[Reader-list] Balagopal obit by V. Geetha

[Harsh Kapoor]

Kashmir: Will The Pain Never End?
Impunity of policing and aimlessness of politics: A report

A Publication of HRF, PDF & APCLC December 2007

report in pdf version (716 kB)
http://www.humanrightsforum.org/Kashmir-pdf.pdf

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Sanjay Kak <kaksanjay at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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