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 Anantapur, to mark 10 years of
Human Rights Forum, the organisation he and others started in 1998. That
had become a pattern almost, that he would leave for the districts on the
weekends, to enquire into rights violations – land-grabbing by the state
or private agencies for special economic zones; hazardous opencast 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 conscience
keeper. 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 subinspector… 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 Sanghatana (in the Economic & Political Weekly).
His insistence on retaining a radical class approach to the politics of
the Indian peasantry helped bracket and problematise 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 had 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 Salwa
Judum in stymieing dissent as well as the hugely problematic use of
violence by the Maoists, especially in contexts where popular mobilisation
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 face of capitalist
rationality and state terror. He did not counsel a simplistic pacifism;
rather, he spoke of the importance of mobilising 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.
