behind it to enforce it.

            Indian law took Hobbes's insight about enforcement seriously, while firmly rejecting his comfort with unlimited power. The “sword” that stands behind a citizen's protection in India is not the unchecked will of the government — it is due process. Under Section 10 of the Citizenship Act, the government's power to actively cancel (“deprive”) someone of citizenship is narrow: it applies only to people who became citizens through naturalisation, through registration, or through one very specific constitutional clause — not to the large majority of Indians, who are citizens by birth or descent. Even within that narrow group, the law requires written notice, a clearly stated reason, and — in most cases — a hearing before a Committee of Inquiry led by someone with at least ten years of judicial experience. This is the corrective that Hobbes's own critics asked for: a sovereign that is bound by its own rules, rather than one whose will alone decides who belongs.

            The Supreme Court's 2026 ruling on the SIR exercise reflects exactly this principle. Election officials, the Court said, can decide who appears on a voter list — but that decision is not, and cannot be, a final ruling on a person's citizenship. If citizenship genuinely needs to be determined, that must happen through the Citizenship Act's own process, with notice and a chance to respond — not through an electoral roll.

            To be fair to the real concerns in Section 4: this does not mean disputes never arise, or that the process is always smooth, fast, or evenly experienced by everyone. People with weaker paper trails can find these inquiries slow and stressful. That is a genuine, serious concern. But it exists alongside, not instead of, the legal protections described above. What the law clearly does not allow is for a citizen by birth to be declared a foreigner without notice, without evidence, and without a chance to respond.

            Hobbes's framework explains why a state may hold this kind of power at all — why citizens accept that it can demand documents, run verification drives, and define categories like “citizen” in the first place. But Hobbes has a well-known blind spot: he offers almost no answer to what happens when the power-holder breaks its own promises. He was deeply suspicious of any right to resist a sovereign, fearing it would tip society back into the chaos he spent his book describing. His one real exception was narrow and personal — if the sovereign directly threatened your life, your right to self-preservation never actually left you, so you could resist that one act. That is a right to dodge an executioner, not a right to contest a policy or seek redress through an institution. This gap is not just an academic curiosity. It was tested, in real time, in West Bengal in 2026.

6. When the Safeguards Are Tested: A Case Study from West Bengal

            In 2025 and 2026, the Election Commission carried out the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in many states, including West Bengal, ahead of its April 2026 Assembly election. By the time the rolls were frozen, more than nine million names — roughly 12% of the state's electorate — had been removed. Most fell into the routine category every roll revision produces: voters who had died, moved, or been duplicated. But around three million fell into a newer, more contested category called “Under Adjudication,” covering people flagged for unexplained “logical discrepancies” in their documents.

            Independent data analyses by journalists and researchers found that this contested category landed unevenly. In several Muslim-majority and border-belt constituencies, deletions ran far higher than the local Muslim population share — in one constituency, over 95% of deleted names were Muslim, against a population that was roughly a quarter Muslim. Part of this appears to trace to an identifiable technical cause: automated “discrepancy” checks seem to have misfired on Urdu- and Arabic-origin names when transliterated into Bengali or English script, a flaw that could produce this kind of skew without anyone deliberately aiming for it. Whether the pattern reflects bias in design, a careless side-effect, or both, is genuinely disputed and is the subject of ongoing litigation — not a settled fact in either direction.

            What is well documented, independent of that dispute, is the human cost on the people running the exercise. Booth Level Officers — ordinary government school teachers and anganwadi workers, assigned this duty on top of their regular jobs — were asked to verify a year's worth of records in a matter of weeks. Multiple Indian and international news outlets documented named officers who died by suicide during the exercise, with notes that explicitly cited the Election Commission's pressure; one independent tally put the national death toll, across several states, at over thirty. This has been reported and mourned across the political spectrum, not claimed by only one side.

            An appeals process for deleted voters did exist on paper: nineteen special tribunals, online and offline forms, the right to be heard. In practice, voters described confusion about where to file an appeal, an undisclosed tribunal procedure, and a backlog one senior lawyer told the Supreme Court could take over four years to clear. Two days before the first phase of voting, only 139 of the roughly nine million deleted names nationwide had been restored.

            The BJP went on to win the West Bengal election in a landslide, ending the Trinamool Congress's fifteen-year hold on the state. Lawyers for the opposition have argued before the Supreme Court that, in at least 31 constituencies, the number of disputed deletions exceeded the margin of victory — a serious claim. The Court has treated the question of whether deletions actually changed the result as a separate matter requiring its own evidence, and has not ruled on it. The Election Commission's own counsel has urged the Court not to speculate about why people voted the way they did. So: a documented numerical overlap exists. A proven causal link does not — at least not yet.

            This is precisely the situation Hobbes has no real tools for. If a citizen genuinely believes the sovereign has broken its side of the bargain — used its power to exclude rather than protect — Hobbes offers them almost nothing beyond hoping the next sovereign behaves better. Something more is needed. That something arrived, philosophically, about forty years after Hobbes.

7. Locke's Answer: A Government on Trial, Not Just on Top

            John Locke, writing in the late seventeenth century, accepted Hobbes's basic premise — that people leave a chaotic “state of nature” by forming a government — but rejected his conclusion. For Locke, the agreement that creates government is conditional, not a one-way surrender. People hand over certain powers to a government, but not their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property, which exist before government and outside its gift. Government holds its power in trust, on behalf of the people. If it breaks that trust — if it turns its power against the very people it was meant to protect, without due process or accountability — Locke argued that the people retain the right to resist, to seek remedy, and ultimately, to “alter or abolish” that government.

            This is the idea modern constitutional democracies are actually built on, including India's. Hobbes explains why a state may hold power over something as personal as citizenship and voter rolls in the first place. Locke explains why that power has a leash, and what a citizen can do when the leash is tested. Both pieces are necessary to understand what happened in West Bengal; neither alone tells the whole story.

            In Locke's terms, here is what “resist and seek remedy” actually looks like inside India's constitutional machinery:

•         Article 32 lets any citizen go directly to the Supreme Court when a fundamental right is at stake. A public interest petition is currently before the Court on behalf of West Bengal voters, demanding transparency in the deletion data and disclosure of the tribunals' own procedures.

•         Article 226 gives the same power to High Courts. The Supreme Court has directed many individual West Bengal grievances to the Calcutta High Court rather than hearing each one itself.

•         Article 142, the Supreme Court's unusual “complete justice” power, was used here to bring in judges from Jharkhand and Odisha to help clear the appeals backlog, and to order supplementary voter rolls so voters cleared by the tribunals could still cast a ballot.

•         Election petitions are the standard statutory route to challenge a result itself, including on the ground that wrongful deletions changed the outcome. The Election Commission's own lawyers pointed petitioners toward exactly this remedy.

•         The basic structure doctrine holds that certain features of the Constitution, including free and fair elections and judicial review, cannot be removed even by a parliamentary supermajority. No government, however large its mandate, can simply legislate these protections away.

•         A free press and civil society surfaced the data in the first place. Without independent analysis and on-the-ground reporting, courts would have had far less evidence to act on at all.

            None of this guarantees a particular outcome. The tribunal backlog is real. The four-year estimate is real. The 139-out-of-nine-million figure is real. Locke's framework does not promise that institutions move quickly or perfectly — only that, unlike in Hobbes's system, the citizen is not left with nothing. The Supreme Court's own posture in this case is itself a small demonstration of the Lockean idea in motion: it upheld the SIR exercise as lawful in principle in May 2026, while separately and repeatedly intervening to correct how it was carried out — validating the power and policing its use, at the same time.

8. A Question of Conscience — and a Lesson in How Not to Decide

            Institutions like these take time, and time is exactly what fear does not respect. A tribunal appeal that may take years to resolve is small comfort to someone who is frightened today. This is where the personal question becomes as important as the constitutional one. Why does even the possibility of this uncertainty unsettle so many people so deeply? Because citizenship is tied to dignity and belonging, not just paperwork, and fear about it can spread further than the legal facts alone would justify.

            There is an old and very practical piece of wisdom that fits this moment well. In the sixteenth century, a teacher of spiritual reflection named Ignatius of Loyola described two opposite inner states: times of fear, restlessness, and inner darkness, which he called “desolation,” and times of calm, clarity, and steadiness, which he called “consolation.” His most famous piece of advice was blunt: never make an important decision, or change an existing one, while you are in a state of desolation. Wait until your mind is calm and clear, and only then decide. Modern decision research says something similar in plainer language: people make their worst choices in “hot,” emotional states, and their best choices once they have cooled down enough to think clearly.

            This rule fits the present moment almost exactly. A person frightened about their citizenship status is, in plain terms, in exactly the state where people make their worst decisions — destroying genuine documents out of panic, paying a tout for a fake “quick fix” paper, signing an unfamiliar form without understanding it, or making a drastic, rushed decision about where to live. None of these actions protect a person. Several of them can make a real, ordinary case look far worse than it is.

            This is, fittingly, a question of conscience at a crossroads — which is exactly what this blog is named for. The wisest step at a crossroads is rarely the fastest one. Pause. Gather your documents. Talk to someone trustworthy — a lawyer, a recognised legal aid clinic, a community elder who has dealt with this before. Decide what to do, if anything, only once your mind is calm and you have real information in front of you.

            A democratic society carries a matching responsibility. It can verify voter rolls and citizenship status without manufacturing unnecessary fear in millions of lawful citizens. Equal treatment before the law is not just a phrase in the Constitution — it is what allows people to trust that a verification drive is about accuracy, not about exclusion.

Conclusion: What You Should Actually Do

1.   Find and preserve your birth certificate. If you don't have one, apply for it now through your local municipal or panchayat office — it is the single strongest document for citizenship by birth. In case you were born after 30^th July 1987, try and get the birth certificates of your parents as well and keep these on record.

2.   Keep certified copies and digital scans of your key documents, stored safely in more than one place.

3.   Build a paper trail over time. School records, old ration cards, and land documents all add weight later.

4.  Get your facts from reliable sources — government notifications, court judgments, established news organisations — not rumours or forwarded messages.

5.   If you are ever asked to verify your status, respond within the given time, keep records of every notice and reply, and get help from a lawyer or legal aid service if the process becomes complicated.

6.   If your name is removed from a voter list, use the appeals process (Forms 6, 6A, or 7, and the tribunal route) rather than assuming the worst, and keep a dated record of every submission — it is what makes escalation to a High Court or the Supreme Court possible later, if needed.

           And above all: do not let fear make your decisions for you. The law, as it stands, protects citizens by birth with real safeguards and requires due process before those protections can be touched — the kind of guardrail that history's critics of unchecked power have long argued every government needs. Your own decisions deserve a similar guardrail: calm before action, facts before fear. A frightened decision and an informed decision can look identical on the surface. Only one of them actually protects you. Informed, steady citizens — not frightened ones — are what keep a democracy honest.

Conscience at the Crossroads: From Nakusha to Priya — A Story of Reversal and Reclaiming the human dignity

 

Savio Saldanha

DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.20749131

Date: 18-06-2026

            A few years ago, I was a Jesuit novice teaching catechism in a small parish near Belgaum. It was the kind of class where you learn far more than you teach. One afternoon I was going around the room asking each child to tell me the meaning of her own name, expecting the usual answers — gift of God, light, little flower. One girl was very quiet. When I gently pressed, she said, almost as a fact of life and not a wound, “Nakusha.” We both knew it meant unwanted in Marathi.

            I did not know what to do with that silence. I had walked in to teach them that God loves them without condition, that they are precious in his eyes. But before I could say a word, her own name had already said something else. The Gospel I wanted to proclaim arrived a few seconds too late. Nakusha had already been spoken. That moment has stayed with me through my formation, and it has become the heart of my Jesuit vocation. I want to share it here, not as an academic exercise, nor for any credit, but as the question it actually is: what does the Church say to a child whose own name calls her unwanted?

A Campaign That Tried to Undo a Name

            Nakusha is a real name, given mostly in rural Maharashtra — my home state — to girls born when the family wanted a son. In October 2011, the district administration of Satara, working with local health officials and a girl-child welfare project, found close to 280 girls registered under this name or its variants (Dagadi, Dhondi — both meaning “stone”). They organised a public ceremony where the girls themselves, some as young as toddlers and some in their late teens, were invited to choose new names. Many chose names that meant the opposite of what they had been called: beloved, powerful, true. It was, by every account, a moving day, and it is still cited as a small but real victory for the dignity of the girl child in India.

            But a renaming ceremony, however beautiful, does not change the conditions that produced the first name. India’s sex ratio at birth has improved over the last decade through sustained public effort, yet it remains skewed below the natural ratio, and in Haryana — one of the states that had made the most visible progress — it actually slipped backward again in 2024. The economists Ashwini Deshpande and Apoorva Gupta published a 2020 study that still uses the word “Nakusha” as a working term, not a historical curiosity, to describe how son preference shapes which children get fed, schooled, and invested in. The name may now be rarer in official records. The reality it named has not gone away. This is why the question is not history for me. It is still happening.

            That is the question this reflection tries to answer, and it unfolds in five simple moves. First, Amoris Laetitia teaches that every child is loved without condition and that women and men share equal dignity as the image of God. Second, naming a girl “unwanted” inscribes rejection into her very identity — this is the wound. Third, the Bible already knows this pattern: in the Book of Hosea, God commands names of rejection upon Israel’s children, and then reverses them. Fourth, if God does this for an unfaithful people, the same logic applies with even greater force to an innocent child. Fifth, the Church’s response cannot stop at theology — it has to become a pastoral practice: naming, accompanying, and changing the conditions that produce the wound in the first place.

Amoris Laetitia

            Pope Francis’s 2016 exhortation on the family gives us three texts that matter here. In paragraphs 54–55, he insists that women possess full and equal dignity with men as bearers of God’s image, and he names outright the many forms of discrimination still directed at women and girls. In paragraph 166, he writes that children are loved by their parents even before they arrive — love that asks nothing in return, that is not conditioned on what the child can offer. And in paragraph 170, he says that every child has a place in God’s heart from eternity, quoting the prophet Jeremiah: before I formed you in the womb I knew you (Jer 1:5).

            None of this is new to Francis. It stands on ground the Church has held since the Second Vatican Council, which in Gaudium et Spes (no. 29) declared that any discrimination based on sex is contrary to God’s design, and on John Paul II’s 1988 letter Mulieris Dignitatem, which grounded women’s dignity explicitly in the creation account. What Amoris Laetitia adds is not a new doctrine but a pastoral instinct: it does not only proclaim that dignity, it asks how the Church walks with families where that dignity has been wounded. That, exactly, is what I am trying to do with the Nakusha question — and to see why, it helps to look honestly at what a name like this actually does to a child.

The Wound Goes Deep

            A name like Nakusha does not hurt only the feelings. It works at three levels. It wounds identity itself: the girl is not told she did something unwanted, she is told she is unwanted, from her very first day, the one word everyone will call her for the rest of her life. It wounds the capacity to receive love: if your first experience of family is conditional — I would have loved you if you had been a boy — it becomes harder, later, to believe in a love that asks nothing of you. And it wounds faith before faith can even begin: how do you tell a child that God loves her without condition, when her own parents — the first face of love she ever knew — named her by her unworthiness? The name gets there before the Gospel does. That was exactly what I watched happen in that catechism class.

            Scripture, it turns out, has met this exact wound before — not in Belgaum, but some twenty-eight centuries earlier, in the household of a prophet named Hosea.

Hosea: A Name Reversed

            The Old Testament prophet Hosea is asked by God to give his own children prophetic names: Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah (“not pitied”), Lo-Ammi (“not my people”). These names are a sign of Israel’s broken covenant — judgment spoken over an unfaithful nation. But the story does not end there. In chapter 2, God reverses the names: I will say to Not-My-People, You are my people (Hos 2:23). And in chapter 3, God commands Hosea to love his wife again, even after betrayal — a second act of love that refuses to let the first failure be final.

            I want to be precise about what this analogy is, and is not. It is structural, not moral. Israel deserved judgment for breaking the covenant; the Nakusha girl has done absolutely nothing wrong. I am not comparing her to an unfaithful nation, and I am not suggesting that God somehow permits or authors the wound of her naming so that a reversal can later happen. That would make God the author of cruelty, and nothing in the text says that. What the text does give us is a pattern: a name of rejection is spoken, and God refuses to let it be the last word. I want to be careful here, because reversal language can slide quietly into making the wound sound useful, as though the suffering was worth it for what came after. It was not, and it is not. The reversal does not give the wound a purpose; it simply refuses to let the wound have the final say over who this child is.

From the Lesser to the Greater

            This is where the logic, for me, becomes hard to escape. If God reverses the names of rejection spoken over a people who had genuinely broken faith with him, how much more readily — how much faster, how much more completely — will God restore the name and dignity of a child who is entirely innocent? Theologians call this reasoning a fortiori, “from the lesser to the greater”: what holds true in the harder case holds even more true in the easier one. Saint Paul uses exactly this logic in Romans: if we were reconciled to God while we were still his enemies, how much more, now that we are reconciled, will we be saved (Rom 5:10). The same logic applies here. If mercy reaches a faithless nation, it reaches an innocent child first, and more fully.

            This logic does not stop at birth. Amoris Laetitia 170, quoting Jeremiah, insists that God’s knowledge and love of a child precede even conception. So if God restores the name of a girl who was born and called unwanted, God certainly does not abandon the child who was never even allowed to be born because she was a girl. The same eternal love that the prophet describes — known before the womb — reaches her too.

Renaming, Accompaniment, and a Way Out

            None of this matters much if it stays on the page. So what would it actually look like, in an ordinary parish in Maharashtra, to put this logic into practice? A pastoral response has to begin where the wound is named, but it cannot stop at a beautiful ceremony. I propose a simple renaming rite — not a second baptism, but a blessing, in the spirit of the Church’s existing rituals of blessing a name. The community gathers, reads Hosea’s words of reversal, reads Jeremiah’s words about being known before birth, and says clearly to the child: we receive you, we name you Priya — beloved. I have suggested the name Priya deliberately. It is a word shared across Hindu, Christian, and Muslim communities in India, and it carries the same resonance as the Song of Songs, as Hosea’s restored mercy, as the voice at Jesus’ baptism: you are my beloved. The healing should come from the Holy Spirit working within the culture, in its own language, not as something imported from outside it.

            A ceremony like this can change what a community says over a child. It cannot, by itself, undo a habit built over years. In the actual 2011 campaign, one father was reported calling his newly renamed daughter by her old name a week later, simply out of habit, then catching himself with an awkward smile. That is not a failure of the rite. It is evidence that a name changes in a register long before it changes in the heart, and the second change takes much longer than an afternoon. The moral theologian Alain Thomasset, commenting on the same chapter of Amoris Laetitia that speaks of moral education, makes a point I find essential here: virtue is not learned by being told the rule once. It is learned the way you learn to play a sport well — not just knowing it is forbidden to foul, but acquiring, over time and within a community that practices it together, the taste and the habit of the good. Changing a culture of son preference will take the same patience: formation before marriage, accompaniment of mothers during pregnancy, and ongoing catechesis that keeps repeating, year after year, that a daughter is gift and not burden.

            I also want to be honest about what the parents in these situations are carrying — and that includes the mothers, who are very often under the same pressure their daughters will inherit. But it is worth saying clearly that women are not only the ones who carry this pressure; they are very often the ones who break it. The 2011 Satara campaign itself began at the suggestion of a local social activist, Sudha Kankaria, who pushed district officials to draw up the list of Nakusha girls in the first place. I do not think blame helps anyone here. Many of these families are not cruel; they are frightened. The fear of dowry, the shame a community attaches to “too many daughters,” the very real economic pressure of marrying off two or three girls — these are not invented anxieties. They are heavy and they are real. But naming that fear onto a newborn does not solve it; it only passes the weight from the parent’s shoulders onto the child’s identity, and the child carries it for life.

            The way out has to address both ends at once. On the spiritual side, this means the parish-level formation and renaming rite already described, accompaniment of both daughter and mother, and the conviction — taught patiently, not imposed in one sermon — that a girl’s worth has nothing to do with what she can be married off for. On the social and governmental side, this means real enforcement of laws already on the books: the Dowry Prohibition Act and the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which forbids sex determination before birth; it means making use of, and pushing local administrations to properly fund, schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and conditional savings programmes for the girl child, so that a daughter becomes a visible economic asset to her family rather than only a looming cost. None of these instruments has worked as well as it should. Enforcement of the sex-determination ban has loosened in several states even as the technology to evade it has become easier to access, and an early government audit of Beti Bachao Beti Padhao found that more than half its budget had gone to advertising rather than direct support for girls. Naming a law is not the same as enforcing it, and any pastoral advocacy worth doing has to keep pressing on that gap rather than simply pointing to the law’s existence. It also means dioceses and Catholic social bodies working alongside these government efforts rather than separately from them, the way the Church already collaborates with girl-child organisations in several Indian states. James’s letter puts the choice bluntly: if you say “go in peace” to someone in need and do nothing for their actual situation, what good is that (Jas 2:16)? A purely spiritual solution, without addressing the dowry and the poverty behind the fear, would be exactly that — words without help.

God Already Knew Her Name

            Even with all of this in place — the rite, the formation, the advocacy — it helps to step back and remember that none of it is actually new. Scripture had already settled the deeper question long before any ceremony tried to catch up to it. When God first brings the animals to Adam in the garden, the man’s naming of them is an act of relationship and care, not domination (Gen 2:19–20) — which tells us that naming carries real moral weight; it is never a neutral act. To the prophet Isaiah, God says of Israel: I have called you by name, you are mine (Is 43:1) — the divine name arrives before, and outlasts, any name a human being gives. To Jeremiah, God says that he knew him before he was formed in the womb (Jer 1:5) — the very verse Amoris Laetitia 170 borrows. And in the Book of Revelation, God promises the faithful a new name, known only to the one who receives it, a name that no human rejection can ever touch or cancel (Rev 2:17).

            Put together, these four texts say something simple and very large: every girl ever called Nakusha was already named by God before her parents ever spoke a word over her, already known before she was formed, and is already promised a name that will outlast every name of rejection she has carried. The renaming ceremony the Church can offer is not an invention. It is simply the community catching up, out loud, to what God has already done in silence.

 A Word on Discernment

            Ignatian spirituality has one more thing to offer here, and it is not a technique but a habit of attention. Ignatius taught that God is found in the concrete and the particular — in this child, this family’s fear, this community’s silence — not in abstract talk about “the problem of patriarchy.” Discernment begins by noticing what a name, a fear, or a decision actually does to the heart: does it bring consolation, an opening toward life and trust, or does it bring desolation, a closing in on shame and despair? For the parent paralysed by the cost of a dowry, real accompaniment does not minimise the fear — it helps distinguish the fear, which is legitimate and deserves a real answer, from the despair that turns a daughter’s name into a verdict. And for anyone trying to respond pastorally to this wound, the same discernment applies inward: is my response coming from love for this particular child, or from an urge to fix things quickly and move on? Ignatius would ask us to sit with that question before we act.

 Conclusion

            I did not write this because I needed an academic exercise to finish in Paris. I wrote it because of the one girl in a Belgaum classroom who, years ago, told me without flinching that their own names meant unwanted — and because nothing I have studied since has answered that sentence more simply than Hosea already did, nearly three thousand years earlier: rejection does not get the last word, not for an unfaithful nation, and certainly not for a child who did nothing but be born a girl. The Church does not need to invent that mercy, though it has not always spoken it loudly enough, or to everyone who needed to hear it. What it needs to do, starting now is say it out loud, in time, before the wound speaks louder than the Gospel does.

            I do not know if either of those girls was ever told, the way Maharashtra tried to tell 280 others in 2011, that she could choose a different name for herself. I hope someone has, by now. But more than that, I hope for a day when no girl, in India or anywhere, needs to be renamed at all — because no one ever called her unwanted to begin with. Until that day comes, the least the Church can do is keep saying, clearly and often: you are Priya. You always were.

 

Bibliography

Scripture

Hosea 1–3; Isaiah 43:1; Jeremiah 1:5; Genesis 1:27; Genesis 2:19–20; Galatians 3:28; Romans 5:10; James 2:16; Revelation 2:17.

 

Magisterial and Church documents

Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (19 March 2016), §§54–55, 166, 170.

Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965), §29.

Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem (1988).

Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1272, 2156.

 

Theological and academic sources

Alain Thomasset, SJ, “L’éducation morale comme apprentissage des vertus,” Revue d’Éthique et de Théologie Morale, 2019/HS, pp. 129–146.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (French ed., Après la vertu).

 

On the Nakusha naming practice and the 2011 Satara renaming campaign

“‘Nakusha’ campaign successful as 280 girls renamed in Maharashtra,” DNA India, October 2011.

“End ‘Nakusha’ campaign: Girls no more unwanted,” Zee News, 22 October 2011.

Freny Manecksha, “Renaming Nakusa,” India Together, 6 September 2011.

Ashwini Deshpande and Apoorva Gupta, “Nakusha? Son Preference, Resource Concentration and Gender Gaps in Education,” Working Paper, 2020, discussed in Ideas for India.

 

On sex ratio and government policy in India

Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, Women and Men in India reports; National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21; reporting on the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme and the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994; parliamentary and audit reporting on Beti Bachao Beti Padhao budget allocation; state-wise sex-ratio-at-birth data on the 2024 decline in Haryana.

 

Conscience at the Crossroads: Truth, War, and Moral Discernment

DOI- 10.5281/zenodo.19792370

                                                                                                                                                        Savio Saldanha SJ
 

        In times like these, conscience does not remain calm and undisturbed. It stands at the edge of history, listening to the noise of war, propaganda, and fear, and asking what truth still means when everything around us is being used, edited, repeated, and manipulated. I feel this deeply because the world today does not simply inform us; it presses itself upon us, often before we have time to think, pray, or even breathe.

            I have often wondered how a Christian, and especially a Jesuit, is meant to live in such a world. How do we remain faithful to compassion without being swept away by outrage? How do we speak truth without becoming cruel? How do we stay awake to suffering without losing interior freedom? These are not abstract questions for me. They are questions that arise in silence, after prayer, when the heart is still carrying the weight of the world.

            The other dilemma I face is voiced out by Hannah Arendt who in her collection of essays ‘Thinking without a banister’, says ‘What is most difficult is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it.’ As a Jesuit, I feel the weight of these words in my life. How can I go on joyfully with all this strife and hatred around me? How can I fulfill my vocation to love the oppressed without speaking against the oppressors? And am I supposed to take sides or remain in silence? If I am to remain in the world, I must do so honestly, without pretending that injustice is less real than it is. And yet honesty alone is not enough. The question remains: what kind of response does truth require?

            In this context, I found myself drawn to the witness of Pope Leo XIV. His public stand for peace, and his refusal to be dragged into the mudslinging of political spectacle, struck me as an important reminder that the Church must speak clearly without becoming partisan. He did not deny the moral gravity of unjust war. He simply refused to let truth be reduced to the tactics of the day. That witness mattered to me, because it suggested that moral courage and institutional restraint can coexist.

 Stoic Wisdom and Christian Freedom

            It may seem strange to turn to Stoic philosophy in such a moment, but Stoicism has something useful to say when the heart is overwhelmed. Epictetus teaches that we should distinguish between what is in our control and what is not. At first, this can sound cold, even unrealistic. I cannot simply switch off my sorrow when I hear of civilian deaths, nor should I. But Stoicism is not asking me to become numb. It is asking me not to become enslaved by what I cannot govern.

            Seneca’s language of the “first movements” helped me here. Shock, fear, anger, grief — these arrive before reflection. They are not shameful in themselves. The real moral question is what I do after the first wave passes. Do I allow the emotion to harden into despair, hatred, or paralysis? Or do I gather myself, pray, reflect, and decide what response is faithful to truth and charity?

            This is where the Serenity Prayer speaks with surprising force. There are things I cannot change, things I can change, and the wisdom lies in knowing the difference. For a Christian, this is never about retreating into emotional distance. It is about forming the heart so that it can act without being consumed.

 Reflection and Responsibility

            I have sometimes been tempted to retreat into interiority. Silence is necessary; self-examination is necessary; prayer is necessary. But there is also a temptation to use reflection as an excuse for inaction. One can remain forever in analysis, discussion, and self-interpretation while the world burns outside. I know this temptation well especially in certain structured environments where speaking about action can become a substitute for acting.

            The most famous articulation of this sentiment is by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 13:2 he writes, "And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity (love), I am nothing." Thomas Kempis in his book ‘The Imitation of Christ’, Book 1, Chapter 2, echoes this beautifully when he writes, “If you knew the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it all profit you without the love of God and without grace?". These words disturb me because they expose a danger I do not want to ignore: that the life of the mind can become self-enclosed.

            The problem, then, is not reflection itself. The problem is reflection detached from responsibility. The mind must return to the world. Silence must become discernment, and discernment must become action. If contemplation does not eventually open outward in service, truth begins to lose its moral weight.

 The Catholic Just War Tradition

            The Catholic Church has never treated war as morally light or easily justified. The Just War tradition, as summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§2307–2312), begins from a presumption in favor of peace and sets demanding moral limits on the use of force. It does not bless violence; it restrains it. It asks whether the harm inflicted by the aggressor is grave and certain, whether peaceful alternatives have truly been exhausted, whether there is a reasonable chance of success, and whether the use of force will avoid creating greater evil than the evil it seeks to stop.

            What I find important in this tradition is not only its rules, but its moral seriousness. War is never normalized. It is judged, measured, and feared. Augustine and Aquinas did not write to make war acceptable in the abstract; they wrote because they knew that a fallen world sometimes presses leaders toward tragic decisions. Their teaching insists that even when force is used, conscience must remain vigilant, because the moral law does not disappear in times of conflict.

            This matters because it prevents two opposite errors. One is naïve pacifism that ignores evil and leaves the innocent undefended. The other is moral surrender, where violence becomes routine and is explained away as necessary. The Catholic tradition rejects both. It asks instead for discernment shaped by truth, justice, and charity.

War, Civilians, and Moral Limits

            In light of that tradition, the present conflict involving Iran raises serious moral concerns. When measured against the criteria of the CCC, the case for war appears deeply questionable. The extent of the harm caused by the aggressor remains disputed, the possibility of peaceful alternatives has not been convincingly exhausted, and the proportionality of military action remains morally difficult to defend.

            This is especially so when civilians suffer. Any damage to schools, homes, hospitals, or infrastructure reminds us that war rarely remains within the boundaries claimed for it. Even when military objectives are invoked, the lived reality is often grief for families, fear for children, and long-term instability for whole populations. The bombing of the Iranian school, and the killing of innocent children, is therefore not merely a tragic event to be remembered; it is a moral wound that demands justice, not indifference.

            At the same time, moral judgment must not become moral vanity. To say that a war is unjust is not the same as claiming pure innocence for oneself or one’s side. A Christian conscience should resist propaganda, but it should also resist the temptation to speak as though history were simple. The duty is not to excuse violence, but to see it clearly enough to oppose it truthfully.

 Why Peace Demands More

            Peace is often spoken of as if it were merely the absence of fighting. But Christian moral thought does not treat peace as silence after violence. Peace is a form of order, justice, and restrained power. It requires patience, truthfulness, and a willingness to keep human dignity visible even in disagreement. It is not sentimental. It is demanding.

            That is why the work of discernment matters so much. We are constantly being invited to react quickly, speak loudly, and choose sides before we have understood the depth of what is happening. But conscience should not be ruled by haste. It should be formed by truth, tested by charity, and strengthened by prayer. Only then can it resist the pressure to turn every conflict into a performance.

            I remain convinced that the Church must continue to speak for peace, not as a political faction but as a moral witness. That witness will sometimes unsettle people. It should. Truth often does. But if it is true, it must also be humble, careful, and willing to bear the cost of being misunderstood. The civil society and people of goodwill should come together irrespective of their religions and other differences and join together in this peace initiative.

 Ignatian Discernment

            Before any moral judgment can become action, it must pass through discernment. Saint Ignatius taught me that not every strong feeling is a command, and not every noble impulse is already wisdom. The heart can be stirred by compassion, but it can also be pushed by fear, pride, impatience, or the desire to appear right. That is why discernment matters: it helps me ask not only what I feel, but where the movement is leading me.

            In moments of conflict, Ignatian discernment begins with attention. I must notice what stirs within me when I hear of war, civilian suffering, propaganda, or public debate. Do I feel only anger? Do I want revenge disguised as justice? Do I feel an urge to remain silent because speaking is costly? Or do I sense a quiet invitation to truth, patience, and fidelity? These questions matter because the spirit of God does not normally work through confusion, haste, or self-display, but through a deeper freedom that leads toward love.

            Ignatius also taught that consolation and desolation are not merely emotional states. They are spiritual orientations. Consolation draws a person toward greater faith, hope, charity, humility, and peace. Desolation pulls the soul toward closure, despair, agitation, or sterile certainty. In the face of war, this distinction becomes very practical. A response shaped by consolation will not be naïve, but it will be peaceful, truthful, and willing to serve. A response shaped by desolation may feel forceful, but it often leaves the heart more divided than before.

            This is why I cannot simply ask whether I am “pro-war” or “anti-war,” as though moral life were a slogan. The deeper question is whether my response is helping me grow in freedom before God. Ignatian discernment asks me to pause, test the movement, pray over it, and then choose what leads more surely to love, justice, and the common good. It asks me to resist the pressure of immediate reaction and to seek instead the interior clarity that makes responsible action possible.

            For me, this is one of the most demanding parts of Christian life. It is easier to react than to discern. It is easier to denounce than to understand. It is easier to remain in private reflection than to enter the world with a clear conscience. But Ignatius does not permit me to remain comfortable. He asks me to be attentive, truthful, and available to God’s movement even when that movement costs me something.

 A discerned choice

            At this crossroads, the Christian task is not to become emotionally detached, nor to become politically reactive. The task is harder and more beautiful: it is to remain interiorly free before God while remaining outwardly faithful to the suffering of the world. Ignatian discernment has shown me that conscience is not formed only by feeling, nor only by ideas, but by the slow testing of spirits in the light of truth. It asks me to speak more carefully in public and private, refusing to spread anger where understanding is needed. It asks me to pray not as an escape, but as a way of forming a conscience capable of acting with clarity and charity in a confused world.

            I therefore return to the same conviction with greater clarity: conscience must not be outsourced, and it must not be hurried. It must be formed through prayer, tested by discernment, and then translated into charity. Reflection is necessary, but it is not the end. Judgment is necessary, but it is not enough. What finally matters is whether my response leads me toward truth, justice, humility, and peace. So this is where I stand: at the crossroads between silence and speech, between fear and responsibility, between reaction and discernment. I do not wish to be ruled by propaganda, nor by my own passions, nor by the illusion that moral seriousness requires anger. I wish instead to listen more deeply, judge more truthfully, and act more lovingly.

            And if Ignatius has taught me anything, it is that God is found not only in prayer but also in the careful, costly choices that prayer makes possible. In a divided world, that may be the most faithful way to live: not to escape the turmoil, but to enter it with a conscience made free enough to seek the greater good.

 References

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2307–2312.
• Augustine of Hippo, Contra Faustum; City of God, Book XIX.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 40.
• Gaudium et Spes, §§79–82.
• Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §§497–520.
• Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister.
• Epictetus, Enchiridion.
• Seneca, selected moral writings on emotions and judgment.
• Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.
• Deadly bombing of Iran primary school ‘a grave violation of humanitarian law’: UNESCO https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167063