K. Balagopal (1952-2009) was a mathematician, civil rights activist and one of post-independent India’s most original thinkers. Born in Bellary, he grew up in Andhra Pradesh completing his education in the State, finishing up with a doctorate in Mathematics from the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. Following a brief period of time in the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi, where he was a post-doctoral fellow, he returned to his home State and taught at Kakatiya University until 1985. He resigned from his teaching post following a threat to his life by the police and came to be involved full-time with civil rights work thereafter, first with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), as its general secretary, for 15 years and then with the Human Rights Forum (HRF), an organization that he helped found in 1998.
Balagopal belonged to a generation that was politicized by the Indian Emergency of 1975, when the nearly three-decade old Republic went into crisis. Arbitrary arrests, detentions without trial and mysterious deaths signaled the arrival of the authoritarian State, and Indian citizens got a foretaste of what their nation-State was capable of, and how it could act in impunity, even as it declared that it was doing so, in the name of the sovereign good. Being young and critical minded meant that one engaged with the times, and Balagopal did: from being interested in Marxism, he went on to follow and support the politics of the militant Left in Andhra Pradesh, especially the consequential work it did, by way of organizing the very large underclasses in rural Andhra, comprising to a large extent, of adivasis and Dalits, into a formidable political force.
The brutal suppression of the radical Left in the State provoked an active civil rights movement into existence. Balagopal was associated with it from its earliest days and began a life in critical ‘fact-finding’ – enquiring into diverse forms of State violence, from the so-called ‘encounters’ to torture in detention, from criminalizing democratic protests to actively thwarting rights work. His work in civil liberties took him to different parts of India, and he worked with other rights organisations in the country, and took the lead in organizing frequent fact finding missions to Kashmir, as if to remind the Indian State and its citizens of the crimes committed in that part of the subcontinent in the name of the sovereign nation. Likewise, he was invested in rights violations which had become equally routine in the North-East of India and subsequently in Chattisgarh, in the wake of ‘development’, and which resulted in wholesale attacks on the rights of tribal populations, expropriation of their lands, rights to the forest and worse, rendered them subject to vigilante violence, endorsed by the State. This made him wonder about the nature of development, so to speak, and he came to be equally concerned with the alienation of the commons when a dam was built or coal or other minerals were mined and brought these within the purview of rights violations as well.
Meanwhile, his understanding of rights changed and expanded as APCLC found itself enquiring into instances of violence against Dalits. Arguing that the caste system was an enduring form of inequality, Balagopal insisted that civil rights groups ought to not only address specific instances of caste violence, but treat caste inequality as such as a rights concern. That is, it was not the State alone that violated democratic rights, but social relations and institutions, pertaining to caste and gender did so as well. In this context, he suggested that the history of civil rights ought to be rethought, and not traced back to protests against State repression alone. Rather, this history must be located in the long trajectory of rights struggles that challenged the constitutive inequality of our social systems.
During this time he also raised questions about the so-called ‘bourgeois’ character of rights. He argued that a right cannot be viewed merely as a postulate that is granted by the State to stem popular discontent, or a limited value which is upheld by the ruling classes to mask the reality of economic exploitation. Rather, a right is to be seen as a norm, defined, affirmed and upheld through people’s struggles for equality and justice. The inviolability of rights was thus “an ethical standard” developed over centuries, and while this standard might be enhanced and reinterpreted, it cannot be viewed only as a contingent virtue that would eventually be superseded in a utopian future. It was an important civilizational value that has to be cultivated and expanded.
Such views brought him into conflict with the APCLC and he left the organization. This was when he and others founded the HRF, as a rights organization that understood equality to be an idea that “that originated in the fight against brahminical society that began in the middle of the first millennium BC and continues till today”. By locating itself within a long tradition of thought and resistance to the caste order, HRF sought to define what Balagopal had always considered important: a philosophy for rights movements, and one that cannot be reduced to the views of those movements or political actors whose rights it seeks to defend.
Meanwhile, Balagopal trained himself to be a lawyer and practiced in the courts for more than a decade, taking up cases of the most marginal sections of our population, to do with land, rights of access to resources, and curtailment of rights. Meticulous as he was in his legal work, and committed to securing such rights that had come to be enshrined in the Constitution, he yet entertained no illusions as to the ‘lawless’ nature of Indian caste society, and pointed out, on several occasions that the ancient lawgiver Manu’s writ ran still in vast parts of the country. Rights movements thus had to consistently grapple with violations that stemmed as much from civil impunity as with those that had to do with State impunity.
Writings
In addition to being a civil rights activist, Balagopal was a prolific writer. He wrote of rights matters in Telugu and English. His essays were almost always more than reports on what happened. He may be said to have pioneered a genre of writing in this regard, and one that evades description: impeccable in its attention to local detail and histories, he yet managed to evoke the larger picture, sketching for us the class and caste contours of a society in rapid and violent transition. In the event, we learned how to ‘read’ an event: in its immediate as well as historical contexts, and in terms of changing social and political relationships, amongst classes and castes, and between the Indian people and the Indian State.
Having been fellow traveler with the Indian militant Left, Balagopal was part of conversations on India’s development, the nature of class formation, the relationship between the all-India ruling classes and class-caste blocs at the regional level, the nature of inequality, and of the place of caste and religion in defining the latter and the making of what we might call ruling class consciousness. He was one of the few that actually paid attention to ‘what the ruling class does when it rules’, his essays on the late Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N T Rama Rao capturing this rather accurately for us. Balagopal was also a keen observer of the relationship of government to political parties, and of how the administration, particularly at the level of the thana and tehsil heeds local structures of social and economic dominance – matters that were dissected with critical finesse in his writings on atrocities against Dalits, as these unfolded in Karamchedu and Tsunduru.
Balagopal was also perhaps one of the few civil rights activists who acknowledged the importance of Dr Amebdkar’s life and work in building a rich, democratic culture. He also believed that an expansive history of the civil rights movement in India ought, legitimately, to start with the rights struggles waged by dalit and anti-caste movements. His brilliant and suggestive writings on caste and civil rights represent important points of conceptual departure for those concerned with the relationship between ‘social’ caste and ‘public’ law.
Likewise, his understanding of authoritarian aspects of political life in India, evident in his many writings on the Hindu Right, laying out the ugly contours of Hindutva, point to new directions: the need to locate as precisely as possible the rise of the latter, and the manner in which democratic failure and equally political opportunism have won the Right a measure of political respectability.
Brilliant in his political analysis, and careful in his sociological reasoning, Balagopal was concerned, above all, with the ethics of living, of how we treat each other, and most of all, he agonized how might we live with each other, in a spirit of respect, affirming our collective rights to equality and justice.
