Articles by K Balagopal

Deaths in Police Custody: Whom and Why Do the Police Kill?
K Balagopal WHEN a person is beaten to death in police custody, the very event, even without the need of any propaganda, generates an image which retrospectively justifies it: the victim would not be beaten so badly if he/she were not a 'desperate' criminal or an otherwise dangerous individual. The police usually add their flourish to the image by describing as the victim's crimes all the charges they have written down in the FIR, some of them even perhaps as an afterthought necessitated by the very death. And when a scholar like Upendra Baxi ("The Crisis of the Indian Legal System") manages to arrive at the conclusion, unsupported by any evidence on exhibit, that custodial violence is used not invariably but rationally or 'judiciously' (a particularly inept choice of a description) by the police in the course of the investigation of crimes, the image acquires respectable solidity: it would not be a very judicious use of torture that beats to death a mere drunkard or pickpocket or prostitute, would it?

market-rates inside jails. Two matchboxes bartered with a litre of milk!" comments Haque.
BREEDING GROUND FOR CORRUPTION Whatever scope of being linked with productive labour was there in jails, Haque alleges, is diminishing. The prisoners used to grow some vegetables on jail plots to meet their daily requirements. Now the practice has been stopped. Other small-scale productions arc on the verge oi breaking down. "No supply; raw materials not available No fats. No wool. So yarn. But yes, the Left Front has increased the daily wage from six annas to one Rupee. How happy the prisoners are! Yet, if these inmates arc asked the government has fixed the minimum wage for eight hours labour at Rs 8.33. Why you, working for twelve hours, would not get even that rate? They reply

ANDHRA PRADESH Anti-Reservation, Yet Once More K Balagopal SOUNDS of the future are sending their echoes backwards. As one reads the posters and listens to the arguments one is filled with an indistinct sense of unease, a premonition of the scenes that are going to trample along the streets of this land twenty, thirty or forty years hence; a prescience that is more akin to a feeling of deja vu in reversed time.

higher. However, it is an open secret today that there are any number of methods of circumventing these regulations. Are the checks on kit imports then really comprehensive enough to ensure an adequate absorption of design and development know-how in the country? Secondly, are they of a nature that would provide adequate incentive for domestic manufacturers to gear up and start producing state-of-the-art electronic components?

ANDHRA PRADESH Rayalaseema: Waiting for a Rshyasrnga K Balagopal 'ROADS indicate culture' says a doubtful maxim inscribed by the Public Works Department on a roadside stone slab in Anantapur district. But though 'culture' is not precisely what is indicated, the epigram is perhaps unintendedly apt; for the road in question goes on to Bellary in Karnataka, and it is to the canal-irrigated lands of Bellary that thousands of indigent labourers from Anantapur have trudged" along this very road in search of work and sustenance. The cotton-growing black soil of Bellary under the Tlingabhadra project, colonised by enterprising Kamma cultivators from coastal Andhra, is the nearest thing to Promised Land for poor and landless peasants of drought-ravaged Rayalaseema. No matter that the very exodus has brought down the wage rate for picking cotton from Rs 10 to 5 and even 3 per day, they trudge on nevertheless, for this Promised Land has promised them not Paradise, but just one meal every day, which is three times what they can get in their villages.