Resistance movement: Rajan Naidu writes from prison
‘It is up to us whether we opt to remain bystanders.’
In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends – Martin Luther King Jr.
I am putting these words together in a small grubby cell – one I am sharing with another prisoner, who is twenty-one years old – in a Victorian wing of a prison. There is no writing surface. My fellow inmates have generally been friendly and well disposed towards me. Being locked up just under twenty-three hours a day has been much lightened by weekly Quaker group meetings. My thanks to Tricia Bradbury for her excellent chaplaincy here.
Routine indignities, privations, and minor (and not so minor) human rights violations tell us that the British penal system is rotten, antiquated and long overdue for thorough, independent review, and radical reform.
On September 14 I was one of fifty-one Just Stop Oil campaigners – five Quakers and three vicars among them – arrested for breaking an injunction. It was brought by North Warwickshire Borough Council, which, paradoxically, makes great play of how ‘green’ it is. The objective of the injunction is to shield fossil fuel corporations operating out of Kingsbury Oil Terminal from protests. But these acts are, in fact, not protests. They are acts of Nonviolent Civil Resistance (NCR) against rapacious corporations. These corporations are, purely for profit, knowingly and significantly contributing to the climate and ecological crisis, and the sixth mass extinction.
We take up NCR because, after decades of protest, rallies, marches, petitions, letters and phone calls lobbying politicians and corporations, there is still no effective democratic pathway that allows us, the great majority, to take back decision-making and policy-making powers. Over years these have been systematically stripped away from us, and transferred to an anti-democratic oligarchy of the wealthy. They are crushingly powerful, corrupt and corrupting, a tiny minority of our global population, the so called ‘one per cent’.
After our arrests I was put on remand for a week at HMP Hewell. On September 20, I was taken, with three fellow rebels, to Birmingham Crown Court, before high court judge Emma Kelly. We were representing ourselves, so each of us was permitted to make a statement in our defence. We chose not to do this but use the opportunity to say why we had done what we did, and that we would, whatever the verdict and sentence, continue. I appealed to the judge and everyone in court to join our struggle for climate-social justice.
My friends were fined and had to pay costs but told they could leave. I, because this was my third breach of the injunction, was sentenced to thirty-four days (which meant seventeen days with ‘good behaviour’) in HMP Birmingham. My release date was October 6.
The fact that we are in a deepening climate crisis has made very little impression on those who have the capability to bring about the healing reforms and structural changes we so urgently need. Rather, they are frustrating and blocking them – at least to judge by their grossly irresponsible actions and inactions.
The global movement for climate-social justice can, I believe, only succeed if it is rooted fast in humane values that will be familiar to Quakers.
Simplicity helps us recognise that selfishness, greed and consumerism are responsible for most of our gravest ills and injustices.
Peace shows us we need each to work on ourselves and with one another if we are to have a society based on nonviolence and the healing of hurts. We need restorative justice to be an integral part of that work.
Truth and integrity must be a basic requirement of decision makers as much as of ourselves.
Community reminds us that we are all in this together. We are all crew. It is up to all of us to build, nurture and lovingly maintain the diverse, friendly, inclusive communities we need.
Equity means recognising and ensuring that the needs of all – especially those who might be vulnerable or feel marginalised – are, as far as possible, fully met.
Sustainability is now a matter of survival. We need to learn, quickly, how to live lightly on this beautiful, finite planet of ours. This will mean learning to identify and reject the corporate ‘green washing’ and neocolonialism that has replaced military occupation and slavery as the scourge of the environment. This especially damages the peoples of the global south.
We need to bring and develop truly democratic processes at every level of society. To that end we need to initiate an era of people’s assemblies and, as demanded by Extinction Rebellion, citizens’ assemblies. Power must be taken back by the people – all the people.
Quakers have immense potential, which I hope will be realised, to contribute very significantly to developing the ethos of the global movement for climate-social justice. We must make sure it is grounded firmly in love, compassion and nonviolence.
In these fleeting moments, there is an opportunity opening up for Quakers to have positive influence and agency far beyond our numbers. People will only listen to us if we are fully and actively with them in the global struggle. That may mean that we are occasionally called to live a little adventurously.
Quakers have to be far more than ‘nice people’ if we are to come anywhere close to being the patterns and examples that our world so badly needs.
Since I have been in prison, I have received many kind messages of support and feel very much held in the Light. I have read the closing minute of the Living Witness Gathering (see 30 September). I hope Local Meetings will make time and space for reading and discussing this highly motivating document. My hope is that it will be a tinderbox of inspiration, a call to action.
We all start off as bystanders to injustices great and small. It is up to us, though, whether we opt to remain bystanders. It is, without a doubt, a great leap of faith, to trust, following discernment and our leadings, that giving up our security – perhaps our liberty and maybe more – can make us all freer. n
Rajan dictated the article over the telephone.
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