You Belong to Nobody? A Second Thought on Smashing the Patriarchy

Savio SALDANHA

10.5281/zenodo.22121594

27 August 2026

 

    There is a verse in the Manusmriti, chapter 9, verse 3, that reads:

‘pitā rakṣati kaumāre bhartā rakṣati yauvane, rakṣanti sthavire putrā na strī svātantryam arhati’

            Which literally means that, "The father guards her in childhood, the husband guards her in youth and the sons guard her in old age. The woman is never fit for independence." It is not a stray line. The verse before it says women must be kept under control by the men of the family. The verses after it treat guarding a wife as the highest duty a husband has, and treat a widow's chastity after her husband's death as her defining virtue for the rest of her life. Read this slowly and you see what it actually does. A woman never becomes her own person. She is handed from one male guardian to the next. Protection, in this text, is another word for custody.

            This is the background against which Rahul Gandhi spoke to a crowd of young women in Pune last week, in the middle of a charged political season where Manusmriti gets thrown at the BJP and RSS almost as often as it gets read on its own terms. He quoted that verse, called it the Manusmriti mindset, and told the women they do not belong to their father, their husband, or their son. You belong to yourself, he said. Smash the patriarchy. Be loud, be proud.

            I agree with the diagnosis. What I want to sit with here is the line he offered as the cure. A rally is not a treatise, and it is worth engaging the sentence Rahul actually said, in full, rather than the shortened version of it that will end up on placards or circulated as memes. I have already come across several such photos with tagline, you do not belong to anybody but yourself. This is the better one than another shortened version which reads, you do not belong to anybody. This is where I see the danger. When Rahul spoke he addressed a real socio-political reality of the oppression of women. He spoke from this particular context. The photo memes take the tagline while ignoring the context, presuming readers already know it. I reflect on this phenomenon as a Jesuit, a teacher and a counselor who has some experience of working with the youth, women, tribals and the dalits.

What the slogan gets right

            Rahul was not making things up. The verse says what he said it says. And what it prescribes is not protection in any ordinary sense as some have claimed. A father who genuinely protects his daughter wants her safe and also wants her to grow into someone who can stand on her own. The Manusmriti does not want that. It wants the transfer of custody to never end. That is worth naming clearly, and smashing it is the right instinct. So when Rahul says a woman does not belong to her father or her husband or her son, he is right. Nobody owns another person. That much is not in question for me.

This was never only an Indian problem

    It is worth saying plainly that Manusmriti was not some isolated case of one culture getting this wrong. Aristotle, writing in Greece in the fourth century before Christ, said something with the same structure in his book on biology, Generation of Animals, book two, chapter three. He wrote that the female is, in effect, a deformed male, and that menstrual fluid is semen in an incomplete form, lacking what he called the principle of soul. In his Politics, book one, chapter thirteen, he goes further and says the woman has the capacity to reason but not the authority that reason needs to rule, which for him settles her place under the man's authority in the household.

    Two civilizations, arriving at the same idea: women are a lesser, incomplete version of men and that incompleteness justifies permanent male authority over them. That should tell us something. This is not a defect of one text or one region. It is a pattern in how men in power have thought about women across most of human history, dressed up differently depending on where you stood, biology in Athens, dharma in India.

    Neither tradition stayed frozen there. Bhakti poets and later reformers pushed back against verses like this one from inside Indian religious life. The Greek and Roman thought moved past Aristotle's biology too. So both traditions were larger than their worst verse, and it would be its own kind of unfairness to treat one line of thought as the whole of either.

 

Where I got uneasy

            Rahul's actual sentence was "you belong to nobody except yourself." That is a complete claim, not a fragment, and it deserves to be read on its own terms rather than as loose talk that happened to leave a phrase dangling. I have already explained the shortened versions making rounds and how I look at them.

            If I or someone read on its own terms, here is what it says: there is exactly one legitimate owner of you, and it is you. Not your father. Not your husband. Not your son, just yourself. That is a real position, not a slip of the tongue. It is close to what a great deal of modern liberal thought says about the person, that I am self-possessed, and self-possession is the ground of my dignity.

            I still get uneasy here, but for a more precise reason than I started with. If the self is the last and only owner of the self, the self also becomes the last court of appeal. Nobody has a claim on you, which sounds exactly right against Manusmriti's father-husband-son chain. But it also means, followed all the way through, that nobody's judgment of you can ever outrank your own. I have sat with enough people in distress, students back in India buckling under exam pressure or being torn apart by what strangers said about them online, or going through serious relationship breakups to know that a self answerable only to itself is not always a self at peace. Sometimes it is a self with nobody left to check it, and nobody left to catch it either.

    To be fair to the other side of this, traditional embeddedness has its own well documented costs. Restricted mobility, restricted schooling and no real way out of a bad marriage to name a few. Nobody sane wants to trade freedom for those. The real question is not whether the old bonds were worth keeping. They were not. It is whether the right alternative to being owned by others is being owned only by yourself, or something else again.

What I would say instead

    As a Jesuit I would put it differently, and the difference sits exactly where Rahul's sentence ends. His sentence ends at yourself. I want to press on past that. Kindly be patient with me as I say that we all belong to God. This belief does not undo anything that Rahul said about not being owned by fathers, husbands, or sons. It agrees with all of it. But at the same time it does not let the self be the final resting place either. It means we are accountable, all of us, for what we do, and nobody, not even the self, gets the last word on that just by being the self.

    And next to it, morally, I say we are accountable to the society we live in. That is Gaudium et Spes speaking, the Second Vatican Council's document on the Church in the modern world, paragraph 24, which says a person cannot fully find himself/herself except through a sincere gift of himself/herself. Not through detachment from others but through gift. A self that belongs only to itself has nothing left to give and nobody left to answer to but its own judgment. That is not what any of us, man or woman, was made for.

    I say this as a Catholic, and I know the language is not available to everyone who was standing in that crowd in Pune. Most of those women were not going to walk home wondering what a Vatican council said forty years before they were born. A Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist woman in that stadium has her own ground to stand on for saying the same thing without needing mine, human dignity, equal citizenship, the plain constitutional fact that she is protected under the law regardless of what any dharmaśāstra says about her. I am not claiming my language is the only door into this argument. I am saying every version of it needs some floor under autonomy, whatever name a person gives that floor, or autonomy on its own will not hold the weight being put on it.

 

The harder question

    But there is a real problem hiding in what I just said, and I do not want to dodge it. What happens when the society you are supposed to be accountable to is itself the Manusmriti society? What happens when the accountability structure is the oppression? This is not a hypothetical for the women Rahul was addressing. Their families, their neighbourhoods, sometimes their own religious world, are shaped by exactly the mindset that the verse encodes. Telling them to be accountable to that society is not a moral answer. It is just handing the custody back to the oppressors. So accountability to society as it currently stands cannot be the last word. But that does not mean the answer is no accountability. It means the accountability moves. It moves from the society that exists now to the society that should exist.

    Mary's song in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 51 to 52, does exactly this: "He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly." She does not say she belongs to nobody. She names an order that is currently in power, the proud, the powerful on their thrones, and says God is against it. That is not a rejection of accountability. It is a redirection of it, away from an order that crushes people and toward one that does not yet fully exist but is being called into being.

    As stated earlier that redirection needs a floor of its own, or it becomes whatever the speaker wants it to be. Here is mine: no person handed to another as property, and each person treated with the dignity that is theirs by right. Every person answerable and every person answered to in turn. Dignity that does not depend on whose household you were born into. This is not an empty standard. It is exactly the standard the Manusmriti fails, and it is a standard anyone can check an order against, mine or Rahul's or anyone else's.

 

What Ignatius adds

    There is one more piece I want to bring in, because it is the tradition I was formed in. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Principle and Foundation that opens the Spiritual Exercises, paragraph 23, has a concept he calls indifference. It does not mean not caring. It means being free enough from disordered attachment to anything created that you are available to what God actually wants. He says we should not be more inclined to health than to sickness, to riches than to poverty, to a long life than a short one, but should desire and choose only what leads to the end for which we are made.

    Notice what indifference is not. It is not detachment from every relationship. It is detachment from whatever attachment gets in the way of the right one. Manusmriti's structure, where a woman exists to serve her father's household and then her husband's line, is a disordered attachment, a woman held not for her own sake but for what she secures for the men around her. Ignatian indifference would cut that attachment loose in a heartbeat. But it would not then leave a person attached to nothing. It frees a person for the deepest attachment there is, to God, and from that, to other people rightly. Rahul's slogan, read as opposition to a disordered custody, fits inside this. Read out of context, as opposition to belonging as such, it does not.

Where this leaves me

    So here is where I land. Liberation from an unjust structure and freedom from every accountability but your own are two different things, and it is easy to slide from the first into the second without noticing. The right-wing does this constantly when it defends structures like Manusmriti's in the name of tradition and order. But the language of liberation can do it too, when the self quietly becomes the only authority left standing.

    The correction Manusmriti needs is not "you belong to nobody except yourself." It is "you do not belong to your father, your husband, or your son, because you belong to God, and answerable to God, not just to your own judgment of yourself, is what makes you a person and not property in the first place." That is a harder sentence to fit on a banner. I do not blame Rahul for this; he made a statement from a different perspective than mine. I also do not say that my perspective is the only right one or the only one there is. There are several concepts on which we can base this argument rather than a Christian understanding of God, particularly in a pluralist nation like India. To the large number of Indian women who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh or other religions, or atheist, or agnostic, the Manusmriti critique can be a part of a broader secular or reformist project of individual rights and constitutional equality, or a call to re-center on their understanding of God.

    I worked with women outside the classroom too. Before I became a Jesuit, I spent nine years as a bank officer, and part of that work was helping set up self-help groups for women, many of whom had never held a bank account of their own before that. Since then, I have addressed rural women entrepreneurs, assisting in building small businesses, with no capital behind them and no one behind them either, except themselves. Almost every one of those women had spent years being told, in one form or another, whose she was before anyone thought to ask who she wanted to be. That is what this argument is actually about, underneath the theology. Not detachment from everyone who ever had power over her. A different, truer accountability altogether, one that starts with God, or with whatever floor she stands on, and does not stop at whoever currently holds power over her life.

 

 

From Chariot to Crossroads: Discernment lessons from Plato, Krishna and Ignatius.

Savio Saldanha

DOI- 10.5281/zenodo.22083353

Date – 24 August 2026

                After all these years as a Jesuit, I still consider myself a student of discernment. I sometimes find myself thinking almost desiring that I too receive this grace like Solomon. But experience and history teaches it is not always so simple. As I keep reflecting on this I take recourse to different traditions and cultures which have searched for the solution to this problem(?). I delve into the Greek, Indian and Western philosophies and theologies that show a probable way. I think of a chariot pulled by two horses, one obedient and one unruly. I read about a prince who lays down his weapons and hands the reins to his chariot to God. I walk with a pilgrim who lets his mule choose the road so that a stranger might live or die depending on which direction it takes. Three images, separated by centuries and continents, all asking the same question: who is driving?

Plato's horses

                In the Phaedrus, Plato pictures the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of two horses (246a–254e). One horse is noble and responds to command; the other pulls toward appetite and has to be fought. The charioteer is reason. Left alone, either horse would wreck the chariot — the noble one through excess of spirit, the unruly one through raw appetite. The soul only moves well when reason holds both.

                In the Republic, Plato gives the same structure a different shape: reason, spirit, and appetite (Book IV, 434d–441c). Justice in a person is reason ruling, with spirit as its ally, over appetite. He then maps this onto the city — guardians, auxiliaries, and producers — because for Plato the well-run soul and the well-run city are the same pattern at different scales. The charioteer image and the tripartite soul are really one argument: order is not the absence of conflicting forces, it's their right ranking under something higher.

Krishna, and a bow that still has to be drawn

                The Bhagavad Gita opens with Arjuna setting down his bow on the battlefield, paralysed by the prospect of killing his own kin. He asks Krishna to be his charioteer — and Krishna agrees, but not by taking over the fight. He drives, counsels, and clarifies, while Arjuna is the one who has to fire the arrow. By chapter 18, Krishna's counsel is still the same: act, but act without grasping at the fruit of the act (18.63 and surrounding verses). This is worth sitting with, because it's easy to read "Krishna is the charioteer" as "Krishna took the wheel and Arjuna went along for the ride." That's not what happens. The clearest statement of what Krishna is actually offering comes earlier, in chapter 2:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन। मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥ (2.47)

"Your right is to the action alone, never to its fruits. Let the fruit of action never be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction."

                That's not permission to step back or a passive surrender as is generally presumed. It's the opposite — a command to act, stripped of the grasping that makes action anxious. Krishna restores Arjuna's clarity about what he's already committed to doing. The guidance is real, but the war is still fought with Arjuna's own arms.

Ignatius and the mule — a false start, not a smaller version of discernment

                There's a well-known story from Ignatius's own account of his early life (Autobiography, no.14-15). Riding toward Montserrat not long after his conversion, he falls into an argument with a Moor about the perpetual virginity of Mary. The man rides on ahead. Ignatius, furious, can't decide whether to catch up and kill him for the insult or let it go. Unable to settle it himself, he lets his mule choose: if it turns onto the Moor's road, he'll follow and kill him; if it stays on the highway, he'll let the man live. The mule stays on the highway.

                   It's tempting to read the slackened reins as an early flicker of trust in providence, and there's something to that — Ignatius includes the story precisely to show, in his own words, how God was working on a soul that was "still blind." But the scholarship on the Autobiography is blunt about what this episode actually is. Reviewing the text's context and rhetoric, John McManamon notes that in letting the mule decide, Ignatius was abandoning the knightly code of honor that would have obligated him to avenge the insult himself — a move the Autobiography itself frames as immaturity, not wisdom (McManamon, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2016; drawing on Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle's Loyola's Acts, 1997). Ignatius was outsourcing a moral decision to chance because he hadn't yet learned how to test what's actually moving in him.

            By the time he came to write his own guidance for others, decades later, that had changed completely. What he eventually taught was not "wait for a sign," but the far harder discipline of paying attention to your own interior movements before you act — a discipline he'd had no access to on that road. That according to me is much closer to what Krishna does for Arjun than the mule ever was: not removing the choice, but clarifying the ground it's made on.

                Read in that order, the arc isn't Plato to Krishna to Ignatius as three points on a rising line, or three versions improving on each other. Krishna and the mature Ignatius stand together as two versions of the same claim: guidance sharpens the one who still has to act. The mule is the cautionary case of what happens when that guidance is skipped and chance is asked to stand in for it. I mean this at the level of the claim only, not their stature. A divine avatar and a canonized saint don't occupy the same order of being, and I'm not putting them on a scale against each other. What I'm saying is narrower: they're teaching the same thing about action. Arjuna's despair and Ignatius's rage at the insult are both impulses that have to be tested and cleared before they can be trusted. Only then does the action go forward. Krishna clears Arjuna's sight through counsel before he lifts the bow. The mature Ignatius teaches clearing your own interior movements before you choose. Neither says stop acting. Both say don't act on the first impulse.

What's left when the analogies run out

                None of these images, read carefully, license passivity. Arjuna still draws the bow. Ignatius, once he's past the mule, still has to sit with a decision and choose. Plato's reason doesn't get to retire once it's in charge — governing the horses is a permanent job, not a one-time victory. The chariot doesn't move on its own even with the reins in the right hands. It moves because someone is still driving and someone is still fighting.

                I kept coming back to this during my annual retreat — the same movement, on different days, in different prayer periods, refusing to resolve into either extreme. Not "I will handle this myself," and not "I will step back and let God handle it." Something narrower than both: hand over the direction, keep your hands on the work. I'd sit down expecting to have finished with the question and find it waiting for me again the next day, in a different disguise. That repetition was the point, I think. Surrender that only has to happen once isn't surrender, it is relief. The kind that has to be renewed each time you sit down is closer to what Arjuna is doing with the bow still in his hands, and closer to what Ignatius was still learning on that road to Montserrat. That's the whole of it, really. Not a single act of letting go, but a grip you keep adjusting — loosened where you were gripping out of fear, tightened where you'd let it go slack out of avoidance.

                As I bring this reflection to the story of Solomon, I find that even the wise king had to keep discerning and growing. He did make mistakes along the way, like his extravagant lifestyle and the increased taxation which led to the future splitting of the kingdom of Israel.

                So I feel that I will never be able to call myself a master of discernment. I shall be a student throughout my life, praying, reflecting and growing in this grace. My chariot may be driven by God, but at the same time I will be driving and choosing my way ahead.

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What the Oppressed Owe Their Own Liberation: On Standing With Palestine Without Losing the Ground to Stand On

What the Oppressed Owe Their Own Liberation: 

On Standing With Palestine Without Losing the Ground to Stand On

Savio SALDANHA

10.5281/zenodo.21922181

13 August 2026

I watched the film The Voice of Hind Rajab not as a spectator but as a man forced to reckon with what "magnitude" actually means when it stops being a statistic. A six-year-old girl, trapped in a car, pleading on a recorded line while the world listened and did nothing fast enough. That is not an abstraction. That is a name, a voice, a last conversation. It broke something open in me that statistics never had — and it forced me to ask why I had allowed myself, for however long, to process this conflict in numbers rather than names, or why I preferred to remain neutral when a people suffered.

But this reflection did not begin with a film, and it will not end with one. It sits on ground I have been building for years — as an Indian, as a Jesuit, and as someone who has spent a working life, before formation, among people for whom oppression was not a headline but a Monday.

Not a Religious Case

Let me be precise about what this is not. I do not support the Palestinian cause because of a theological commitment, and I have no patience for those — on any side — who fight in the name of religion rather than justice. Hamas does not speak for Palestinians any more than any single armed faction speaks for an entire people's grief — just as Hindutva does not speak for all Hindus, religious-nationalist Zionism does not speak for all Jews, and fundamentalist Christianity does not speak for all Christians. My objection is not to a religion, a people, or a state's right to exist. It is to occupation, blockade, and the killing of unarmed civilians and children — wherever and by whomever it is done. That distinction matters, and I hold to it deliberately, because a solidarity that cannot state its own limits is not solidarity — it is tribalism borrowing humanitarian language.

I also want to name the accusation directly rather than let it hover unanswered: that criticism of Israeli state policy is antisemitic. It is not, and there is a simple test for the difference. Antisemitism targets Jewish people or Judaism as such. My argument targets a state's conduct — occupation, blockade, the killing of civilians — the same category of critique I would apply, and do apply, to any state committing the same acts, including my own country in Kashmir. If the argument would stand unchanged were the state in question not Jewish, it is a policy critique, not prejudice. That is a test I am willing to be held to.

Gandhi's Ground: A Colonized People Recognizes Another

India's instinct here is not new, and it is not imported. We fought colonial rule ourselves, and Gandhi's method of resistance — satyagraha (truth-force) and ahimsa (non-violence) — was not a tactic of weakness but a claim that the means of resistance must be as just as the cause. Gandhi never asked the oppressed to submit; he asked them to resist without becoming what they resisted. That is not naïve idealism — it is the sharpest form of moral seriousness, because it refuses the shortcut of saying the ends justify any means.

I want to be honest about the limits of this ground rather than borrow Gandhi's authority without his record attached. Gandhi's own writing on the Jewish situation in the 1930s was, by most serious accounts, wrong — he opposed a Jewish national home in Palestine and, notoriously, suggested German Jews meet Nazi persecution with satyagraha, a position that treated a campaign of extermination as if it were a colonial grievance amenable to the same method that worked against the British Raj. It was not a small misjudgment. I invoke Gandhi here for the principle — that the means of resistance must be as disciplined as the cause is just — not for his verdict on that particular catastrophe, which does not hold up and which I do not defend.

This is also why India's foreign policy — decades before it built any strategic partnership with Israel — stood consistently for Palestinian statehood, for a negotiated two-state solution, for a people's right to a home of their own. That position has real ideological roots in India's own anti-colonial memory, but it is not pure inheritance; it has shifted over decades alongside strategic interest, energy security, and India's evolving relationship with both Israel and the Gulf states. I state the fuller picture rather than the cleaner one, because a nation's foreign policy, like a man's philosophy, is rarely as tidy as the story we tell about it — and a nation that itself endured partition, displacement, and colonial violence does not need religion, or a simple story, to recognize the same wound in another people.

Catholic Social Teaching: Justice Is Not an Afterthought

As a Jesuit, my tradition gives me a second, independent ground — one that does not rely on Gandhi or on India at all. The 32nd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus declared that the promotion of justice is a constitutive part of preaching the Gospel, not an optional humanitarian add-on for the sentimental. Pedro Arrupe's writing on structural sin gave the Church language for something Scripture already knew: that sin can be embedded in systems — in checkpoints, blockades, demolitions, in the daily architecture of humiliation — not only in individual cruelty. A structure can grind a people down long before a single bullet is fired.

And Catholic just war thinking gives me the tool to hold both halves of this without contradiction. The tradition recognizes a right to resist unjust occupation — it does not counsel simple submission to injustice. But it separates the justice of a cause from the justice of the means used to pursue it, and non-combatant immunity does not bend, ever, no matter how legitimate the underlying grievance. This holds even when an adversary makes distinction harder — embedding fighters or infrastructure among civilians is itself a grave violation, and I do not excuse it. But that violation does not transfer the resulting deaths onto a ledger where they stop counting; it does not convert a child's death into a legitimate military outcome, whichever side creates the conditions that made the strike difficult to avoid. The doctrine is not conditional on the enemy fighting fairly — if it were, it would cease to be a moral constraint and become a bargaining chip. This is the same principle that lets me grieve Hind Rajab and, in the same breath, condemn the killing of Israeli civilians on October 7. If the principle only runs in one direction, it was never a principle. It was a loyalty pretending to be one.

The Test I Hold Myself To

I have had to ask myself, honestly, whether my outrage is principled or selective — whether I speak because a people are oppressed, or because it has become fashionable, safe, or emotionally satisfying to speak about this particular oppression. The only honest answer is to widen the frame and see if it still holds: the Rohingya driven from Myanmar, the Armenians who carry a century of unacknowledged genocide, Kashmiri Pandits displaced from their own valley, the Baloch under a state that treats them as expendable, Tibetans under decades of occupation, Coptic Christians facing periodic violence in Egypt, Hindu minorities attacked amid political upheaval in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Jews murdered by the millions under Nazi Germany. If my solidarity does not travel to all of them with the same weight, it was never solidarity. It was politics wearing solidarity's clothes.

This is also where I part ways, sharply, with any movement — religious or political, on any side — whose compassion activates only when the oppressor is convenient to condemn: voice for a Gazan child but silence for a Coptic one, or the reverse. A consistent ethic cannot be redrawn depending on who benefits from the world's attention that week.

What Oppression Feeds, Without Excusing It

I have also had to be careful with a claim I believe is true but easily misused: that prolonged oppression is fertile ground for extremism. Research on suicide terrorism has found military occupation to be among the strongest common threads across cases, and structural violence — humiliation, deprivation, statelessness — measurably lowers a population's resistance to the narratives that recruit it. But the evidence is not simple: many who take up arms come from stable, educated backgrounds, and ideological movements like Salafi-jihadism have an autonomous life that predates and outlives any single occupation. Education does not manufacture terrorists; it does what Paulo Freire said education should do — it builds critical consciousness, the capacity to name one's own oppression and refuse to accept it as natural. That capacity has, throughout history, produced far more strikes, boycotts, and civil resistance than it has produced violence. The First Intifada proved that. Gandhi proved that against an empire crueler than most modern occupiers. To say oppressed people had "no other option" but arms erases the far larger number who chose otherwise, often at great cost to themselves.

So: oppression explains without excusing. It is accelerant, not cause. And the moment explanation curdles into justification for killing a child, I have left the ground I claim to stand on.

The Warning Inside Every Liberation Struggle

There is a harder thing I have come to believe, and I do not say it to score a point against either side: in the absence of a firm moral discipline, the oppressed do not automatically become just once they hold power. They can become mirror images of what oppressed them. This is not a claim about one people or one state — it is a pattern history keeps producing, and it comes from within the very traditions of liberation I draw on, not from outside critics of them. Paulo Freire named it directly: the oppressed, in seizing power without transforming the structure itself, risk becoming what he called sub-oppressors rather than liberators. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of liberation theology, made the same point from within faith — he distinguished political liberation from liberation from sin, insisting that the first without the second guarantees nothing, since only genuine conversion prevents the freed from repeating what freed them. Gandhi reached the identical conclusion from a different tradition entirely, insisting, against enormous pressure from his own movement, that the means of resistance had to be as disciplined as the cause was just. He understood something easy to forget in the heat of grievance: a freedom won by the oppressor's own methods tends to produce, eventually, a new oppressor wearing the old one's methods. That is the warning built into every liberation struggle I have named in this piece — including the ones I support, and including any state, anywhere, that was itself born of persecution and now governs others.

A Path That Runs Through Neither Extreme

I cannot, in good faith, stand with either pole of this argument. On one side sits rhetoric like the Swedish protest song 'Leve Palestina', whose chorus calls not only to support Palestine but to "crush Zionism" outright — language that slides from opposing occupation into denying any Jewish claim to self-determination at all, which is a different and darker thing than the position I hold. On the other side sits the view that treats every act of the Israeli military as self-defense beyond question, absorbing civilian deaths as an acceptable cost rather than a moral fact requiring scrutiny. And I will name, without hesitation, the version of this I find most cynical: a Hindutva politics that backs Israel not out of any real solidarity but out of contempt for Muslims, using a foreign conflict to launder a domestic prejudice.

I do not believe this war ends by force, because if force could end it, it would have ended already, on one side or the other, decades ago. It ends, if it ends, at a negotiating table — not imposed by any outside power but among the actual stakeholders: Israelis and Palestinians themselves, the neighbouring states, and representatives of the three Abrahamic faiths whose claims to this land are entangled with each other. I find real hope in a two-state framework, with borders both sides accept and guarantees both sides trust — not because this is untested, but because the precedent already exists. Postwar Europe, whose nations spent the first half of the twentieth century trying to exterminate one another, built exactly this kind of peace: shared institutions, defined borders, and mutual guarantees strong enough that France and Germany have not seriously contemplated war in eighty years. Egypt and Jordan reached comparable peace with Israel directly, and both have held for decades. This is not an idealistic thought built in an academic's ivory tower. It is a documented method, tried and proven elsewhere, and I believe it is the only realistic way ahead. I hold onto a smaller, stranger piece of evidence that coexistence is not merely theoretical, either: Neve Shalom–Wahat al-Salam, a village in Israel where Jewish, Muslim, and Christian families have chosen, for decades, to live as neighbours rather than as combatants.

Why I Cannot Stay Silent

I do not carry the fear that keeps some people quiet on this question. But that was never really the reason to speak. Hind Rajab was where this reflection began, not where it ends — I cannot let one filmed, named death matter more than the thousands who died the same week without a camera, a voice recording, or a name the world ever learned. That would be its own kind of selective outrage, the very thing I have tried to hold myself against throughout this piece. She is not the point. She is the door through which the point became impossible to avoid.

On the other side of that door are children and innocent people whose names I will never know — Palestinian, Israeli, Rohingya, Armenian, Kashmiri, Baloch, Tibetan, Coptic, Yazidi, Jewish — killed in wars fought, in every case, by those who called their violence necessary. A faith, or a nation, or a conscience that can hear of all of them and say nothing has already decided what kind of silence it is willing to live with. I am not willing to live with that silence. The name changes. The obligation does not.

Conscience at the Crossroads: Prayer, Protest, and the Ethics of Refusing Atrocity

 

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.

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.