The theme of the January 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, India was “Another World is Possible,” surely a welcome hope to people like Leena Dhanalakshmi, a member of the Safai Karmechari subgroup of the Dalit caste, who was destined by birth to gather and dispose of human feces and decaying animal remains.

Leena conveyed the perils of this humiliating and hazardous work, which can cause respiratory illness and leprosy, especially when protective gear is not available. Despite a national law banning the practice of such caste-bound labor, the 40-year-old mother of five, abandoned by her husband, had no alternatives.

JOHN SEALEY PROVINCIAL ASSISTANT FOR SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES

Like racism, ongoing casteism demonstrates that unwritten laws tend to endure in the human heart, often negating corrective civil legislation. Today 95 percent of all scavengers in India are Dalits. Doubly stigmatized by caste and occupation, Leena is nearly invisible in an increasingly privatized world economy.

Motivated by the core principle that each life is intrinsically valuable with rights to be asserted and defended, South Asian Jesuits have aligned their mission with the social struggles of the Dalits, indigenous people, and refugees. Indian Jesuits work as lawyers defending workers’ rights; as educators providing literacy and vocational training; as pastors proclaiming the spiritual Good News of the Gospel; as researchers giving academic voice to the experience of the poor; and as community organizers linking fisherman and farmers into cooperative networks seeking sustainable cultivation.

The social forum in Mumbai (colonial Bombay) brought together a delegation of 108 Jesuit scholastics, 177 priests, 130 religious sisters and over 1,000 lay colleagues, joining over 100,000 participants. My entrée to the conference was primarily through the Wisconsin Province’s recent twinning partnership with the Kohima region in Northeast India. (See www.wisprovupdates.org for more on this arrangement.) Mumbai is a city where the spoils and the wreckage of globalization are simultaneously apparent. Riding by train or rickshaw to forum events, I could see the distant glass towers of the downtown financial district (where rents can outpace Manhattan), while outside my open window children labored alongside the road, miraculously finding ways to play and laugh.

Fr. Louis Prakesh, SJ, director of the Indian Social Institute, observes that the forum is intentionally held as a counter-event to the World Economic Summit, also held every January.While the World Economic Summit convenes the global financial powers to promote liberalized free-trade, the World Social Forum is organized by and for marginalized sectors to take stock of the destructive consequences of globalization. It brings together civil society (scholars, non-governmental organizations, churches, and labor cooperatives) to promote alternatives to the swift foray toward privatization confronting the world’s poor.

In post-911 America, while promoting freer movement of capital and commodities across borders, low-bid labor contracts, and unfettered access for multinational companies to extract raw materials, we simultaneously establish more impenetrable walls to keep out the victims of free markets.

In Mumbai comments and analyses by panelists often expressed suspicion and resentment of current US military and trade policies that mandate how poorer countries are to govern themselves, lest they risk isolation. In fairness, equal criticism was also directed at local corruption which places personal benefit above public good.

It would be naïve to think that either the social forum or the economic summit represents the entire truth on the complex issues of trade policy or the globalization agenda. Yet we are so heavily exposed to hearing and seeing one side, it begins to frame our perspective.

Besides limited coverage in The New York Times, the social forum barely registered U.S. media attention in January’s cultural/commercial Super Bowl swirl. Therefore, it’s worth reporting the significant participation by our Jesuit friends and brothers to proclaim God’s love for the poor. Fr. Provincial James Grummer, SJ has reflected that Jesuits and Jesuit-sponsored institutions are in an almost unique position to bridge what seem to be hostile, and too frequently, false polarities we draw between North and South, rich and poor, liberal and conservative.

If we were to meditate on the forum theme of making a different world possible, what sort of world would we imagine? Who is rendered, like Leena Dhanalakshmi, untouchable in our society, or in our hearts? What written and unwritten laws maintain this arrangement? How could we stand with the Dalits who live among us and find a home for those rendered refugees by forces beyond their control?