K. Balagopal

K. Balagopal was the fifth child of eight children of a middle class Telugu Brahmin couple- Kandalla Parthanatha Sarma and Rallapalli Nagamani. One of his brothers, Anantha, was a doctor in the Indian army. His father’s job in the insurance sector entailed frequent transfers and Balagopal’s education was in several towns of AP, from Nellore to Vizianagaram. After Pre-University education in Kavali and BSc in Tirupati, he took an MSc and PhD in Mathematics from the Regional Engineering College in Warangal before proceeding to Delhi for a post-doctoral at the Indian Statistical Institute. He returned to Warangal in 1981, where he started teaching Maths at the Kakatiya University. This was also the time when he decided on social activism and joined the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee.

Over a period of 26 years, he documented and took up cases of thousands of extrajudicial killings by government forces in Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere. When the erstwhile people’s war cadres resorted to a rash of kidnaps in late ‘80’s, a vigilante organisation ‘Praja Bandhu’ abducted him demanding the release of two policemen from naxalite custody. The ‘Praja Bandhu’ which was suspected to have been floated by the state police had released him only after the abducted policemen were let off.

K. Balagopal died of lung aspiration following bleeding of stomach ulcer in Hyderabad on the night of 8 October 2009.

He served as a member of the Expert Group on Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, set up by Planning Commission of India in 2008. He genuinely believed that human rights are indivisible. He was known for his simple living and his extremely sharp analytical articles that appeared regularly in Economic and Political Weekly.His incisive articles in EPW included issues ranging from the regime of Indira Gandhi, Reservations issue, human rights violations from time to time in different places, the Gujarat riots, Special Economic Zones, land acquisition, sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes in Andhra Pradesh, the failure of talks between the YSR Government and the CPI-Maoists and so on. He was a prolific writer in Telugu.

His Telugu essay 'Cheekati Konaalu' was a path-breaking one, in which he directly questioned the violation of human rights by those who claimed that they were working for a radical revolution. After the formation of Human Rights Forum, he expanded his activities and visited areas undergoing intense social turmoil in Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat, West Bengal and Orissa. In Orissa his fact-finding teams visited Rayagada district and documented the perspective of people displaced by Utkal Allumina Project, Jagatsinghpur district in respect of people affected by proposed Posco steel plant and Kandhamal district, which was affected by communal and ethnic clashes in 2007/2008. Not only was he an intellectual giant, but he had his heart for the deprived and down-trodden. He analysed critically and exposed the hypocrisy in the functioning of most of the mainstream political parties.

K. Balagopal was a brilliant mathematician, he began his career as a teacher in Warangal but soon turned full-time human rights activist. He was a Mathematics professor at Kakatiya University before quitting in 1985. He did his Phd in Kakatiya University. He chose to become a lawyer much later, after getting fully associated with the human rights movement.

K.Balagopal served as the general secretary of Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) between 1983 and 1997. Following sharp differences of opinion within the APCLC on how to respond to revolutionary violence he left APCLC and formed the Human Rights Forum.

Kandalla Balagopal (Telugu: కందాళ్ల బాలగోపాల్ ) (10 June 1952 – 8 October 2009) was an uncompromising human rights activist, mathematician and lawyer who was known for his work on the issue of civil liberties and human rights. He was a staunch civil liberties activist in Andhra Pradesh. He had broken away from the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), with which he was associated since its inception in ‘80’s, on the issue of violence perpetrated by the erstwhile CPI-ML Peoples War. He was a prolific writer on people’s issues and had recently written about the developments on the Maoist front in west Bengal.