The Telegraph, March 23 , 2015
One of the finest - Remembering Govind Pansare
PRABHAT PATNAIK
I was based in Trivandrum at the time, working in the Kerala State Planning Board. I got a call one day from Kolhapur from Govind Pansare of the Communist Party of India, asking me if I would give the annual memorial lecture for that year, instituted in the memory of his son, Avinash, a CPI youth activist who had died in an accident a few years earlier. I agreed, though I did not know Pansare, because of his belonging to the CPI. So, one morning I flew from Trivandrum to Mumbai, was met by some CPI activists who took me to the Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan of the party, located within a stone’s throw of the Siddhivinayak temple in central Mumbai, to await the overnight train that would take me to Kolhapur.
Two memories of that evening are etched in my mind. One was the enormous ruckus made by a group of children on the top floor of the Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan where I was lodged. They were apparently rehearsing for a play. This, I was told, was a common practice: a part of the building was given for use everyday without any charge for various cultural activities by local children, a gesture on the party’s part which impressed me greatly. The other memory is of the two CPI activists, who took me out for a walk before dropping me off at Dadar station, pointing out the telltale signs of Mumbai’s transition from a fishing village to a megapolis; such signs, like old fishermen’s huts, which had been built over subsequently but whose remnants had not been fully erased, abounded in that neighbourhood.
At Kolhapur, where I was lodged at the university guest house, I met Govind Pansare for the first time - a tall, impressive, grey-haired gentleman with great gravitas and a touching concern for my comfort, who was held in very high esteem by everyone around. At the venue of the lecture, scheduled for late afternoon, where I went after lunch, there was an adda going on with stories of Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj and of Govind Pansare (he himself had not turned up) doing the rounds. Shahu remains an iconic figure for the social emancipation movement in the country, because he did much in his area to eliminate "untouchability" and other such oppressive social practices.
Apparently, he had a novel way of doing so: he had once asked a person of dalit origin, who had come to him for assistance, to start a tea shop in Kolhapur for which he had provided financial help; and any of his "subjects" who wanted to meet him for any reason were asked to come in the morning to the tea shop where he would invariably be ensconced having tea, together with his ministers and advisors, much against the latter’s wishes. The visitor would be gracefully offered tea by Shahu that he could scarcely refuse. Hence everyone perforce was made to drink tea prepared by a dalit because nobody dared to incur the displeasure of the ruler. And this was around the beginning of the 20th century!
At that adda I also learned of Comrade Pansare’s background and his fight against casteist and fundamentalist tendencies in western Maharashtra. Coming from an extremely impecunious family, Pansare had educated himself with great difficulty, taking up the job of a peon for some time to finance his studies. He had been drawn to the communist movement in his student days, and after some years of working as an academic in a local college, had decided to become a full-time party activist, doing trade union work and organizing the oppressed in the region. He had risen to become the Maharashtra state secretary of the CPI and had held a number of important positions in the party. But he had always been of the view that the communist movement had to engage itself with the struggle for social emancipation, for which an ideological fight against reactionary positions had to be incessantly carried out. It was this conviction that had prompted him to write a number of path-breaking books, including, above all, the one on Shivaji in which he had portrayed the latter not as an upholder of Hinduism, as is usually done, nor even as a mere "backward caste" leader asserting himself against Brahmanical dominance, but as a "secular" ruler who pioneered a Welfare State. This book, translated into many languages, has sold over one lakh copies.
The event at Kolhapur that evening in the memory of Avinash Pansare was very well-attended; there must have been several hundred people in the audience. Even more impressive was the stack of questions in written form that was submitted to me for answering at the end of my lecture. In fact, the stack was so large that before I could come anywhere near its end, I was whisked off to the railway station to ensure that I did not miss the train back to Mumbai.
In television studio discussions in Delhi, both hosts and guests appear generally agreed that the Left in India has become largely inconsequential, a spent force; and this view is echoed in the print and social media. But whether in Jullundur or Kolhapur or Rohtak or Guwahati or Tirunelveli, literally hundreds of persons regularly make it a point to attend serious intellectual discussions organized by the Left. Hence, only someone exclusively and myopically focused on parliamentary election results, someone who does not appreciate the power of ideas, who does not understand the fact that ideas, to borrow Mao Zedong’s phrase, can become a "material force", can hold the view that the Left is a spent force. For me, that evening in Kolhapur once more brought home this lesson.
Arriving back at the Dadar station next morning, I got into an auto-rickshaw to take me to the Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan, but to my chagrin, the driver would not budge. At that hour of the morning, several people, including large numbers of women of different ages, go to the Siddhivinayak temple to offer flowers; so, auto-rickshaws are never available at that time for single occupants. Each carries at least four passengers, and each passenger pays a fixed amount for being transported to the temple. I, therefore, had to suppress my "bourgeois" desire to have an auto-rickshaw all to myself and to wait until three other devotees had joined me. Sandwiched between them, I made the journey to the temple, paying some absurdly trivial sum, and then walked the short distance to the Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan.
After getting ready and consuming a masala dosa at a dhaba nearby, I took an auto-rickshaw, this time all to myself, to Santa Cruz airport, where I had to catch a flight to Calcutta for carrying out some official work relating to academic administration. Since the work at Calcutta was "official", I was met by a chauffeur-driven car at the airport and taken to what I suppose was a five-star hotel, all of which was a complete contrast to my Mumbai sojourn. Throughout that day, however, the memory of Govind Pansare and his wife kept coming back to me.
That memory came back to me again last month when I read in the papers that Govind Pansare and his wife had been shot at while taking a morning walk near their house in Kolhapur and that he had succumbed to his injuries in the hospital. Even though the exact identity of his assailants was not known, the general view was that it was some extremist Hindutva group, for whom Govind Pansare’s talk a few days earlier criticizing Nathuram Godse, M.K. Gandhi’s assassin, who is enjoying a revival of sorts in the new atmosphere of right-wing hegemony, had been impossible to stomach.
Whatever freedom we enjoy in this country, whatever "modernity" we have in this country, whatever social equality we have achieved in this country, is continuously under attack, and its preservation is made possible by the continuous struggles undertaken by a large number of persons scattered all over India. They do not make it to New Delhi’s TV studios, they are not to be found in the corridors of power in the nation’s capital, and they do not even belong to the metropolitan centres of the country. But, because of their sheer dedication, indefatigable energy and unquestionable integrity, they wield great influence among the people in their respective regions, in spite of the overwhelming odds stacked against them. Among all such persons, Govind Pansare was undoubtedly one of the finest.
The author is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi