Social Justice In India: Reflections

Special Articles / Henry J D'Souza / Social Work Profession in India: An Uncertain Future

“I do not long for kingdom, heaven or rebirth, but I wish to alleviate the sufferings of the unfortunate” proclaims Yudhishtira in Mahabharata1.  The Upanishads state, “Let all be happy and healthy, let all be blessed with happiness and let none be unhappy.” Such quotes, cited rarely, can indeed form the basis of a Hindu liberation theology of Dharma and significantly validate the struggle for economic and social justice for the poor and suffering millions of India.  To be sure, it is astonishing that the Supreme Court of India’s justices chose to cite these quotes in its 1997 historic decision, Samatha vs. Govt. of Andhra Pradesh  (Ramaswamy, Ahmad, & Pattanaik, 1997, p.26), which essentially upholds the principle of social justice when the Government of Andhra Pradesh conspired to give extracting rights to transnational mining corporations, in the tribal lands protected under the Fifth and Sixth Schedule of the Constitution of India. Samatha (means equality), the human rights organization working for the rights of the tribal groups in Andhra Pradesh, sought to stop corporate usurpation of tribal and Dalit (the term used to refer to the untouchable communities or the Scheduled Castes) lands to strip them of valuable extractive reserves, by its successful appeal to the Supreme Court.  Since then, similar decisions have been issued prohibiting the corporate usurpation of tribal and Dalit lands in  Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Rajasthan (Press Trust of India, 2012).

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