[Reader-list] Fwd: balagopal on sudesh

[Nagraj Adve]

This piece on Sudesh Vaid of PUDR was written years back by K.
Balagopal - both of whom I regarded very highly - in the Express, on
her passing away. It still has relevance for our times, which is why I
am forwarding it.
Nagraj


REQUIEM FOR ONE OF A RARE BREED


The death of Sudesh Vaid was a non-event even for many people who
regard themselves as knowledgeable about human rights affairs. Yet she
is one of those who shaped the contours of the civil rights movement
as we know it in this country today.

We live these days in a climate where people are not content to
quietly influence the course of history. It is more important to be
loud as an individual than to be effective as a group, a collective,
an idea. Some times, people seem to even value the personal noise they
make over the welfare of their proclaimed cause. Sudesh was markedly
different. The movement and the organization were always more
important, and so long as they progressed it did not matter that one
did not `make one’s mark’ as an individual.

That is of course an old virtue among communists. Along with what is
bad about the communists, this virtue of self-denial too has been
thrown over board by the self-proclaimed new movements. Assertive
self-aggrandisement is the mark of movements these days. There are
many seemingly reasonable excuses for the self-indulgence. Criticism
of it can even be given quite a few bad names. Yet the excuses are but
excuses.

One that comes immediately to mind is the fact that with the
communists this self-denial never touched the top leadership, around
whom in fact a personality cult frequently developed. Self-denial in
practice often meant suppression of individual identities, denial of
individual nuances of thought, and destruction of individual talents
at the lower level of the organisation, in the name of a dominant
identity called `the Party’, which seemingly abstract entity was but
the name by which the handful of leaders imposed their will and their
views on all. A characteristically patriarchal state of affairs, in
other words. And a state of affairs that offends the human rights
spirit.

Yet, people like Sudesh Vaid who possess strong individualities have
shown that this is not an inevitable consequence of the idea that the
movement and the organization are bigger than the individual. That it
is possible to be part of a larger whole and find contentment in its
weal, and yet be a distinct individual, a free individual. If it
turned out otherwise within the communist movement, the fault lies not
with this idea but with the obsession with power that is a
characteristic of the communist project.

Sudesh Vaid taught English literature at I.P.College, Delhi
University. She was a founder-member of the Peoples Union for
Democratic Rights (PUDR) a small but influential civil rights group.
She was among those instrumental in developing a view that has
strongly influenced PUDR’s activity, which is again uncharacteristic
of today’s fast crowd among what are being called `civil society
groups’: that the concern of the human rights movement is with causes
which are `unpopular’ not only with the establishment but also the
mainstream of democratic protest. Unpopular because they are the
concerns of a small or marginal or illegitimate segment of society. Or
because they do not merge with any alternative macro-view of
development, democracy or equity. Such concerns don’t make much news,
and don’t make their proponents cult figures, but nevertheless – or
perhaps for that very reason – they are the proper concerns of the
human rights movement.

There is much to be said for this view, though perhaps not all of us
felt very comfortable with it since it can be taken to extremes, as it
some times has been, in which case it leaves out the possibility of
what is marginal growing and becoming central, or what is central
standing for a principle that helps the marginal. Also, some times,
democratic principles need the strength of big collective assertion,
and cannot be content with being small for ever.

However that may be, a culture of searching out what nobody – even the
dissidents of civil society –wishes to see or cares to articulate is a
culture that values the effort that bores into the wall of societal
indifference and builds something tangible in the long run, well after
those who have drilled inch by inch are no longer around to reap the
cult. Not a very attractive proposition for the effect-maximising
model of social concern that has grown around democratic activism in
the last decade or so. But nevertheless a valuable point of view.

While acknowledging that generalizations can be dangerous, and that no
single attitude can possess all the virtues, it can perhaps yet be
safely said that the true human rights attitude is an attitude that
shuns power. In traditional human rights circles one has too often
been confronted with activists who love the power of revolutions, and
in today’s new generation one equally often comes across activists who
are at home with the power-packed culture of capitalism. It is not
that these categories of activists are incapable of making any
contributions to the cause of rights, but the distinctive emphasis
that belongs exclusively to the human rights movement would elude them
and their achievements.


K. Balagopal
06-12-2001