[Reader-list] Balagopal obit by V. Geetha

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Nagraj,

Many thanks for posting this obituary on Balagopal. His sudden, and  
unexpected death certainly leaves us all a lot poorer. His totally  
non-partisan commitment to the rights of vulnerable people will  
always remain exemplary. And in a society where people from the  
sciences are often bulldozed into abdicating any sense of involvement  
in society, his life, which included being a mathematician as well as  
a civil rights activist, of teaching himself law, of disagreeing,  
when necessary, not just with the state but also with everyone,  
including his own former comrades, on matters of ethical principles  
will have much for us all to learn from.

In today's climate, where the so-called war on Naxalism, leaves both  
the state and its clients in the media unable to think in any nuanced  
terms, a life such as Balagopal was all the more significant. I never  
met him, but always wanted to, thanks for bringing him alive by  
posting this tribute,

best

Shuddha
On 10-Oct-09, at 8:29 AM, Nagraj Adve wrote:

> A slightly longer unedited version of the obituary on Balagopal by  
> V Geetha
> that appeared in today's Hindu.
> Naga
>
>
>
> K. Balagopal: A Memory to be cherished
>
> 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.
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Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net