What Would K. Balagopal Have to Say About Our Times?

New Delhi: What would K. Balagopal make of our times? For those who know his work, the question presses on us daily. It feels sharper on his birth anniversary, surfacing whenever a new political absurdity unfolds, an injustice stings or a lie parades as truth. What would he have made of this moment, these outrages, these new political groups, these depressingly old justifications for power?

This question is not a search for an oracle. It is a confession of need – for the intellectual and moral compass he always provided. For those of us who use his analyses to navigate these times, his absence leaves a void we can feel.

We long for his rare mix of unflinching analysis, profound humanism and the courage to name realities others obscure. The question itself is an admission of how necessary his work remains.

We miss his unique, unsparing gaze. It was the gaze of a mathematician – a field he taught while earning his doctorate before turning to law and activism – fused with the fierce advocacy of a human rights lawyer defending the dispossessed.

It was the gaze of a humanist who refused to look away from our complexities and contradictions, especially when faced with power. His life was one of relentless engagement, an effort to live the idea that “action is accomplishment of knowledge and knowledge is fruit of action”.

Why Balagopal, more than a decade after his death? Why urge a new generation, lost in a storm of digital noise, to read him? Not for uncritical praise; he would have been the first to dismantle any monument to himself.

We must engage with his work because we urgently need the mental habits and ethical sense that our simplistic, hyper-mediated world threatens. He offers not answers, but something more valuable: a method, an ethical stance, a toolkit for a world designed to confuse.

First was his commitment to intellectual honesty. He knew the “human subject … is too small to bear the heavy weight of Utopias. It can only be crushed by them.” In an age of soundbites, his writings teach nuance. He showed how to dissect an event, peeling back layers of official rhetoric to reveal the complex dynamics at play. 

He taught not what to think, but how to think critically about power and justice. His dense, layered prose mirrors the reality he sought to unravel. It demands that you engage, argue and conclude for yourself rather than passively accept a story. For a young person facing a world of instant opinions, his methodical deconstruction of arguments is an invaluable tool.

Second, he could unmask power in all its forms. He did not just analyse the state; he walked its darkest alleys, documenting “encounter” deaths, disappearances and the violence dealt to the poor. Then he laid bare the structures that allowed such impunity.

He showed how power works in caste hierarchies, in patriarchy, in the nexus of local bullies and political patrons, and in the “development” that dispossesses the marginalised. His anger and anguish often found voice in sharp satire.

To read Balagopal is to learn how power operates. He taught us to look past official reports, critiquing how “a pervasive media creates a celebrity out of almost nothing”. He showed how an ideology like Hindutva aggregates the “little enemies of equality within us” and “fits very well with the economic policy” of capital accumulation without social concern.

This is essential knowledge for any young person who wants not just to understand the world, but to change it.

Yet he was never a romantic. While unsparing in his critique of the state, he was equally critical of the failings within movements of the oppressed. His analyses of Maoist movements, for instance, sympathised with the injustices that fueled them but never shied away from questioning their methods.

This capacity for self-reflection – this insistence that if “torture is wrong”, the principle must apply to everyone – is a vital lesson in an age of simplistic loyalties.

Third, a moral urgency drove his intellect. His was not a detached academic critique but one fueled by indignation at injustice. His anger was not for show; it was a cold, intellectual anger rooted in deep empathy – an empathy that sharpened, rather than clouded, his pursuit of truth.

He believed in making the oppressor “feel that what he or she has been doing is morally wrong”. This fusion of moral passion and analytical clarity is a powerful model for anyone seeking a meaningful way to engage with the world’s problems, guarding against both cynicism and thoughtless activism.

He also emphasised historical consciousness. He understood that today’s realities grow from long historical processes. His analysis, whether on land rights or the Indian state, was always rooted in history. Drawing on Ambedkar, he argued that democracy in India is impossible without annihilating caste, a system that erects “walls in society” and is by nature a “denial of democracy”. For a generation fed sanitised versions of the past, his work is a vital corrective.

He saw literature’s task, too, as “filling the void” by revealing hidden truths and proclaiming “the possibility of societal transformation”, urging writers to ground their work in “historical optimism and materialism” and a true familiarity with people’s lives.

Finally, he taught intellectual courage. He never shied away from speaking truth to power, no matter where it resided. He subjected the state, dominant classes and even movements of the oppressed to the same rigorous scrutiny.

Valuing Marxism’s “superb critique of society”, he nonetheless questioned its dogmas, warning against theories that breed “intellectual intolerance, political dogmatism and repressive politics”. He urged instead an “eclecticism” that draws from many traditions without being trapped by one. In a climate where dissent is constrained, his principled, evidence-based critique is a moral example.

So when I ask, “What would Balagopal say?” I expect no simple answer. The question itself forces me – and I hope others – to engage with the present using his analytical depth and ethical seriousness. To encourage young people to read Balagopal is to invite them into a demanding but rewarding apprenticeship.

It is to arm them against the glib slogan, the comforting illusion and easy demonisation. It is to give them not slogans, but the power of sustained, critical thought. It is to remind them that understanding the world in all its painful, messy, brutal complexity is the first step toward changing it.

June 10 is K. Balagopal's birth anniversary.

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