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BALAGOPAL’S
LEGACY WILL LIVE FOR EVER |
By Manoranjan
Mohanty
I cannot believe
that Balagopal is no more. He came to Delhi last month to address an
important meeting launching a Citizen’s Peace Initiative calling for
stopping the cycle of violence and urging for a dialogue between the
government and the Maoists. We had been in constant touch to carry this
initiative forward. At a time when the government’s military campaign
against the Maoists has been escalated and the Maoist attacks on the
police have also continued unabated bringing enormous sufferings to the
common people in the tribal areas Balagopal’s leadership was most
essential. The democratic rights community of India has lost an
invaluable asset and India a rare intellectual who has
contributed greatly to the progressive democratic thought of India.
Balagopal was the
standard bearer for many like me for the working in the human rights
movement. Together with Kannabiran and Haragopal he defined the meaning
of human rights challenging mainstream ideas of liberals and Marxists.
Civil Liberty above all was rule of law and therefore false encounter
killings by security forces had to be exposed. From Andhra Pradesh to
Kashmir to Manipur and Nagaland civil liberty groups took up this issue
and today there is a significant opinion in the country that opposes
false encounter killings. Even though such killings have not ended, but
the impunity with which it was going on is today widely challenged.
Balagopal’s contribution to this campaign for civil liberties will be
remembered forever.
For Balagopal
while in APCLC or in HRF civil liberty did not have a narrow meaning,
but included common people’s right to political, social, cultural and
economic freedoms. He took up cases of atrocities against dalits,
against women, against minorities and against nationality movements as a
part of the civil liberty movement. Andhra society has experienced a
great momentum of creative transformation during the past three decades
and people like Balagopal have contributed significantly to that
process. India’s democratic struggles for justice, dignity and peace
have benefited enormously from his insights and leadership.
I have many
memories to share. Let me just pick up one from our Adilabad experience.
In April 1985 I was in a five-member team together with Balagopal then
the General Secretary of APCLC going to participate in a memorial
meeting in Indravalli. The police stopped our vehicle and arrested us.
We were in a lock up for two nights. The first night I tried to humour
the team continuously, but he would give a only suppressed smile at
best. When i went to do my shaving the next morning and wondered why he
was not shaving he said- not under repression! That night we were
transported through the deep forest to a town for being produced before
a magistrate. Past mid-night in the deep forest I whispered to him - now
we should be ready to be encountered and I am proud to be in your
company now. He gave a big laugh and said- you will be disappointed ;
these are not law and order police men- these are court constables, just
wait they will stop and serve you tea. Yes, indeed, half an hour later
we were sipping hot masala tea in the wee hours of the morning in a
forest dhaba.
We got bail the
next day in the court. The case was withdrawn by the NTR government on
the initiative of many intellectuals later. Hundreds of people have had
this experience together with Balagopal of facing repression together
seeking to expose violation of human rights while upholding some human
values.
Balagopal decided
to break with APCLC and formed Human Rights Forum to insist on one issue
that human rights movement had to be an independent political force to
uphold human values. It had to challenge the state to abide by its
constitution and the laws and test all its institutions to prove
themselves fulfilling their legal obligations. It also had also to
challenge those who struggled for a new order to respect human values.
He relentlessly exposed the army and police atrocities in J & K, North
East, A P, Chhatishgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and elsewhere. He also
condemned many incidents of killings by the Maoists inviting their
wrath, but on many occasions the Maoists themselves regretted some of
the actions. The recent incident of beheading of a Police Officer in
Jharkhand which must be condemned by all civil liberty forces is a
possible case of that kind.
Many of us had
argued with him as to whether he was not defending abstract values of
humanism while struggling people had to contend with reality of
oppression and violence of many kinds. He proved his point not only by
concrete analysis of existing conditions of the political economy and
that combined with a most sought after people’s lawyer’s skill and a
trained Mathematician’s precision but also by going into deep
philosophical analysis of history of civilisation and how humanity had
to constantly create conditions of peace and beauty for each and all.
The readers of Economic and Political Weekly had some access to his
insights and much more was available to the privileged readers of
Telugu. For Balagopal the commitment to human values had to determine
our strategy of work at every level. This will be the abiding legacy of
the great humanist fighter for democratic rights.
Manoranjan
Mohanty is a Political Scientist and a Human Rights activist. E-mail:
dr_mohanty@yahoo.com
K. Balagopal: A Memory to be
cherished
By V. Geetha
At first it seemed a huge, obscene lie, the news of his death. It did
not seem possible—he had been busy as always the weekend before, at a
human rights convention in Ananthapur, to mark 10 years of Human Rights
Forum the organization he and others started in 1998. That had become a
pattern almost, that he would leave for the districts in the weekends,
to enquire into rights violations - land grabbing by the state or
private agencies for special economic zones; hazardous open cast mining,
farmers' suicides, health issues in adivasi communities..
Balagopal was not just another civil liberties man: A
brilliant mathematician who gave up his academic vocation for a public
life, a public
intellectual, alive to ethical doubts and concerns, yet committed to
being political and accountable in the here and now of history, he
sought to link thought, action, consciousness… For many of us, the
manner in which he lived his life was as important as what he said: he
was like a moral compass that you turned to, to check your own political
orientation and direction. Without intending to or wanting to, he became
a keeper of social consciences. In this sense, it was a great public
life, but nevertheless one that mattered to many, in the intimate and
silent corners of their hearts and minds.
For nearly two decades, Balagopal had worked hard and
argued much to deepen and broaden our understanding of democracy in this
country - precept and practice came together in his work, as he wrote,
took up legal cases, organised fact-finding missions and called
attention to the darker aspects of state power and authority in India.
His civil rights work acquired great visibility in the early 1980s, when
he was General Secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee
(APCLC): those were the years of the infamous encounter deaths, which
ended the lives of several idealistic communist militants belonging to
the erstwhile People's War Group and their supporters in rural and
tribal Andhra. During those years of the 'long knives' and draconian
laws, he faced threats to his life, was kidnapped by a vigilante group,
widely believed to be linked to the state police, arrested on a
trumped-up charge of murdering a sub-inspector … He survived all that,
and during the end of that period, around the mid-1990s, began to write
of the importance of thinking about rights violations in a broader and
more expansive context.
While agreeing that state
violence against its citizens and the impunity with which it was often
carried out was the worst possible threat to
democracy, he called attention to rights violations in other contexts.
Structured inequality, whether of caste or gender, he argued, was as
much a source of these violations. Further, he reasoned, the reactive
violence of communist militants as well as the spate of killings that
the latter carried out in the name of carrying out a 'class' war often
ended in the deaths of vulnerable citizens or minor state functionaries,
even as it left intact the real and material structures of state power.
He argued too of the importance of democracy, of the rights guaranteed
in the Constitution - for these had come about as a result of people's
struggles and movements, and rights groups had to learn to defend these
hard-won historical legacies.
During this period, he wrote on other things as well - the late 1980s
and early 1990s saw him respond critically to Gail Omvedt's articles on
the Shetkari Sanghatna (in the Economic and Political Weekly).
His insistence on retaining a radical class approach to the politics of
the Indian peasantry helped bracket and problematize Gail’s novel
approach to the unequal relationship between the country and the city.
However, he was no dogmatist. In the course of thinking through the
ethics and politics of communist violence, he asked deep and searching
questions about left politics and theory. He drew upon theories in
psychology, existentialism, and ruminated over the human condition as
such, as he attempted to square the ethical imperative that lies at the
heart of the socialist imagination with the sometimes violent political
practice of left militants.
Meanwhile, there was work to
be done: Kashmir and the North-east were causes that took him away
regularly from Hyderabad. His writings on Kashmir, dispassionate, wry
and acute in their analysis of the Indian state and army, and the
complicit role of Indian journalism in rendering murky, everyday news
from the valley, were unparalleled. He took to studying other movements,
especially the anti-caste movements in western and southern India, and
produced, as was his wont, stunning observations on the caste order:
Caste, he noted, is a production relationship, defining your access to
goods and resources, limiting, restricting your choices, until you
actually fought for them.
This rich medley of ideas have
since come to inform his many concerns, and for the past year and more
have helped illuminate – for many of us – the continuing anti-people and
pro-capitalist stances of the Indian state, the role of pro-state,
vigilante groups such as the Salma Judum in stymieing dissent, as well
as the hugely problematic use of violence by the Maoists, especially in
contexts where popular mobilization is possible and capable of
challenging authority. In one of his latest articles on violence and
non-violence, he noted that it was important not to be dogmatic about
the use of violence; equally, it was necessary to be alive to the limits
of violence, about what it could achieve in the fact of capitalist
rationality and state terror. He did not counsel a simplistic pacifism,
rather he spoke of the importance of mobilizing people, of creating
agitational movements…
And this is how perhaps how he
would like to be remembered: as one who trusted to radical popular
protest, who at all times wished to examine the ethics of such protests,
wanting to constantly test precept against practice as well as the other
way around.
For more
tributes, see http://balagopal.org/ |
