By Savio Saldanha SJ
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21477142
Date: 21-07-2026
I was disturbed. If I can use the one civilized word for what I felt as I watched the footage coming out of Delhi, it is that — disturbed. Not outraged in the performative sense that social media rewards, not righteously indignant in the way that costs nothing, but genuinely, deeply disturbed in the way that stays with you when the screen goes dark and the room goes quiet and you are left alone with what you have seen.
These were not agitators. These were not provocateurs looking for confrontation. These were young people — many of them from families who had sacrificed enormously so that one member could sit for an examination that might change the trajectory of an entire household. They had studied in inadequate light, in crowded rooms, on empty stomachs, with the weight of expectation pressing down on every hour. They had prepared for years. And then they discovered that the examination meant to open their future had been compromised, corrupted, sold — before they even sat down to write a single word. They came out to say so. They came out because the alternative — silence — would have meant accepting that their dignity, their effort, and their future were worth nothing. And for saying so, for daring to say so in public, they were beaten.
I watched the footage more than once, which I perhaps should not have done, but which I am glad I did, because the temptation with suffering at a distance is always to let it pass through us quickly, to register it as unfortunate and then move on to something more manageable. Watching it more than once refused that temptation. It made the faces real. It made the cries specific. It made the violence impossible to absorb into abstraction.
And then something happened that I did not fully anticipate. The images entered my prayer. They unsettled it. They made it impossible to proceed with the usual movements of a prayer that remains comfortably interior, safely distant from the disorder of the world. I found myself unable to address God without first addressing what I had seen. And in that encounter — between the footage and the prayer, between the faces of those students and the face of the God I claim to seek — I felt something I want to name honestly and without embarrassment.
I felt anger.
On the Necessity of Anger
I name that anger deliberately, because I think the first temptation of a person formed in religious life is to spiritualize distress away — to transmute it quickly into something more acceptable, more interior, more prayerful in the conventional sense. We learn to speak of sadness, of concern, of compassionate solidarity. Anger feels less controlled, less suitable for a theology student writing a blog post. But I think that particular restraint is dishonest, and I think dishonesty is a poor foundation for anything that aspires to be theological reflection.
The tradition I inhabit does not ask me to be numb. It asks me to see clearly. And sometimes, when we see clearly, anger is the most truthful response available to conscience. It was anger that drove Jesus into the Temple with a cord of whips. It was anger that animated the prophets when they named the exploitation of the poor as a theological crisis, not merely a social one. Amos did not speak softly about the powerful who sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals. Isaiah did not offer measured concern about those who added house to house and field to field while the poor had nowhere to stand. They were disturbed, and they said so, and the tradition has preserved their disturbance as sacred text.
Anger, rightly received, is not the opposite of love. It is sometimes love's most honest form. The person who watches a child being beaten and feels nothing — or who converts that nothing quickly into a composed and balanced reflection on the complexity of law enforcement — has not achieved any form of spirituality. They have achieved a kind of moral numbing that the tradition has always recognized as dangerous.
So I was angry. I remain angry. And I have come to believe that in a moment like this, the disturbance is not the problem to be managed. The disturbance, rightly received, is the beginning of conscience doing its proper work.
The Claim of the Wounded Face
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent his life trying to articulate something that resists articulation: that ethics does not begin in a principle, a system, or a theory, but in an encounter — specifically, in the encounter with the face of another human being. The face, for Levinas, is not merely a feature of the body. It is the place where vulnerability and dignity coincide, where the other person looks at us and makes an absolute claim upon us that we cannot think our way around. The face says: you are responsible for me. It does not say this as an argument. It says it as a reality that precedes argument.
The faces of those students in Delhi made that claim. They made it through a screen, across a distance, into a room in France where I was sitting with my morning tea, and they made it with a force that no amount of geographical or cultural distance could fully absorb. That is what Levinas means when he says the face is absolute. It does not respect the boundaries we construct between ourselves and the suffering of others. It insists.
Hannah Arendt, writing in the shadow of a very different and far greater atrocity, gave us another category that is useful here: the danger of what she called the suspension of moral judgment. Her argument, developed through her analysis of how ordinary people in ordinary institutions participated in extraordinary evil, was that atrocity does not always arrive in dramatic and obviously recognizable form. It arrives gradually. It arrives bureaucratically. It arrives uniformed and authorized and procedurally justified. It arrives when conscience goes quiet and procedure takes over, when people stop asking whether what they are doing is right and begin asking only whether it is permitted, whether it is ordered, whether it falls within their defined role.
The officer who raises a baton against an unarmed student has, at some level, stopped thinking. Not necessarily stopped feeling — that is a more complicated question — but stopped thinking in the moral sense that Arendt means: stopped asking what this action does to another person who has a face, a history, a family, a future. The baton has become procedure. The student has become a problem to be managed. And that transformation — of a person into a problem — is precisely the beginning of atrocity in its ordinary, everyday, uniformed form.
The question Arendt forces us to ask is not only who gave the order. It is who chose not to think. And that question is ours as much as it is the officer's, because the choice not to think is available to all of us, at every moment, every time we encounter suffering and decide that it is not quite our concern.
What the Tradition Says
The Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et Spes, teaches that conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of the human person — the place where one is alone with God, whose voice echoes in the depths. This is a rich and demanding teaching, because it refuses to reduce conscience to mere feeling or personal preference. Conscience, in this tradition, is not what I happen to feel comfortable with. It is the place where I encounter truth and am held accountable to it. It is not private in the sense of being arbitrary. It is intimate in the sense of being the place where the deepest encounter between the human person and the moral reality of the world takes place.
When the sight of suffering awakens something in us — when the footage of beaten students enters the prayer and unsettles it — that awakening is not a distraction from conscience. It is conscience doing precisely what it is made to do. Gaudium et Spes goes further: it insists that the Church has a duty to read the signs of the times, to hear the groaning of the poor and the marginalized, and to bring the light of the Gospel to bear on the concrete conditions of human life. Theology that remains safely above the disorder of the street has not achieved serenity. It has achieved irrelevance.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Council's declaration on religious freedom and human dignity, insists on the inviolable dignity of every human person and the duty of all — including and especially those who hold power — to protect that dignity from coercion, from humiliation, from violence. Dignity is not something that is granted by the state. It is something the state is bound to recognize and protect. A state that beats unarmed students who are demanding accountability for corruption is not maintaining order. It is violating a dignity that no authority — elected, appointed, or uniformed — has the right to touch.
Pope Francis, in Fratelli Tutti, is direct and without diplomatic cushioning on this point. He speaks of the throwaway culture that treats entire categories of people as expendable — the poor, the young, the migrant, the protester. He warns against the indifference that allows atrocity to become normalized, the social numbness that permits the suffering of the vulnerable to pass through public awareness without leaving a mark. And he says something that I find particularly challenging: that fraternity is not a sentiment but a practice, and that the practice of fraternity requires a willingness to be inconvenienced by the suffering of others, to allow their reality to genuinely disturb our comfort.
I was disturbed. Fratelli Tutti suggests that this is the correct response, and that the absence of disturbance would have been the more serious problem.
Two Voices from Our Soil
Gandhi understood examinations. He understood systems. He understood what it means to be a young person from a modest background who stakes everything on a process that is supposed to be fair, and discovers that the process has been captured by those with money and connections. He had seen it under colonial rule. He knew that the corruption of a system that was supposed to offer opportunity to the many, but was manipulated to serve the few, was not merely an administrative failure. It was a moral one, with a moral name: injustice.
His insistence on nonviolence was never, at any point in his life, an instruction to be passive. It was something considerably more demanding than passivity. It was the discipline of refusing to answer violence with violence not because violence does not hurt, but because answering it in kind destroys the moral ground on which justice must eventually be built. Gandhi understood that the moment the protester becomes the mirror image of the oppressor — violent, retaliatory, driven by hatred — the oppressor has won a deeper victory than any baton can achieve. They have corrupted the conscience of the resistance.
But — and this must be said clearly — nonviolence for Gandhi was never silence. It was never looking away. It was never the comfortable neutrality of the person who is not personally at risk and therefore finds it easy to counsel patience to those who are. Nonviolence was, for Gandhi, a form of moral combat: disciplined, costly, and demanding. It required showing up, being present, absorbing the blow without retaliating, and insisting in the face of power that the truth would not be silenced simply because the body could be hurt. That is not passivity. That is one of the more demanding forms of courage that the human moral imagination has produced.
From the Sikh tradition comes a principle that I find myself returning to in this moment with particular force: na zulam karo, naa zulam saho — do not commit oppression, and do not submit to oppression as though it were natural or inevitable. These are not two separate instructions loosely grouped together. They are one instruction with two faces, and the connection between them is the point. The person who watches atrocity in silence, who tells themselves they are simply staying out of it, keeping the peace, avoiding trouble — that person is not neutral. They have chosen a side. They have chosen the side that benefits from the silence of witnesses. Naa zulam saho — do not endure oppression, do not normalize it, do not absorb it into the background noise of a world where such things happen and nothing can be done.
The students in Delhi refused to absorb it. They went into the street instead. And they were beaten for that refusal. The Sikh principle asks us: who, in that scene, is living closer to the truth that oppression must not be submitted to as though it were the natural order of things?
The Ignatian Question: Mute Spectators or Responsible Participants?
Ignatius of Loyola built his entire spiritual pedagogy around a single central conviction: that God is found in all things, and that the task of the person who seeks God is to develop the capacity to discern what is of God and what is not — in interior movements, in exterior situations, in the concrete circumstances of a particular life at a particular historical moment. Discernment, in the Ignatian sense, is not a technique for making comfortable decisions. It is a practice of moral and spiritual attention that demands honesty about what we are actually feeling, why we are feeling it, and where it is leading us.
The anger I felt watching those students being beaten is, in Ignatian terms, a movement that requires discernment. Not because anger is automatically suspect — I have already argued against that spiritualization — but because anger can move in two very different directions, and discernment is the practice of knowing which direction it is moving in, and choosing consciously which direction to let it take us.
Anger that moves toward hatred, toward a dehumanization of those who have done the dehumanizing, toward a logic of vengeance that mirrors the logic it condemns — that anger, however understandable, is not leading toward life. It is producing a mirror image of the problem it set out to oppose. The history of social movements is full of the wreckage of this particular failure, and Ignatius would have recognized it immediately: it is the spirit of desolation masquerading as the spirit of justice.
But anger that is purified — held honestly, examined carefully, and then directed toward solidarity, toward truth-telling, toward the patient and costly work of accompanying those who have been hurt and demanding accountability from those who have done the hurting — that anger is a different thing entirely. That anger, in the Ignatian framework, can be a movement of the good spirit: something that draws us toward greater love, greater honesty, greater fidelity to the God who, as the tradition insists, hears the cry of the humiliated.
The Ignatian question for this moment is not whether to be moved. The question is: having been moved, what does fidelity require of me now? What is the more life-giving response — not in the abstract, but for me, in my specific situation, with my specific gifts and limitations and responsibilities?
Mute spectatorship is a choice. I want to say that plainly, because it is often presented as non-choice, as the natural default of the person who is not directly involved. But it is not. When footage of atrocity circulates and we scroll past it; when the conversation turns to what happened and we change the subject; when we know what has been done and we calculate that speaking about it is not worth the trouble — these are choices. They are choices about whose dignity matters and whose does not, about whose suffering registers and whose can be managed into background noise. Ignatius would not have called that discernment. He would have called it a failure of discernment — the quiet choice of the less life-giving response, made comfortable by the fact that it requires nothing of us.
Responsible participation does not require the same thing from every person. For some it means writing, as I am doing now. For some it means organizing, accompanying, legally supporting those who have been harmed. For some it means the patient and unglamorous work of building institutions that are less corruptible, systems that are less easily captured by those with money and power. For some it means prayer — not the prayer that retreats safely from the world, but the prayer that brings the world's wound into the presence of God and refuses to pretend, even before God, that everything is fine.
The question is not whether to participate. The question is what form participation takes, given who I am and where I am and what I have been given. That is discernment. That is what Ignatius was asking his companions to do in the concrete situations of their sixteenth-century world. It is what his tradition asks of those who claim to follow him now.
Conscience at the Crossroads
There is a moment in every atrocity — public, documented, watched by many — when something is decided collectively, not by vote or declaration, but by the accumulation of individual responses. Each person who sees it decides, in their own interior space, whether this is something that registers or something that passes through. Each person decides whether the face on the screen makes a claim upon them or whether the distance is sufficient insulation. Each person decides whether conscience will awaken or harden.
Conscience stands at a crossroads every time the defenseless are harmed in public and power calls it order. At that crossroads there are, finally, only two directions. One is toward truth — toward the wounded face, toward the harder path of speaking and accompanying and refusing, at whatever personal cost, to normalize cruelty. The other is toward silence — toward the comfort of not being involved, toward the gradual habituation that allows today's atrocity to become tomorrow's routine and next year's forgotten incident.
The students who went into the streets of Delhi were asking for something that is, at its core, very simple: that their future not be stolen from them before it began. That the process they had trusted and sacrificed for not be corrupted by those with money and connections. That the state be accountable to the people it claims to serve. These are not revolutionary demands. They are the basic expectations of a democratic society, and they are demands that the Gospel — with its insistence on the dignity of every person and the particular claim of the poor upon those who hold power — can only endorse.
In French they say, 'Dieu entend le cri des humiliés', which means that God hears the cry of the humiliated. That is not a pious sentiment. It is a theological conviction with consequences. It means that the cries of those students in Delhi were heard — not only by cameras, not only by those of us watching on screens, but by the God who, according to the tradition I inhabit, is not indifferent to what is done to the least of these.
The question that conviction places before us is whether those of us who claim to follow that God are willing to hear it too. Whether conscience will awaken or harden. Whether we will be mute spectators or responsible participants. Whether disturbance will lead us toward truth or be managed back into comfort.
I was disturbed. I remain disturbed. And I have come to believe that the disturbance is not the problem to be solved. It is, if we let it be, the beginning of something necessary — the sound of conscience finding its voice at the crossroads, and choosing, with whatever courage is available to it, the direction of truth.
