South Asia Citizens Web

My first introduction to Balagopal was as a brilliant mathematician with a doctorate from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a lecturer at the Kakatiya University in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. Balagopal had to leave his job at the Kakatiya University because there was a danger that he would be killed by the police because he had been taking up the cause of the Naxalites.
I could not help smile when I remembered our first meeting as lawyer and client and he had looked at the petition (…)

The following is the text of a resolution adopted at the National Convention of the Citizens Initiative for Peace held in the Capital on October 20, 2009. The convention was addressed by Justice P.B. Sawant, Prof Randhir Singh, Aruna Roy, Surendra Mohan, Prof G. Hargopal, Sandeep Pandey, Ajit Bhattacharjea, Prof Manoranjan Mohanty, as well as representatives from Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orisssa, West Bengal; victims of state violence in Chhattisgarh also gave testimony of state violence in the name of fighting
the Maoists.

We are a people who have retropicalised and reorientalised our geography. The village of the 50s and 60s has disappeared. It is this distancing which allows the middle class to use the language of security with the impunity and indifference and demand the bombing of our own people. There are huge sectors of India where poverty has become pathological to such an extent that India is a failed development state. A democracy when threatened suspends the rule of law to save itself. In an ironic sense, it sacrifices democracy to save democracy. Security and Internal war becomes reasons to save the state.

The recession is a promising moment to expand NREGA with greater emphasis on building social capital in a big way.

The impunity of repression is directly proportional to the extent of insecurity of the State. This is the obvious reason why dictatorial/tyrannical/autocratic regimes tend to be brutal. This does not mean that insecurity, brutality and repression belong only to repressive regimes. Democratic governments reflecting the insecurity of the voters and elected leaders have very often displayed rather audaciously their capacity to unleash very sophisticated and brutal campaigns of repression, often subverting the very values that got the government into power in the first place.