This is a transcript of the keynote address delivered by Harsh Mander on Albert Schweitzer Day in Aspen on July 1.
We are living through profoundly troubled times. So much that is most precious in our world is badly broken – kindness, justice, love, courage, caring, compassion and empathy.
Look at the world today. Democracy is crumbling in country after country. We see the hubris of highly centralised, opaque decision-making that abandons the poor and is worryingly crony capitalist.
Never before in human history have so few men owned so much. Unimaginable levels of wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while millions continue to endure desperate hunger, dead-end insecure jobs at dirt wages, homelessness and disease.
A trillion dollars is the wealth today of one single man. If he spends a million dollars every single day, it would take 2,700 years for his wealth to get exhausted. Yet one in 12 people in the world sleep hungry every night, one in two are denied affordable healthcare, and one in five children are malnourished.
The pandemic dramatically laid bare, with ruthless moral clarity, the catastrophic public costs of inequality. Millions of lives could have been saved if over many decades, states had made much greater investments in public health provisioning. And the explosion of mass hunger and joblessness and the mass dislocation of millions of working poor people could have been averted, had labour protections, social security and wage levels of workers been secured, and had governments ensured more money in the hands of every poor person.
I am convinced that when the history of these times will be written, this will be recorded as one of the cruel periods of human history. There was of course much greater destitution, famine, epidemics in the past. But today the world has the resources many times over to ensure that no child sleeps hungry, no child dies because they cannot afford health care. We have the capacity to end all of this, but we choose not to.
Soaring inequality runs hand in hand with surging politics of hate: hate that threatens and targets vulnerable minorities, immigrants and the working poor. It has everywhere become more and more dangerous to be a minority of any kind. They face persecution for the colour of their skin, the god they worship, their caste, their gender, their language and who they choose to love.
Each day there are new stories, sombre stories of surging hate, fear and inequality. This fraught and pitiless age is a moment of profound moral crisis.
Humankind has clearly lost its way.
I stand here in memory of Albert Schwietzer. He spoke to humankind during another moment of civilisational crisis, when the world was broken like it is today – broken by deadly wars, colonial oppression, the devastation wrought by the nuclear bomb and the genocide of the Holocaust.
He spoke luminously of “reverence for life”, for every life. We need once again today to heed his words, to affirm that every life is worthy of reverence. No life is dispensable. No life is of any lesser dignity and worth.
In recent years, both my parents died, my mother in her late 80s, my father when he was 94. Over the years before they passed away, they were in and out of hospitals, sometimes for many months at a stretch. I tried always to be by their side, immensely grateful each time that they recovered, granting us a few more years, months, days of their lives.
But one thought would haunt me through all of this. My parents could afford the scandalous hospital bills only because of their privilege. If we were poor, there is no way my parents could have lived so long. While I was blessed that they were alive, I was continuously mindful of the cold reality that in my country – and in much of the world – a person’s access to health care does not depend on how urgent her need is. It depends instead on how lofty is her privilege. To be poor condemns you to early preventable death.
I think of the homeless mentally ill women I often see in our city streets squatting on trash dumps. Covered with grime. Matted, unkempt hair. Nearly naked. Name forgotten. Family forgotten. Muttering inscrutable words. Solitary. Profoundly lost to the world.
I long, achingly, for a world where she has exactly the same chances of life as my mother had, that she is treated in the same hospitals with the same respect, dignity and care where my mother received the healing that added many precious years to her life.
A world in which there is equal reverence for her life.
Can we draw people of every social class and identity into a wide public debate about building a new social contract that ensures that no human being is allowed to fall below an agreed floor of human dignity.
What is this floor?
For me, I imagine a social contract in which no child will sleep hungry, no child will sleep under the open sky, no child will be sent to work instead of a school which is as good a school as for any other child her age, no person will be subjected to discrimination or violence because of her identity, no person will be denied free, good-quality healthcare, and no older person will have to work or beg to live with dignity. We must demand that we find the resources for all of this by greater taxing of the super-rich.
Thinking of Albert Schwietzer’s life all these decades later, I feel a particular kinship to his years of work with people living with leprosy in Africa. Some of the most formative experiences of my early work life was also with people with leprosy. In the 1980s, the number of leprosy patients worldwide was over five million. Around half of these were in India, many of them indigenous people in the impoverished forested regions of central India where I served as an Indian civil servant.
My first posting was in a subdivision called Barwani. I was 27. A procession of protesters arrived outside my office one morning. This one was strikingly different from any that I had encountered. It was a motley gathering of “burnt-out” leprosy patients, led by a communist school teacher. I say “burnt-out” echoing the title of Graham Greene’s classic novel about a leprosy colony in the upper reaches of the Congo river – A Burnt-Out Case. These were people who had been infected with leprosy, people who displayed signs of the terrifying consequences of this infection – dreaded for millennia – such as discoloured skin, damaged eyes, broken noses and stumps in the place of fingers and toes.
When I sat with them in my office, I found that their demands were heartbreakingly modest. It was a time when it was not uncommon for towns and cities to have savagely segregated settlements for people with leprosy in their outer periphery. Exiled to an unsanitary patch of land outside the town, unserved by any public services, all they sought for their shabby neighbourhood was a drinking water point, some drainage for the lowland swamp which they inhabited and possibly some street lighting. I promised that I would ensure these. But I added that I would love to visit them in their homes.
My visit to their colony – to which I then kept returning – revealed to me a people more ferociously ostracised than any whom I have met before -or since. Their monumental tragedy was that although their infection was entirely curable, it contained within it the unbearable burdens of millennia of brutal stigma and prejudice. The result of this was that the moment their infection was detected and known, they would be cast away even by those they loved the most – their parents, their spouses, their children. They would be banished from their homes and their villages.
They would scour for food in waste dumps and ultimately find their way to a shabby ghetto of women, men and children who had similarly been expelled from home and family because of their infection with leprosy. There they would join a new community of exiles, often find a new partner and start a new family of the expelled. But they would be mercilessly and violently despised by the town residents. So would their children. None would give them work. None would admit their children in schools. To survive, they would line the streets all day, seeking alms by displaying their deformed limbs and sores to despising eyes. Some coins were thrown at them from a distance.
I recalled a slogan I had heard: I do not want your charity. I only want a chance. I asked the residents of the leprosy colony one evening who among them wished to give up begging and find dignified work. They immediately all raised their damaged hands and this, for me, lit up the skyline. I brought together a band of compassionate Barwani residents to work with me to help organise for them the “chance” that the slogan iridescently spoke of.
We organised for them very modest but clean housing, employment in weaving and brick making, a child care centre, admission in schools and a local clinic. We called their new settlement Asha Gram, or a Village of Hope. For decades after my transfer from Barwani, I would return to Asha Gram with my family to celebrate Diwali or the new year with them in friendship and to watch with wonder and admiration as they built dignity and hope from the ravages and ruins of their past lives.
After this, in every district I worked, I sought out the inevitable leprosy settlement and tried to help them escape the dark despair and degradation to which they had been banished by the stigma of their ailment. Many Sunday mornings, my routine was to go to the leprosy colony with my daughter in my arms and join the residents for a meal, as my daughter played with their children. Some lifelong friendships emerged.
The central lesson I learned was that their malady was not the bacteria; it was uninformed and brutal societal prejudice and hate. Once when these are overcome can humankind leave behind these horrific tragedies that have come down from centuries. This has begun to happen. The numbers of leprosy infections have reduced to 200,000. India still reports 60% of the cases.
With leprosy, two other maladies preoccupied me over the years. Both of these, not unlike leprosy, are the outcomes of stigma and gross impoverishment.
One of these is tuberculosis. The other is mental illness.
Let me speak here of TB. First, a brief biographical detail. In 2002, after a frenzy of religious violence largely targeting the Muslim minority in the western state of Gujarat (where the chief minister was Narendra Modi, destined to later become India’s prime minister), I quit my position in the civil service in protest, convinced that this was a state-sponsored massacre. I devoted a lot of my time after leaving the government to working with the survivors of hate violence in Gujarat and other parts of the country.
I also started work with rough-sleeping homeless people in Delhi and other cities, and on the questions of hunger and starvation. In the course of our work of street medicine, we learned that rough-sleeping homeless people were five to ten times more at risk of death than people who slept under a roof. We discovered also that one paramount cause of premature death among homeless people was TB. Friends from the University College of London actively screened the population of homeless men on the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi and found among them, to their consternation and alarm, a higher incidence of TB than anything they had encountered anywhere in the world.
Why homeless men in Delhi show higher levels of TB than most other populations in the world, we don’t fully understand, except that TB is classically a malady arising from deep impoverishment. But we understand better the tragic trajectory typical of a homeless person who picks up the TB bacteria. After they contract the ailment, they continue to work until they become too feeble for physical labour, meaning they are unable to earn even minimal wages to buy food to stay alive. If, somehow, they do succeed in finding a bed in the highly overcrowded TB hospital, after a few days the doctor would discharge them to make room for the next in a long queue of waiting patients.
Perhaps the doctor would give them with terse but well-meaning counsel – “Go home, rest, be regular with your medicine, let your family take care of you, and eat nourishing food”.
But doesn’t the doctor understand? I don’t have a family, I don’t have a home, then what do I do?
I have no option except to return to the streets and die!
Unwilling to accept the incontrovertibility of this reality, we searched desperately for solutions to save the lives of homeless people who are infected with TB. And as with most worthy ideas, the solution in the end was simple. For at least a year after a homeless person is diagnosed with TB, we would create a space of rest, treatment, healing and care that substitutes for the absent family. We called these “recovery shelters” and opened these shelters in four Indian cities – Delhi, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Patna. There were numerous challenges in these efforts, but the results were immensely heartening. Many homeless people who came to us close to death recovered and walked out a year later, able now to return to the world.
The crises of our world are not just of inequality, or of the climate crisis. We are riven by the politics of hate, within and between nations.
The Nazi history of Germany in the early 1930s must always be a reminder that democracy is not just the rule of the majority, because that can mutate into fascism. Democracy is equally the protection of every minority, of all their freedoms, including their freedom to be themselves, to worship, speak, dress and love as they choose, and yet be equal citizens in every way.
Look at the flexing and rhetoric of war in the world today. One head of government is kidnapped, another assassinated. The most powerful countries in the world – including my own - are silent or actively support the televised slaughter of children, aid workers, doctors and press persons.
We are witness to a new arms race. I recall the words of President Eisenhower way back in 1953, that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He further warned that a world enmeshed in an arms race was expending not merely money, but “the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children”.
Let me speak mostly of my own country. There are terrifying echoes in India today not just of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but also of Jim Crow’s America, and the genocide of the Rohingya of Myanmar. The Indian people have strayed far from the dreams of India’s freedom struggle, and the pledges of India’s constitution that India would be a country that was just, equal and kind.
A country where it would not matter which god you worship or if you worship no god, it would not matter what was your caste, ethnicity, race, gender, wealth; you would be a fully equal citizen in every way, of equal worth and equal rights
Instead, India today is in the throes of an epidemic of hate. There was one partition in the land of India in 1947. Today in my country we are seeing a million partitions of the heart.
My country today, Modi’s India, is witness to the state at war with its Muslim citizens, and more covertly, with its Christian citizens’ freedom of worship. The people are today wrenched by the tumult of a state-led campaign of open hate targeting its religious minorities. The economic base of these minorities – their livelihoods and properties – are targeted using both changes in law and violent mob actions. Legal and social barriers have been erected to inter-faith sexual relations and marriages. These are described as “love jihad”. The state is rewriting history to demonize targeted minorities. It is also altering laws of citizenship to exclude Muslims from equal citizenship, and in the process of manufacturing mass statelessness.
It is not just the state. Lynching – reminiscent of Jim Crow’s America – have become commonplace. Crowds gather and performatively beat mostly Muslim men to death. The perpetrators themselves videotape the torment of the victims who scream piteously for hours, yet none come to their rescue.
A child born into the “lowest” caste is beaten to death because he touched the water container of his caste Hindu teacher.
Low-caste teenaged girls are routinely gang-raped.
And what about the ordinary citizen? It has become customary for the rest of us to look away as India’s Hindu supremacist government viciously targets India’s Muslim minorities: as their houses are bulldozed, their worship criminalised, their citizenship rights trampled, as some are thrown into detention centres of pushed at gunpoint across international borders.
To look away also when not just informal tenements but even homeless shelters are demolished to “beautify” the city for international guests.
To look away when are finest hearts and minds are incarcerated for years without trial because they dissent against the politics of hate and inequality.
These are just a few fragments of India’s growing darkness.
I think again of Albert Schwietzer. To be human is to affirm the will-to-live, he told us, but an ethical life is one in which one’s reverence of life leads one to live in the service of other people, and of every living being. He was inspired in part by ancient Indian spiritual texts and the ideal of ahimsa or non-violence.
From Gandhi, from Martin Luther King, we learn that you cannot fight hate with hate. You must find ways to fight hate with love.
With a group of fellow citizens, we have tried to counter new India’s epidemic of hate with a campaign of radical love. We call this Karwan e Mohabbat, or a Caravan of Love.
We resolved that we would go to the home of every person anywhere in the country where someone has been lynched. To share their pain. To seek forgiveness for what we have become as a nation. To assure them that we will be with them over the years as they pick up the broken pieces of their lives, and fight for justice. And that we will tell their story. We will continue to tell their story until the conscience of our people does not ache unbearably.
This video was during the second year of the Karwan. It is now nine years since we began this campaign. We have made more than a hundred journeys. Our journeys do not end because the hate does not end.
Families who have lost their loved ones to hate wonder where so much hate comes from. “Why did they torture him so much?”, they often ask us. “Why did no one come to his aid?” They feel alone and abandoned as they battle loss and the hate of their neighbours or strangers who attacked their loved ones. As we embrace and hold each other’s hands, our eyes turn moist as they weep. In each journey to the homes of the families of those who have lost their loved ones to hate and violence, we learn with humility how much our simple gesture of reaching out means to these distraught families.
The institutions of the state refuse to secure them the closure of justice. Even more painful is the profound lack of compassion and solidarity in local communities wherever these attacks have occurred. They rarely encounter empathy. They can no longer recognise this as a country to which they belong. Nowhere in our journeys of the Karwan have we heard reports of care and support for survivors of hate attacks by neighbours from other religions and castes. It is nothing short of a civilisational crisis that we have allowed hate to curdle even our capacity for compassion.
As I said, later generations will ask of each of us, and they did in Germany after the Holocaust. They will ask – when democracy was corroded, when millions were abandoned to lives of want, hunger and joblessness, and when the politics of hate triumphed, what did you do?
But you may ask: How do we fight the powerful forces of hate and inequality? How do we build a good society?
I am haunted by this question. I ask myself obsessively what is the way out of the profound civilisational crisis in which humankind finds itself.
The answer, Schweitzer told us, is reverence for life. I would say: equal reverence for every life.
One lesson from the pandemic was that no individual escape exits are possible. What has any chance of success is a struggle for collective human survival. Solidarity alone – between classes and gender, between nations, and between people and the planet – will enable us to overcome. We can only overcome together.
We must challenge the global “common sense” that the pursuit of the highest possible pace of economic growth should, in itself, be the highest goal of society. A market society pursues exclusively the goal – or mirage – of galloping economic growth; a good society must also preoccupy itself with everyone left out of this growth story.
Therefore, our new imaginations for the future must centre on the idea of solidarity and fraternity.
Solidarity is the recognition that there are no solo escape paths. We can only overcome together. Solidarity is many things. It is my capacity to feel your pain as my own. It is my incapacity to look away when you suffer. It is kindness. It is collective struggle. It is the moral resolve that we must take care of each other.
Fraternity literally means brotherhood, but this leaves out sisterhood and other genders. The Hindi word for fraternity in the Indian Constitution is beautiful – bandhuta. This means that whatever the differences in our faith, caste, skin colour, ethnicity and gender, we are bound to and with each other. It is the idea that we belong to and with each other. I suffer your pain, your injustice, as though it is mine.
There are many sibling ideas of fraternity. One of these is empathy. This is my capacity to feel your pain as my own.
Another is egalitarian compassion, compassion between people of equal worth.
And then there is caring. I love this luminous description of what constitutes the good society: a good society in one in which we take care of each other.
To mend and heal our broken world, most of all may we be driven by what I call radical love. This is love as politics, love as social philosophy, love driven by boundless courage. Love robust enough to risk danger, anger, loss, and isolation in order to protect another human being. Love based on such fierce courage and conviction that for my love and care for you, I should be willing if called upon, to go to prison, or even to give my life up.
The white and black people who fought racial segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa, the millions on the streets of cities around the world including many Jewish women and men to protest the genocidal attacks on Palestine, all are driven by radical love
One towering, luminous historical example of radical love comes from the last months of Mahatma Gandhi’s life, culminating in his assassination. Rewind to 1947, when India was violently partitioned into two nations, India and Pakistan. A catastrophic frenzy of mass hate erupted as one million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims slaughtered each other. Rivers of blood flowed. Fifteen million people trudged across the newly created borders, often with just a bundle on their backs or even less, leaving behind forever their homeland of centuries. Among these was my own extended family.
The mass rage this fostered fuelled in India a demand that grew into a raging fire, that just as Pakistan was a country created for Muslims, India should be a Hindu nation. But Gandhi was resolute. Our promise was that India would be a kind and equal country, assuring equal citizenship for people of every faith including its Muslim minority.
Mahatma Gandhi was not in Delhi to celebrate India’s freedom on 15 August 1947. Instead, he was in Calcutta, trying desperately to end the ceaseless butchery that playing out there. He ultimately undertook an epic fast, pledging he would not eat a morsel until the last hand raised to kill and maim was not lowered. It was this that finally brought peace to Calcutta, as Gandhi pitched his frail ageing body against the mass rising of hate.
Gandhi returned from a Calcutta to a Delhi teeming with refugees, heaving with hate and violence. He implored Muslims not to migrate to Pakistan, that India was still fully their homeland.
Gandhi believed in this idea of India so resolutely that he was willing even to give up his life for it. I look back with immense gratitude for the immeasurable moral courage that he demonstrated at the time of India’s Partition. This was his most agonised but also his life’s finest hour.
His was what I call radical love, love of such conviction that it defied the harshest tempests of hate with the most resolute courage. On the evening of 30 January 1948, as he walked to lead his daily all-religion prayer meeting, he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic. It was his insistence on humane and inclusive citizenship, and particularly that India would belong equally to its Muslim citizens, that led to his assassination.
It is radical love that illuminated also the struggle led by Martin Luther King Jr against racial hate. It is the same love that Nelson Mandela summoned even after 27 years in prison to heal his country torn apart by decades of apartheid.
Let me speak of another leader who more recently, in a moment of immense tragedy, with her people of New Zealand, showed a world riven by bigotry and hatred what solidarity and love can accomplish, even in the darkest times. It is a lesson which people in a bitterly divided world must heed. But will they?
In Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, a young man livestreamed as he shot dead 50 women and men who are in the Friday congregational prayers in two mosques.
The prime minister Jacinda Ardern immediately visited the mourning families to comfort them. In cultural solidarity, she covered her head with a black scarf. As she embraced them, her face mirrored their pain, making plain to those who had lost their loves ones in the shootings that she shared their suffering.
The following Friday the azaan was broadcast before the memorial service all across New Zealand. Outside the mosques where the terrorist had massacred the worshippers, and in mosques around the country, hundreds of men, women and children assembled in solidarity with the families of the dead. They locked their hands with each other, creating a wall around their Muslim brothers and sisters who prayed.
Ms Ardern again covered her head with a dupatta to show respect to a stricken people. Inspired by the prime minister’s gesture, women all over New Zealand – newsreaders, policewomen, ordinary people – covered their heads with hijab scarves.
The Imam Fouda , while leading Friday prayers in Christchurch in New Zealand one week after the terror attack, said to Ms Ardern, “Thank you for holding our families close and honouring us with a simple scarf.”
“We are broken-hearted”, he declared, “but we are not broken.” He explained: “We are alive, we are together, we are determined to not let anyone divide us.”
The crisis that I see in my country and in much of the world is that we stand witness to so much hate, oppression and deprivations, yet we are not broken-hearted. And this reveals how broken we have become.
In our surrounding darkness, there are moments when I wonder if our world can ever mend.
However, I am convinced that even in these times, despair is not an option. Hope is a public duty.
It is radical love, fraternity, solidarity and social caring - the mindfulness that we must take care of each other – these are the bricks necessary to build our radical imaginations for our shared futures.
May each of us join battle in small ways and big for a new world, a world that is kind, equal and just.
Let us together build this new world. A world in which your pain brings tears to my eyes. Your hunger and homelessness torment me. If there are chains on your feet, I feel my freedom is stolen from me.
Harsh Mander, peace and justice worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign in solidarity and support to victims of hate violence. He is a visiting faculty in the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. His recent books are Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities; and A Matter of Life and Death: The Unfinished Journey to Secure Healthcare for All.
You’ve read Scroll.
Now help sustain it
Scroll is funded by readers, not corporate owners. If you believe our work matters, support our newsroom. Become a member today!
We’re not driven by clicks or corporate interests – just honest, independent reporting. Keep us going. Support Scroll today!