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 organisation 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 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: 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.
Structured inequality
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.
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 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.
And this is how perhaps how he would like to be remembered: as one who trusted 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.
( V. Geetha is a writer, translator, social historian and social activist.)
