On the evening of 13 September 2025, as twilight painted Mumbai’s skyline over Nariman Point, the Y.B. Chavan Centre filled with activists, students and civil society veterans determined to attend an event once denied to them. The annual Father Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture — delivered this year by Jesuit theologian Father Prem Xalxo SJ on the theme ‘Migration for Livelihood: Hope amidst Miseries’ and chaired by senior advocate Indira Jaising — was a gathering imbued with both mourning and morale.

Originally slated to be held in August in St Xavier’s College, the lecture was abruptly cancelled after the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), a right-wing student organisation, objected to honouring Swamy, describing him as ‘an anti-national’. For many of those assembled, the rescheduled event was no mere academic exercise but a collective act of defiance. In choosing to persist at a public venue instead, organisers turned the lecture into a refusal to let memory be silenced.

The evening began with the screening of the documentary A Caged Bird Can Still Sing, which recounted Swamy’s life and struggles. Its symbolism was unmistakable: a voice caged, yet still resonant, echoing the refusal to let repression erode resistance.

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The life and sacrifice of Father Stan Swamy loomed over the evening like a moral compass.

Born in 1937, Swamy spent more than five decades working among Adivasi communities in Jharkhand, founding the social action centre Bagaicha in Ranchi and insisting, time and again, that constitutional rights to land and forest must mean more than words on paper. He fought displacement caused by mining projects, corporate land grabs and the state’s erasure of tribal self-governance enshrined in the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act.

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Known for documenting the arbitrary arrests of young Adivasis accused of being ‘Maoists’, Swamy condemned the misuse of the UAPA — the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act — as a tool against dissent. That same law was turned against him. In October 2020, at the age of 83 and battling Parkinson’s, he was arrested in connection with the Bhima Koregaon–Elgar Parishad case, accused of Maoist links on ‘evidence’ widely discredited by rights groups.

Denied bail several times, Swamy’s requests for basic care — including a sipper cup, because his hands shook — became symbols of state indifference. He contracted Covid-19 while incarcerated and died in judicial custody at Holy Family Hospital, Mumbai, on 5 July 2021. Internationally, his death was described as a “judicial murder” and to his supporters, he became a martyr of conscience — a priest punished not for crime but for solidarity with the poorest.

For organisers of the Mumbai lecture, keeping his memory alive was inseparable from defending democratic spaces.

Migration as compulsion, not choice

Father Prem Xalxo, speaking from the vantage with the combined perspective of a social scientist and Jesuit thinker, turned the spotlight towards those who, like Swamy’s Adivasi comrades, are displaced by circumstance. India’s internal migrants — numbering in the hundreds of millions — remain the country’s most invisible workforce, he argued.

Migration, he said, is too often romanticised as opportunity. The reality is far starker. For most rural families, particularly from Jharkhand, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh, migration is not a choice but survival in the face of vanishing forests, depleted farmlands, and shrinking state protections. What begins as hope too often ends in vulnerability.

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In slums that mushroom around cities, migrants work in informal construction, precarious agriculture, or domestic labour. Teenage tribal girls, Xalxo pointed out gravely, are pushed into household jobs in metropolitan centres where they face not just economic exploitation but physical and psychological abuse. The pandemic exposed these frailties brutally — millions were stranded without wages, food or transport.

“This exodus is not footloose movement,” Father Prem reminded the gathering, “but displacement born of dispossession.”

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Yet despair was not the only note; Xalxo also spoke of the resilience migrants embody. Their remittances sustain rural households, fund education for siblings, and make modest healthcare accessible in places where the state retreats. Seasonal journeys to cities, despite hardship, are also stories of hope, showing how dignity endures even when livelihoods collapse.

Practical policy measures formed a backbone of the lecture. Xalxo and subsequent speakers suggested:

• Portable social security benefits that follow migrants as they shift for work.

• A statutory body for the protection of domestic workers, one of the most exploited migrant groups.

• Legal aid and awareness programmes in urban labour hubs.

• Systematic mapping of migration flows so that housing, healthcare, and education planning can be grounded in evidence.

As Indira Jaising reminded audiences, behind these policy frameworks lies a historic struggle. “Father Stan Swamy was enforcing the rights of Adivasis as enshrined in the Forest Rights Act,” she said. “It was these rights, once taken from them by colonial regimes, that he sought to restore.”

Vanishing rebels, voiceless tribals

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Speakers including human rights lawyer Mihir Desai and activist Irfan Engineer emphasised that holding the lecture against odds was itself a statement about civil liberties in India. “This lecture is not commemoration alone,” one noted. “It is resistance made public.”

Over 50 organisations, ranging from People’s Union for Civil Liberties to Karvaan-e-Mohabbat, lent their solidarity. Their backing turned what might have been a subdued scholarly session into a lively civic arena where dissent, memory, and hope intertwined.

Many reflected on the atmosphere of academic and political intimidation. The resistance to holding the lecture at St Xavier’s, they noted, parallels broader attempts to police memory in Indian campuses, where speakers are barred, syllabi altered and programmes curtailed. By pressing ahead at Chavan Centre, organisers signalled that civil society spaces still survive, even if contested.

Linking migration and democracy

The evening’s discussions drew together two strands: the crisis of migration and the fragility of Indian democracy. Both, speakers argued, are tied. When state policies ignore migrants, they signal who is valued as citizen. When men like Stan Swamy are criminalised for defending migrants, the moral crisis becomes political.

Migration, Father Xalxo insisted, is about making survival possible. But survival without dignity cannot be called justice. Migrants are not merely statistics in census tables — they are citizens entitled to housing, healthcare and secure livelihoods. To treat them otherwise is to hollow out the promise of democracy.

The image of Stan Swamy hovered over the evening as a moral benchmark. He was remembered less as a lone figure than as someone who “walked with” Adivasis, sharing their pain, amplifying their voices, recording their losses. He embodied the principle that defending the marginalised is not charity but a political act of asserting rights.

For those present, his incarceration and death made urgent the very themes the lecture explored. If India continues to criminalise voices raised for migrants, how can it ever hope to safeguard migrants themselves?

As the evening drew to a close, the auditorium reflected a mood that was both sombre and mobilising. The lecture reclaimed memory where it was sought to be censored. It offered not only testimony of suffering but also pathways to reform. And it reframed migration not as a crisis of mobility but as a test of India’s democratic soul.

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Father Xalxo’s closing words encapsulated the paradox: migration is both misery and hope; both a wound and a resource. To navigate it requires compassion, political will, and deep engagement with those who labour unseen.

The memory of Father Stan Swamy insists that such navigation cannot wait. If democracy is measured by how it treats its poorest, then migrant workers, tribal communities, and all those who move out of compulsion must be at its heart.

As lights dimmed at Chavan Centre, many felt that the caged bird had indeed sung again — and in that song was the promise of reclaiming rights, dignity, and hope.

Views are personal

HASNAIN NAQVI is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai 

Stan Swamy, in life and in martyrdom