[Reader-list] Balagopal obit by V. Geetha

[Sanjay Kak]

Dear Nagaraj

Would anybody be able to point me towards any material on Kashmir that
Balagopal (and the others at APCLC) had generated in the late 80's, early
90's, and which may be on the net?
I met Balagopal only recently, and very briefly, and thanked him for the
important intercessions that the AP groups had mae. He said one has not been
able to do enough, and was keen to enquire into the situation of Doda and
Rajouri, both highly militarised—and vastly ignored—parts of Jammu & Kashmir

Best

Sanjay Kak


On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Nagraj Adve <nagraj.adve at gmail.com> 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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