Justice V R
Krishna Iyer, former judge Supreme Court of India and a prominent human rights activist, a long time associate of Vigil India Movement passes away
at the age of 100 on 4 December 2014.
Justice V R Krishna Iyer was a close associate of
Rev. Dr. M.A. Thomas, the founder of Vigil India Movement. He has been a guidance force to the VIM team to
strive for the protection and promotion of human rights at different capacities
in the 70s to 90s and a recipient of the prestigious M.A. Thomas
National Human Rights Award in 1998.
VIM expresses the heartfelt condolence to the demised soul and recalls the great memory in association with
Justice V R Krishna Iyer by republishing his acceptance speech for M.A. Thomas
National Human Rights award 1998.
A SOULFUL RESPONSE TO VIGIL INDIA’S GENEROUS GESTURE
I am grateful to the “VIGIL INDIA MOVEMENT’ and the distinguished Judging Committee for
linking my name with a great India, a noble human and global gentleman, Rev.
M.A. Thomas, whose life, simple, selfless and sacrificing was a cast in the
mould of Jesus and shaped by the Gandhian ethos. The passion of Christ on the Cross has been
an inspiration for generous of humankind, a symbol of spiritual protest against
imperial injustices and intolerant fanaticism.
His implacable opposition to the suppression of human personality and
gender justice was also a divine summons to human compassion in the place of
than-attic theology and mono-manic marketisation! Rev. Thomas strode the world in the hallowed
lift of Christ and every cell of his body and soul struggled for human rights
and justice, geared to higher values and resistance to corruption and
exploitation.
His vision was
cosmic, mission humanitarian and passion value-based liberation. Vigil India was his torch motivated for
social transformation where sharing and caring and dynamic fraternity is the
rule of law and life.
I am too
humble to deserve the distinction now conferred but so too am I too small to
challenge the unanimous choice of the panel since I have profound respect for
each member and his integrity, mellowed experience in society and wider perception
of human rights culture. So I submit
myself to his ceremonial function. I
hate to be honoured for an awards and rewards, citation and cash appetizers. What special contribution to society have I
made to deserve this magnificent need?
My conviction, I confess, is compassion for all living creatures best
expressed by Blake when he poetized:
“ A dog starve’d at his
master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the
state
A horse misus’d upon the
road
Calls to Heaven for human
blood”.
And did not
burns weep in verse: “Man’s inhumanity to man make countless thousands mourns”.
Universality of creation and unity of
humanity keeps my being vibrant. Why?
Because Donne’s diction dwells in me:
“We man is an Island,
entire of it self:
Every man is a piece of the
Continent,
A part of the main, if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less; as well
as if a promontory were,
As well as if amanor of
they friends or of thine
Own were, any man’s death
diminished me, because
I am involved in Manking;
And therefore never send to
know for whome the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee”.
My
fundamental philosophy and basic value set are derived from a strange
confluence of Swami Vivekananda, Karl Marx and Comrade Jesus with a sprinkling
of the finer humanism of Prophet Mohammed. In sum, I am at simplicity in life, search for
happiness in a universal just order, detest servility to gain glory, doubt,
with honest skepticism, every proposition but date to accept facts even if
allergic to elite opinion and anathematic to bightrow bosses and above all I
held, deep in my soul, that I am human and so anything that distress any living
creature deeply disturbs me and commands me into curative action, even if in
vain. I am aware of my weakness and feel
painfully ineffectual when injustice is inflicted on fellow creatures. I am a home of lost causes, martyr of pursuits
of noble futility, victims of unwitting misunderstandings and nidus of
unpopular, maverick noises. Still I must and hopefully will battle for human
justice in all its dimensions, even if denounced and defeated by more powerful
authoritarians to dissent against evil is a duty.
Permit me
friends to do first things first. So, I
bow, in profound reverence, before the cherished memory of that incomparable
humanist Rev. M.A. Thomas. We need him every hour, every moment in our asuric
system, to defend the moral order, spiritual culture and probity in public
life. His diamond hard integrity, his
rare commitment to truth, liberty and submission to the supremacy of eclectic
values, sans which life losses its sublimity and the universe its divinity,
made me gravitate towards him. Rev. Thomas was a one-man campaigner against the
decline and all of Bharat’s rich heritage, happily composite, and morally
Gandhian. What a piece of work was Thomas, gentle and
compassionate, noble in bearing, a holy human in luminous locomotion, deep in
concern for justice, truth, amity among communities and a heart tuned to the
travails of the lowliest and the lost. He
wrote to me few days before his death about his illness and possible
terrestrial exit. His premonition proved
true and plunged me and that large fraternity which looked to him for a lead
like a lodestar in grief. Today, his
magic memory still belights this dark world and gives us a heritage of
hope. Dear brother Thomas, salutations to your radiant, tho’
invisible, presence on Indian earth where a pestilent congregation of foul
vapours pollutes our biosphere and glorifies hedonist greed and chauvinist
bombs while millions starve or suicide in this Barabbaque order devoid of purity and probity in private and public
life! What a pity the nation is riddled
with rouges, rascals and free booters a s well as criminalized politicians and
political criminals.
You, Dr.
Thomas, were the founding father of ‘Vigil India’. Eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty and my homage to you is blended with a tryst to battle against
corruption, gender outrages, glitterati immorality and violation of human
rights of vulnerable humans by those dressed in ‘a little brief authority’ but
‘strut and fret the hour’ robbing the resources of the nation and inviting MNCs
to colonise our national economic space, even sensitive areas. Colonialism is
the opium of the creamy layer who are mindless in signing away our Swaraj. We miss you Rev. M A Thomas but your spirit
will stll lead kindly light amidst the encircling gloom.
I am in a
demoralized mood, a spirit of unworthiness, a feeling of aloofness to cash
wards and flattery thro citations. My
mind is elsewhere, my search is in a different sphere, my sunset age is
shell-shocked by the scenario of megalomanic vanity, worldly adventurous and
ambitious gold rush. They are ‘the
hollow men’, …… the stuffed man……….. headpiece filled with straw’! Alas, how free I feel, having jettisoned
these money-making, tuft-hunting crazes for continuance in power as different
incarnations!
Currently,
gross materialism, hostile ethnos and communal ethos, by a python-like process,
crushed the humanist code of ethics.
Therefore, a transformation, at once material, moral and spiritual,
without inhibiting the infinite creative potential within everyone, the last
pariah included – is the only answer to the challenges of violence, greet, sex
and other bestial vices. Vigil India’s
tasks are hard and heavy in the battle for human rights and against inhuman
wrongs.
Be that as it
may, I plead my inability to be happy in the company of the cash and carry
glitterati. While it is the wisdom of
the ‘Vigil India Movement’ to present a hundred thousand rupees to me, but
once presented, it becomes my option to use that sacred sum for human rights cause. Not a single rupee out of this noble amount
will belong to me and the entire sum, I publicly declare, will go to the study
of public law in the human rights domain.
May be, an authentic institution capable of energizing human rights
education and activities like the National Law School of India University, may
accept the trust.
I seek to
place before you a mental page from my life autobiographical but authentic
before I close.
My holistic
tryst with destiny is humbly to strive for a New World Order which makes the
biosphere a hallowed home for all humans and other ecological species in an
environment of harmony and compassion, thro a lovely synthesis of value,
material and spiritual. Such a cosmic
symbiosis where the distant stars and leaves of grass have a underlying unity
is the lesion of Sri Satya Sai Baba, Sri Narayana Guru, Sri Aurobino, a host of
leaders of sublime thought and a sages of the Upanishads. This dynamic transcendentalism, with its
paradigm shift, replaces the currently fashionable but fragmented materialst
ethics with a new noetic ethic, ecological vision and self-realisation
process. Who am I? is a perennial
interrogation which baffles my consciousness, with the iron curtain (or
translucent veil) dividing life from Death.
In flashes I perceive that God (or the Supreme Intelligence of Creative
Power) ‘sleeps in the mineral, awakens in the vegetable, walks in the animal
and thins in man’. If supra-mental
faculties a re kindled, divinity meets and mates with humanity where
consciousness becomes the blissful resource of the universe. This integral yoga, intuitive, subjective, yet
scientific and spiritual is the profound idiom the deep fulfillment of TAT TVAM
ASI (Thou art That).
The kingdom
of God is within you, said Christ. In
the seashore of world children play, says Gitanjali. These are the matrices and glimpses of my
philosophy of life, shared in the long-ago days when my wife and I sat near the
sea in my Tellicherry home and the very process was joy. Life is a verb, not a noun, a perennial
process, not a final product.
I am four
score and three; but in the end is the beginning, a discovery of the manifesto
of humanity an antyodaya sarvodayas project too deep for words. This vistarami vision in my dream, where
secularism and socialism, diginity and fraternity are invested with a celestial
significance. A micro-beginning of an sdyssey towards the infine! It is but a reverie, distant from the
reality. And the recurrent lines of
Tennyson haunt me, day after day:
“ So runs my dream: but
what am I?
An infant vrying in the
night:
An infant crying for the
light
And with no language but a
cry”.
Finally, I
express my profound feelings to “Vigil India” for conferring a distinction I
hardly deserve, except as a Camp follower of the Rev. Dr. M.A. Thomas Brigade.
Justice
V R Krishna Iyer
10-8-1998