Anand Teltumbde Trampled by the State Juggernaut

by Romar Correa

“The permission may be please be granted to use Handcuff to avoid physical contact with the accused amidst Covid-19 Pandemic and spread of Novel Corona virus.” National Investigation Agency (NIA) petition to the court in the case of Anand Teltumbde.

The wheels of justice in India crush those without the financial means and political connections to prove their innocence. Anand Teltumbde, a mild and retiring academic, is the latest casualty. His claim to infamy is the minor classics he has authored on the condition of the poor and marginalized in the country. Indeed, in an open letter to the public the day before his incarceration the only regret he expressed is losing access to his laptop and the unfinished manuscripts there.*         

Teltumbde, 69, surrendered to the NIA in Mumbai yesterday. Gautam Navlakha, a journalist, will do so shortly, for allegedly committing crimes against the Indian State. Both will be jailed. The keys will be thrown away.

Jailed while awaiting a judicial trial

The denouement follows many months of a phantasmagorical journey that began yet again, as news reports attest, with the incitement of Dalits, the oppressed low caste in India, by a rabid Hindu extremist group early in 2018. This clash in Pune, by a bizarre transmutation, was turned around and laid at the door of Teltumbde and others.  

The March 17 pronouncement sending Teltumbde to jail, instead of being free on bail while his case is tried in a court, was delivered by a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, one of them only just before gushing to the world about the messianic stature of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.     

An expert on Big Data

The charges against Teltumbde and the others allege that their speeches and provocative writing triggered violence and that they were active members of banned Maoist groups. 

Expressions like ‘Maoist sympathisers’ and akin being used to connote terror prompt the following reminisces. In my youth, a small but steadfast group of sensitive souls across the country, who had stomachs none of us possessed, chose to devote themselves to ameliorating the plight of the poor and oppressed.

Teltumbde is a Professor and Chair of Big Data Analytics at the Goa Institute of Management. Earlier he was the chief executive of Petronet, a subsidiary of Bharat Petroleum, and taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. A mechanical engineer, he has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the top business schools in India.

Not Maoist but critical of the RSS

Nowhere in Teltumbde’s more than thirty books, or in his research papers, articles and interviews, is there any evidence of support for violence or any subversive movement, as he notes in his letter to the public. (The full text of the letter is in a link below*.)

He was implicated, he continues, on the basis of a letter that the police say they recovered from the computers of two others who were arrested in the case. “Nothing has been recovered from me. The letter makes reference to 'Anand', a common name in India, but the police unquestioningly identified it with me," he writes. “The letter was clumsily constructed with the information on an academic conference I had attended, which was easily available on the website of the American University of Paris.”

I joined nearly 2,000 lawyers, academics, journalists, artists and others who wrote to the President of India asking that Teltumbde be set free while he awaits a court trial. Born in a family of landless laborers in Maharashtra, our petition states, Teltumbde empathizes “with the struggles of the oppressed and the downtrodden” as a civil rights activist. He is married to the granddaughter of B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit jurist who was the primary author of the Constitution of India.

Anand Teltumbde has written the definitive and most insightful works on the condition of Dalits in India. His research and speeches also cover issues of caste and religion, including about the rise of Hindu extremism under Prime Minister Modi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS,) which is said to control the BJP.** ­Teltumbde notes in his letter that he is a target of the RSS: “I was identified as ‘Mayavi Ambedkarwadi’…Mayavi in the Hindu mythology refers to a demon meant to be destroyed.” 

Maoism in India

Teltumbde has never claimed to be a Maoist or a supporter of Maoist groups in India, who follow the theory and practices of Mao Tse Tung. For some, the Maoist experience was a workable model to emulate and Naxalism, an epoch-marking illustration of Maoism in action in a village, Naxalbari, in West Bengal in 1967, a rallying cry. Academic attention kept apace and Marxist political economy (still) and Maoist economics (less) were vibrant subjects of teaching and research.

Connections were made with two-sector planning models of growth, ‘town’ and ‘country’, with the latter performing the task of providing the quintessential Basic, food, to both. The generation and distribution and investment of the surplus in agriculture remains the lynchpin of the Indian economy and the task of increasing worker productivity therein remains central.

Filling forms not firing guns

What does the activity of “activists” consist of? It means making tribals and others attune to the sound of the approaching engines of exploitation of land and the countryside and organizing them to resist the assaults on their existence and humanity.

Routinely, it comprises of no more than educating them of their rights promised under the law, which rights are constantly obfuscated and perverted in opaque bylaws trotted out by the government so as to delude the public of their maleficence. Thus, not a day will go by without a report in the newspapers of a brutal and far-reaching encroachment on land for the purpose of large projects of negative social value and for which cost-benefit analysis has been reduced to a joke.

The fight against oppression is hard but always conducted through making applications, filling up forms, laying siege at state government offices. Activists are highly intelligent and only lunatics would dream the government can be overthrown and madmen would contemplate assassinating heads of state.

Fire in the belly

An organization of workers will be countered by the organs of the State, the army and the police. Unsurprisingly, the latter, with their superior force, win combats. Battles are self-generating and arms and martial arts are snatched by peasants in skirmishes and used against the oppressors. I cannot underscore enough the distress members of the left have felt over the senseless escalation of violence laid at the door of “Naxalites”. It is no wonder that hitherto solid, ideologically-grounded parties of different Marxism-Leninism (M-L) hues were banned.

I find the following scenarios plausible. It is likely that activists covering the same terrain rub shoulders with each other. There would be sympathetic and critical conversations and communications. The deeper a politically-concerned human being enters the hinterland of the dispossessed, the higher her chances of fraternizing with an ex-member of a banned outfit, the fire in whose belly has not been doused, and who is not a pensioner nor has been seduced by the blandishments of the government. No wrong will have been committed.

However, while the State is always fearful of associations that can counter its hegemony, a measure of its paranoia is the fury it unleashes on activists for the potential of sharing a platform on common, universal principles which might not exclude revolutionary ideas.

Reading Mao’s texts is a crime in India

What is the antithesis? The unswerving devotion of the government to the rapacity of a few private capital oligarchs in India means more and more Indians will be rendered destitute, wander about bereft, wither away and die. The leaders of the government know this. They cannot allow the disparate and the dispossessed to form a grand coalition. Sudha Bharadwaj, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, the late Anuradha Shanbag, her husband Kobad Ghandhy and others, teachers, the educated, are dangerous but soft intermediate targets towards the ultimate aim of vanquishing the people.            

The control takes on absurd turns. Leaving (dis)approval in the hands of brutes and cretins, possession of literature on and by Mao is sure to earn incarceration at the hands of the law and the police. Can Karl Marx be far behind? Never mind that their possession on a laptop might be study or teaching material for a course at an Ivy League institution in the US.

Secondly, what might the charge of ‘sedition’ and ‘anti-national’ mean? Imagine, for a moment, that someone subscribes to these epithets and is victorious in the ends allegedly suggested by the words. What, in actuality, would be the victory? 

We must not give up hope. While we cannot all be beacons of light to those less fortunate than us we must at least be candles whose flames are not blown away in the wind. Be less fearful, not capitulate easily, give voice when the occasion demands. Anand and Gautam cannot vanish without a trace.    

Romar Correa retired as the Reserve Bank of India Professor of Economics, Bombay University.

*Full text of Anand Teltumbde’s letter before he surrendered to the central police:

https://thewire.in/rights/anand-teltumbde-arrest-open-letter

**Hindutva and Dalits: Perspectives for Understanding Communal Praxis, edited by Anand Teltumbde, makes a comprehensive view of the birth and growth of Hindu extremism and its impact on Dalits.

https://www.amazon.in/Hindutva-Dalits-Perspectives-Understanding-Communal/dp/9381345503

To receive Global Indian TImes stories each week send your name and email to: gitimescontact@gmail.com