LOK MANCH (LM), a major initiative of Jesuits in Social Action (JESA) in the South Asian Assistancy, was begun a little over a year ago with the two Indian Social Institutes of Delhi and Bangalore as its founding members. This is an attempt to conceptualise the initiative as a faith-inspired inclusive movement so that it can be up-scaled and replicated, motivated by a relevant ideology, inspired by an appropriate liberation theology and driven by an effective spirituality of action.

Effective Praxis
Learning from our field experience and reflecting on it is a much-neglected aspect of our work in the South Asian Assistancy, in our Apostolates and institutions, especially where it is needed most, in new ventures in a fast-moving environment. Given the resources we have and the opportunities available, this amounts to a culpable neglect. An absence of a serious critical reflection on action can only end in ‘ad hocism’ that makes us go round in circles, repeating mistakes without learning from them, forgetting achievements without carrying them forward, wasting resources when they are already scarce. To break from this vicious circle, we need to integrate a process of praxis as articulated by Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed: action – reflections – action in an on-going accompaniment to all our works (1970). This must be the pervasive commitment in all our endeavours as it is very much a part of Ignatian discernment.

LOK MANCH, a large and significant project in which JESA has heavily invested, has the potential of being replicated as a model of collaboration in other apostolic fields, mutatis mutandis. There have, no doubt, been reports and reviews but so far, they have not been articulated and theorised in a framework that would help to focus, plan and take the project to the next level in scale and scope once it has reached a constraining threshold. This is critical if there is to be continuity with new participants being initiated in the culture and dynamic of LOK MANCH as a people’s movement.

LOK MANCH (Peoples’ Forum)is conceived as a platform for social action organisations to work for the ‘Development and Access to Entitlements of the Marginalized’(See Document: Understanding LOK MANCH). These organisations would include faith-based and other NGOs. It is premised on the principle of collaboration with like-minded agencies for a common goal in an interactive network of support. This is articulated in its vision – building an egalitarian, just, inclusive, democratic and secular society in India, spelt out in 3 objectives as follows:
• a vibrant national platform
• improved access to government schemes
• identifying gaps in policies and implementation

These are to be monitored, reviewed and evaluated by 3 indicators:
• lobbying for implementation of schemes
• improved access of households
• training of key leaders

The process is further premised on 11 core values: liberty, justice, equality, fraternity, love, peace, social commitment, gender justice, credibility, forgiveness and excellence. These are made operational in 3 core principles:
• decentralized, participative decision making
• transparency in accountability
• shared responsibility and team work

All this sets a rather high bar for the partners. It will require a selection process to screen out the chaff from the wheat, and a continuing socialisation into the inspiration of the organisational vision/mission to separate the sheep from the goats.

A detailed organogram illustrates how the network of partners will function (See LOK MANCH – Organogram). The network is envisaged as self-sustaining once set up and initiated by the National Committee of LOK MANCH. There is an ambiguity in the organogram where the National Committee (NC) is mentioned as the “implementer”, whereas elsewhere LOK MANCH itself is referred to as a facilitating venture. This is neither clearly indicated from the beginning in the founding documents, nor is the process of transition made operational from initial implementer to on-going facilitator. Moreover, whether sustainability to be premised on a top-down process or centred at the base for a bottom-up initiative, facilitated from higher levels in the organisational structure, is a question that remains hanging. This must be clarified and spelt out if devolution and subsidiarity must be meaningful in the context. This is the first step in contextual theorising.

‘Understanding LOK MANCH’ is spelt this out in 13 bullet points. Given below are the summarised key points to understand how LOK MANCH is conceived:
• a faith inspired movement
• for advocacy at the local level
• for the marginalised and excluded
• to use its structures of organisation and leadership
• to link the grass-root organisations to each other and to higher level structures
• to empower access to entitlements from available government schemes
• to conscientise on communalism, caste-discriminations, and other negativities
• to build up leadership skills and knowledge

It is imperative that the implicit ideological understanding, the theological framework and spiritual perspective underpinning our work, be made explicit and communicable to initiate collaborators and partners and thus, effectively sustain the vision and mission, and our way of proceeding. For, if partners are to be on the same page in their understanding, they must be socialised into the vision and mission which gives purpose and meaning to the endeavour. This is all the more necessary if a facilitating agency must motivate by inspiration rather than the carrot and stick.

But first the lesson from SAPI, an earlier version of LOK MANCH must be learnt lest they be repeated. From the organisational point of view, SAPI was rather similar to LOK MANCH. The World Social Forum in Goregaon, Mumbai, 16-21 January, 2004, was SAPI’s high point, where it established a significant presence on an international stage. However, its demise seems to have been due its overdependence on Jesuit initiative, particularly that of the province Co-ordinators of Social Action (CSA), which was often not forthcoming as personnel changed and new ones had other interests and priorities. Hence, after 8 years, as new persons had little understanding of SAPI, they did not bite into its vision and mission. Funding too seems to have been an issue. The layperson, still holding on with the remnants of SAPI, might be able to fine-tune our understanding of the decline of SAPI. There are two lessons here that need to be carried forward:
• overdependence on Jesuit participation is no guarantee of continuity, rather it undermines capacity building in non-Jesuit personnel; and
• committed, responsible laypersons are the main building-blocks of such a movement.

Moreover, an ideological perspective must be expressed in an organisational culture, which then becomes the creative basis for a consequent organisational structure. A mismatch between the two can be fatal. Too often we overemphasise structure and neglect culture, which then stymies any strategy for organisational growth and enrichment.

We forget what Peter Drucker said: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ (The Economist, 11 January, 2014)

Articulating an ideology must be founded on experience, and the practical way to do this is with a praxis approach of Freire, mentioned earlier. The same would be true for a contextual theological understanding. Furthermore, a praxis approach for social action would be called forth as will. This is to ‘ideologise’ and ‘theologise’ a movement.

This paper attempts to flag some of the key points that must be integrated into an ideology of social action, which must then be refined further by experience in the field, and followed by a faith reflection for a contextual theology of collaboration.

Concretising an Ideology
The bed rock of an ideology for Jesuit initiated social action must be Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and the faith-vision implied there, which amounts to a Catholic Social Ethic, in contradistinction to the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber). Too easily on the one hand, have we assumed the invisible hand to resolve tensions and contradictions and paid homage to the gods of the free market and encouraged profit-making as human achievement; and on the other, for too long have we dogmatically accepted Marxist social analysis, without testing its relevance to the South Asian context. Aloysius Pieris has convincingly demonstrated the urgency for an Asian Liberation theology, not a transplanted Latin American one. Here are some of the crucial points in CST:

1) the priority of the human persons as ends-in-themselves, hence their inviolable dignity and freedom

2) human person as essentially a person-in-community, not an individual by oneself, an independent monad

3) to be person is to be inter-personal, i.e. being in relation with others in a network of relationships that constitutes a community

4) the human community is not made up of isolated monads in interaction but of interpersonal I-thou relationships that humanise persons, not I-it relationships that alienate them (Martin Buber)

5) human relationships are not just a matter of survival, or mere convenience, but of ethical responsibility, and finally love

6) our ethical responsibility is exercised first for those most in need, the poor, the last and the least, marginalised and excluded, ‘the widow, the orphan, the stranger’

7) this responsibility is shored up and sensitised by love, for the poor, the anawim, as the talisman of our authentic concern

8) this ideology is social democratic, rather than liberal democratic. It must be concretised with a socio-cultural analysis as and when required

Here, there is little scope if any, for unregulated free-markets, or free enterprise principally for making profit rather than contributing to the common good; or for a consumerist culture that indulges the material and alienates the human. Hence CST implies that:

1) markets are primarily for exchange, not for profiteering and speculation

2) private enterprise must serve the public good not just private purpose

3) man does not live by bread alone
In other words, CST is necessarily counter to a political economy premised on market efficiency, individualised profit, and materialism. The ecological crisis is a stark pointer to where such a perverse political economy has brought our world today and where it is leading from here.

Finally, an ideology must find support in cultural expressions in social myths and rituals, the arts and literature. Rather than attempting to create a new organizational culture, suitable cultural expressions can be drawn from the broader culture of society, e.g., the rich understanding of ‘community’ in traditional and Adivasi society:

1) to exchange relations as embedded in community structures and not the market

2) the person as part of, not a part from the human community and the more inclusive eco-community

3) the idea of frugality contrary to the prevailing consumerist culture

Moreover, such an ideology premised on the common good, with down-up priorities, will call for collaboration both horizontal and vertical. We are all in this together and common/collective problems call for common/collective solutions. In our complex world, inter-related problems cannot be addressed individually or singly; rather they demand a cooperative, integrated response. This is the ideological premise for collaboration and pooling resource through networking.

Contextual Theologising
There is a compelling scriptural and theological foundation for CST that need not be elaborated here. It comprises a rich and moving imagery for the Kingdom of God that represents the eschatological fulfilment of the ultimate common good. Suffice it to say that there are complementary understandings in other religious traditions, among them Gandhi’s seva-marg beginning with the last and the least, so beautifully expressed in his favourite bhajan ‘Vaishnava Jana toh’, the Bhodisatva mythology, the inclusiveness and equality of the Umma in Islam, the non-violence of Jainism, the bravery of Sikhism, … All these make for inter-religious possibilities with like-minded collaborators, that can bring together faith-based NGOs in a dialogue of action. Further, there are other secular and political ideologies that vibe with this vision. This can add an ‘extra-religious’ humanist dimension to our dialogic endeavour. We still have to articulate a ‘sacred secularity’ and a spirituality to go with it, as Raimundo Panikkar has suggested, ‘to consolidate our resources and inspiration, both ideological and theological’.

If we understand spirituality as a vision and way of life, then within the on-going ‘practice’of such a spirituality, ‘praxis’ must become part of a discernment process, that opens us to that ‘inner voice’, the still small voice of conscience that speaks to us, as persons and in groups, in the innermost recesses of our hearts, where our deepest desires and concerns, our hopes and longings, not just for our own enlightenment and fulfilment, but of that collective dream waiting to be translated into the reality of a more just and human world. Too many of us suffer from the disease identified by the Australian aboriginals in their encounter with the colonialists: The White man he hath no dreaming!

Our world is becoming a dreamless nightmare, where the rich suffer from affluenza – the bad effects of living in a society where many people are too rich, such as always wanting new, expensive things or having to work too hard – and the poor suffer from deprivation and disease. We must find the motivation to bring hope to this broken, bruised, hope-less world. A social activist spirituality, whether religious or secular, faith-based or otherwise must be one of hope, so emphasised by the Marxist Ernst Bloch in his Principle of Hope(1986), and so poetically expressed in George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methusalah (1921):

You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”

This is a worldly hope in the promise of the future reality as the noumenon hidden in the maya of the present phenomenon.

Consequential Implications
CST is an ideology of caring and sharing. For such an ideology to be effective it must be alert to, and deal promptly with the convenient abuse in the ‘free rider theorem’ that results in the ‘tragedy of the commons’. The person or group that rides free on the generosity and goodness of others selfishly, taking advantage of a set up but not contributing in turn to the venture, hollows it out. Eventually, once a certain threshold of free riders is crossed, this leads to a crash that can only be set right by starting all over again with all the participants internalising the required mind-set.

This corrosive and contagious malaise is rooted in a mind-set that seeks one’s own advantage, not community benefit, private profit, not social welfare, material goods, not spiritual happiness, individual privilege, not the common good. Common responsibility for the common good becomes no one’s responsibility! This is a social Darwinism where the devil takes the hindmost, each for oneself in a war of all against all. This precisely was the basis of Thomas Hobbes’ ‘social contract’, which begins on the premise that human life is ‘poor, nasty, brutish, short’, and only authority and force can sustain the social fabric. When this is inadequate, it leads to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, the degradation of common resources that finally presages the ‘war of all against all’.

This ‘tragedy of the commons’ is most apparent in our present ecological crisis, but the same happens when social resources and social capital are drawn down but not reinvested in and replenished. Our present social crisis is surely the result of an excess of individualism and little sense of communitarian responsibility.

Salvatore Quasimodo expresses this movingly:

“Each alone on the heart of the earth
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.”
We have forgotten John Donne’s inspiration:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

For any effective network, this commitment to a common purpose for the common good is imperative, a sine qua non. Indeed, it is the relationship of inter-dependence between the nodes in the net that sustains it, or else it unravels into loose strings and isolated knots.
The theological basis for such a communitarian understanding of the human has a firm basis in the Scripture, where the kingdom of God is for the people of God as a people, a community, and not just as individuals. Salvation, for the Catholic Christian is not an individualistic affair, but concerns us as persons-in-community, who make up the people of God that includes all persons of goodwill. As such we are called to collaborate with each other; this is embedded in our mission.

A second implication is regarding collaboration. This is essential for the complexity of the tasks to be dealt with today: confronting new challenges with our limited and ever diminishing resources, not just material and financial, but especially concerning personnel. However, partnerships cannot be genuine if they are instrumentalised. Collaborators must be partners not employees or volunteers who execute assigned tasks. Obviously, partners must be called to own the endeavour and their ownership will be proportionate to the responsibility taken, or rather given and accepted. To the extent that they contribute their resources and invest themselves, they can claim and must be given ownership of the endeavour as well. This is the meaning of an equal, or rather equitable and meaningful partnership, and it demands a basic level of trust.

So much of our organisational collaboration suffers from a corrosive clericalism, that is unable to trust laypersons to be worthy and equal partners. This is the battle that Pope Francis is fighting in the Vatican dicasteries with their hierarchies and bureaucracies. It is part of a war that needs to be fought at lower levels and in other places as well. The assumption that only our own can be entrusted with our missions seems to show that so little has been learnt from the recent scandals in the Church, not just at the local level, but also in religious orders, not excluding our own. Undeniably then, clerical betrayal of trust and mission has been enormous.

Equal/equitable partnership demands an appropriate initiation and training of would-be partners. They must be competent and committed, and getting them there must be the responsibility of those sharing their mission. The spiritual understanding here is considering the mission as a gift, a gift that has to be shared, not kept for oneself. Sharing this gift means making collaboration with others a part of our mission, not a practical need to be fulfilled by employees when finance is available or by volunteers when finance is short. This is where collaboration must be grounded, in our obligation to share the mission we are called to.

These are but two implications spelt out here. There are many others that need to be elaborated, which will depend on the context. This can be done in an on-going praxis as suggested earlier.

Conclusion
In summary then, the starting point must be a practical praxis: learning from the past, reflecting on the present, and reaching out to the future. This needs a socio-cultural analysis based on Catholic Social Teaching, which is in essence about caring and sharing. This in turn, must be concretised in a social democratic ideology, applicable in the local context. For faith-based groups this can be further inspired by a liberation theology for Asia that goes beyond the religious to find a sacred space in the secular so that all like-minded persons of goodwill can be included in a dialogue of action for the common good. Only a spirituality of hope can make this praxis, this ideology, this theology sustainable. And finally, discernment, collaboration and networking are the founding premises which can make this mission effective for the kingdom.

This is an initial exercise in theorising a people’s movement. It may seem a dream. But if I dream alone it may not add upto much. Only if all dream together, can the dream be made a reality! Fr. General Arturo Sosa has challenged us thus: “Our audacity can go even further and seek not only the improbable, but the impossible, because nothing is impossible with God.” Could we then dream of things that never were? And I say, “Why not?” With this audacity of faith, we call to “Row out into the deep water” (Lk 5:4).

References
Bloch, Ernst, 1986, Principle of Hope, MT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Economist, 2014, 11Jan: http://www.economist.com/news/business-books-quarterly/21593403-forget-annual-reports-go-canteen-what-makes-company-tick-learning.
Freire, Paulo, 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Bloomsbury Academy.
Shaw, George Bernard, 1921, Back to Methusalah, Brenano, NY.