Chief Justice Kakru's Farewell

[Vasudha Nagaraj]

Nisar Ahmed Kakru, the Chief Justice of AP High Court, retired yesterday. On an occasion like this, the High Court Bar Association usually organizes a farewell. Kakru’s retirement was no exception. But something very unusual happened that can easily be said to be first of its kind in the history of the Bar Association. Even as the Chief Justice was being felicitated, as many as fifty lawyers, in a well orchestrated manner, got up from their chairs and shouted slogans: Jai Telangana, CJ Down Down:, “Drohi Kakru”. Many of the lawyers have been part of the Telangana agitation. Amidst cacophony and din, they walked out of the Association hall.

 

Chief Justice Kakru, a Kashmiri Muslim, served as a judge for long years in the J & K High Court. His brief eighteen-month tenure in the AP High Court has been subject of both gossip and controversy. In the first place, he was an absent Judge; on leave for extended periods of time. Rumours were abuzz in the court corridors that he had family problems; that he was unhappy about his posting in AP, that he was unintelligent and lazy and so on and so forth. Even when he attended the court, he was known to have been reluctant to hear cases, prone to adjourning matters unreasonably, quite unsympathetic to public interest litigations, and rarely passed orders. On merits, therefore, he scored very poorly. However, he shone brightly sun when it came to initiating CBI investigations against Jagan Mohan Reddy and Emaar properties. In the face of stunning arguments made by Supreme Court Senior Counsels, arguably the best in the country, he held his cool and ordered the CBI to investigate the allegations against Jagan. Lately he also overturned a judgment rendered by one of the Judges who has the reputation of belonging to the RSS.

 

After this, he disappeared again. Corridor gossip was that the Centre had promised him the post of Chairperson, National Wakf Board if he supported the prosecution of Jagan. Later, during the peak of the Telangana agitation he addressed the Vijayawada Bar Association and said that the strike and boycott were undemocratic and unbecoming of the lawyers’ community. This statement infuriated the Telangana JAC and led to a lot of resentment against him. The Lawyers’ JAC also accused him of getting Telangana lawyers arrested indiscriminately. The boycott apparently seemed to have emanated from such a public position of the Chief Justice.

 

Or so it seemed, till we got to hear other details about this boycott. The boycott was organized by  BJP lawyers and covertly supported by Judges belonging to the RSS. Apparently It was these lawyers who used the Telangana card and mobilized lawyers from the Nampally and Rangareddy courts.

 

Would such a boycott be organized against a Hindu judge? There are several Hindu judges who have made damning comments about Telangana, mobilized massive police presence and have also passed Orders about the security of the AP High Court premises. Also, there are several judges who do not work, and who are alleged to be corrupt. So why single out Kakru? Is it because he is a Muslim? And that too from a distant state like Jammu and Kashmir which does not have any power in the judicial hierarchy?

 

One is seeing the growing presence of the BJP in the region. Both the Siddipet case and the Kakru incident shows how the BJP is quietly consolidating itself through the Telangana movement.  

Vasudha Nagaraj

[Geetha V]

Very interesting and saddening, at the same time. Vasudha,

While I have been very curious about the Telengana struggle and moved by your accounts of its democratic potential, I was also a trifle uneasy. The reason being that we have all come of age in a political culture, in Tamil Nadu, where ethnicity, statehood and identity have been so intertwined and naturalised, and whose history like that of Telengana but in a less substantive sense drew on a sense of historical alienation and grievances.

The Telengana case is much stronger in this regard, and patent injustice has been done in ways that do not bear comparison with the Tamil case - here the opposition to being part of a unitary nation was expressed in contrarian terms. The more radical expressions of this position challenged Hindu-Hindi-bania-India, the more populist ones drew on historical exceptionalism, read almost all contemporary concerns through the lens of language and ethnicity. The populist version has prevailed and is today more than 50 years old, and sadly, as we look back, we are forced to reckon with the question of how and through what means does a just cause turn vicious and serves only rhetorical rather than substantive ends.

It does not seem easy to imagine a cause outside of its historical expressions, of the specific details of how it is imagined, acted out - and so the question I would like you and others to consider is the following: the democratic potential of the Telengana movement notwithstanding, is it being constantly overwritten by a script that is not willing to tolerate dissent, from whichever quarter? Does it have recourse to a discourse that separates 'traitors' from 'real' Telenganites? Does it deliberately and often confuse 'authenticity' with democratic persuasion and argument? For us, looking back at the very attractive figure that the DMK cut in the 1950s, we are all too aware of its hypnotic power, its historical 'truth', that did not brook any critique of Tamilness - the manner in which the DMK worked with caste and gender is legion and points to how one may productively and deliberately rework important aspects of one's democratic politics towards non-democratic ends.

Just some loud thoughts, because what you and Suneetha have been reporting about the BJP does not suggest so much a takeover, but a hardening of some positions which are perhaps as much Telengana as any other and which now appear accentuated in very distinctive ways. How have others supporting Telengana responded to the BJP -

Do write when you have the time to tell us more.

Geetha

--
Maybe Dona Soncorrito is saying right now that the world can be like a big house, or like a little prison; that the world is full of windows and doors; that the world is full of distinct (and sometimes contradictory) realities; that in this world, each reality has two doors, and one of them is the door of a certain Bad and the other of uncertain Good; that sometimes you can choose the room you want to live in, and other times you cannot, and evil and life pursue you everywhere; that if you want to choose, it has to be twice: if you can, first, you have to choose where you want to be, and second, you have to choose the way; that the job of adults is to show the children as many windows as possible so that they can look into as many rooms as possible; that the job of adults is to wage a permanent struggle so that children may always have the freedom to choose the room of the world where they want to be...

Subcommandante Marcos

[R Srivatsan]

Hi Vasudha,

Thanks for this post.  My two bits worth of chewing the cud:

 When I listen to myself speak, and also hear so many accounts of the BJP consolidation and strengthening, I wonder -- should we see this as an intentional plot, or as a sort of autochthonous growth of a BJPish spirit in the strengthening middle classes composed of different castes as it were.  This is precisely the difficulty of Nazi Germany (I am not equating the BJP with the Nazis), that from the nineteenth century on, Antisemitism was the air people seemed to breathe to the extent that both Marx and Nietzsche spoke an Antisemitic language with a natural ease.  

I guess this (tending to name the BJP as a specific corporate category) is in some ways a projection and externalization  -- somewhat like when after a riot, the general consensus is often 'some professional parties came from outside' and killed people.  I guess in times of peace, we cannot look at the mirror and say yes, some of us murdered some of the others.  We need to externalize.  It is as if there is both a humanist element (reformist) and a deeply anti-humanist element (revivalist) in Hindu thought.  It is not as if these are two diverse strands running in different people -- it is rather like a cultural schizophrenia where the same person briefly morphs into an other being.  Sometimes the morphing results in a stable demon.  It took over a hundred years for the Antisemitic soil to yield the holocaust.  I hope that by that time in India, there will be a genuine change in the binary opposition between liberal capitalism and forced development in the name of a national society which will perhaps lead to a more benign and tolerant way of life.

Srvts

-- 

R Srivatsan
Senior Fellow
Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies
2-2-18/49 Durgabai Deshmukh Colony
Hyderabad 500 013
Phone: +91 40 27423690
Fax:     +91 40 27423168

[Mary E John]

Dear Vasudha, Suneetha and friends,

i am so grateful to be part of this group tracking the telengana movement. Especially i want to congratulate you for the careful, complex and reflexive kinds of posts you have been putting up, which are so rare in these days of instant blogging.  Mostly i have been reading them (sitting here in delhi) and tucking them away for further thought.

I have a parallel set of questions which i am not sure how best to articulate -- having to do with bigger and smaller states.  We have seen the creation of new states in recent years -- Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Uttarakhand. There has been too little public discussion i feel about what their trajectories have been, given that there was strong support for their creation -- for creater empowerment of adivasis, for the garhwal region, all in the name of their subordination to "mainstream" society, though in different ways.  For the first two it was in the name of adivasis, and for uttarakhand it was opposition to the OBC/SC politics of UP.  Somehow the BJP seems to have gained the most out of the creation of these states in political terms.  I guess my question therefore would be this:  Is there something about smaller states and the BJP that makes them work so well together, and that too at a time when the BJP is scrambling and has lost its larger agenda?  Is this what is also happening in the Telengana movement?  what repercussions would this have for questions of caste, apart from the question of Muslims that you have been discussing?

warmly

mary

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Vasudha Nagaraj <vasudhan...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mary E. John
Director
Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS)
25 Bhai Vir Singh Marg, Gole Market
New Delhi - 110001, India.
Ph.:91-11-23345530, 23365541
Fax:91-11-23346044
http://www.cwds.ac.in   ; http://www.cwds.org