ANDHRA PRADESH- Missing Telugu Desam Style

more the press and civil liberties organisa ANDHRA PRADESH tions raise a hue and cry about 'encounter' killings, the more the police have been tempted to discover new ways of getting rid of naxalite activists. And making people just K Balagopal 'disappear' is the easiest alternative What 'Missing': Telugu Desam Style A DOCUMENTARY on post-Allende Chile, made by an Australian producer, tells a gruesome tale of 'missing' persons. About 2,500 liftist opponents of the regime have been 'missing' in that country, and this tale is about two of them, one a leader of a teachers' organisation. The events that follow their 'disappearance' have a bizarrery familiar ring. The friends and comrades of the 'missing' persons accuse the government of having picked them up and done away with them. The government at first denies the fact. The teacher's colleagues hold a protest meeting at his college, at which his teenaged son makes a speech; he warns them that they must do something before his father becomes one more corpse floating anonymously down the river. A few days later, a couple of dead bodies are discovered floating down the river. They are identified as those of the two missing men. The democratic- minded public rises in protest, led by a church-based human rights group. Predictably, government-sponsored righteous Christians demonstrate outside the church, accusing the priests of preaching communism in the name of human rights. The priest is at that time actually telling the congregation inside that atrocities like beating up demonstrators, nightly raids on poor slum dwellers, etc, cannot be accepted silently. The government for its part goes on air with the statement that unnamed international terrorists or revolutionaries or whatever, who cannot forgive failure, must have killed these men for having failed to make a revolution in Chile; and that all this noise about human rights is merely an attempt to kill a second bird with the same stone by putting the blame for their crime on the Chilean govern ment. The denouement