OPINION: How genuine is Telangana CM Revanth Reddy’s ‘expression of regrets’?

This reminds us of a similar comparable development from the recent past.

Demanding apology for Jallianwala Bagh

Almost a decade ago, writer and Congress politician Shashi Tharoor demanded an apology from the colonial rulers to the people of their former colonies in general and for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in particular. The demand, made in one of his lectures at Oxford in 2015, actually followed British Prime Minister David Cameron calling the massacre “a deeply shameful event in British history”.

Subsequently, on the occasion of the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 2019, Shashi Tharoor and CPI(M)’s MB Rajesh proposed that Parliament pass a resolution for an unequivocal apology from the British government. Thereafter, then-British Prime Minister Theresa May expressed her regret, describing the massacre as a “shameful scar”. Throughout this, several critics pointed out that Britain was unwilling to tender a formal, absolute apology and stopped at superficial regrets.

Interestingly, several observers over the decades compared the Indravelli massacre to Jallianwala Bagh. Of course, both the massacres have similarities, if not in magnitude.

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The Indravelli massacre

During the democratic upsurge after the Emergency, the then CPI(ML) Andhra Pradesh state committee, under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, began its activities in the forest belt of Adilabad district and started forming Girijana Rythu Coolie Sangham (Tribal Peasant and Agricultural Labour Association) branches across the villages and hamlets. The activists wanted to culminate the efforts of over two years into a district-level consolidation of the organization and hold a district-level conference to mark the occasion in 1981.

Indravelli was the chosen venue as it was located on the Karimnagar–Adilabad state highway, and the prominent tribal village was fully occupied by non-tribals, turning it into a market town by then. The date chosen was 20 April, a Monday, as it was also a shanty day in Indravelli. The organisation’s demands included protecting tribals’ rights over their land and forests, action against exploitation by traders from plains and oppression by the forest department, withdrawal of false cases foisted by police and police repression in general.

The public meeting, as announced, was to be addressed by Kobad Gandhi (then with Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, Bombay), M Ranganatham (Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee), Himajwala, (poet, Virasam) and G Linga Murthy (vice president, Radical Students Union) along with a few Gond and Paradhan leaders. The Adivasi leaders applied for permission, but the police delayed granting it.

Finally, just a day before, the police denied permission as apparently another organisation had also applied for a meeting on the same day. Later, media and fact-finding committees found that there was no such “other organisation,” and the police themselves cooked up an alibi in the name of a “non-tribal rights protection committee”.

As the campaign for the meeting was all across the district and even in adjoining Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh forest areas, people started pouring in, unaware that the permission for the meeting was denied. As the police began lathi charge on the thousands of people coming for the meeting and hundreds, if not thousands, busy at the shanty, the restless crowds started pelting stones. The police then opened fire without first trying to disperse the mob, without harming them or without any warning, killing at least 13 on the spot.

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Death count higher than reported

The fact that the firing was indiscriminate came to light with bullet wounds on the dead bodies, invariably on the upper limbs. When a fact-finding committee from Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), Delhi, led by Prof Manoranjan Mohanty, questioned the district SP, reminding him of the guidelines that protesters should be shot in the legs, even when firing was inevitable, he quipped, “bullets won’t obey guidelines”!

While the police claimed only 13 casualties, based on the count of the dead bodies, the tribal organisation, as well as fact-finding teams, put the figure anywhere around 60, based on eyewitness accounts. However, the actual number could not be ascertained. The police disposed of all the dead bodies without even informing their families, and nobody exactly knew how many bodies were cremated.

Moreover, people who came from far-off places to attend the meeting might have taken back their dead and wounded with them. The kin of those who later succumbed to their injuries did not reveal the deaths for fear of police reprisals for having attended the meeting.

When the first anniversary of the massacre was to be commemorated in 1982, Socialist Party MP Surendra Mohan and civil liberties lawyer K G Kannabiran were arrested at Indravelli, and the meeting was scuttled.

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Indravelli massacre monument

However, to keep the memory of those killed alive, Andhra Pradesh Rythu Coolie Sangham (APRCS) wanted to erect a memorial column. It purchased a piece of land in 1981 and began construction in 1982. Ganji Rama Rao, former MLA and president of the APRCS, wanted the column built on the lines of the memorial for Chinese revolutionaries in Tien’anmen. He resided in Indravelli for over a year to personally supervise the construction.

The 53-foot column, with a 7-foot-tall flag pole and red flag with hammer and sickle, was inaugurated by revolutionary balladeer Gaddar on the second anniversary in 1983.

There was an attempt to demolish the column in November-December 1985, during the period of “no dance – no song – no speech” repression under the TDP rule between 1985 and 1989. At that time, police said the demolition attempt was the handiwork of the BJP, but within a year, the police themselves demolished it.

Fearing a backlash from the Adivasis, the government blamed miscreants and promised to rebuild it under the auspices of ITDA. The government officials said they would replace the hammer and sickle with the national flag and paint the column white instead of red. However, they did not dare implement the proposed changes.

The memorial column was rebuilt, of course, at a much-reduced size of fewer than 30 feet (almost half of the original). Now, the Chief Minister addressed Adivasis under the shadow of that statue. It is an irony of history that a chief minister of the Congress, which killed the people in the firing, and himself a former leader of the TDP, which demolished and subsequently rebuilt the column, was commemorating it.

However, without implementing the 5th schedule of the Constitution, the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act and the Forest Rights Act, in letter and spirit (in fact, violating them every day), would the present “expression of regrets” or “tendering an apology” resolve the vexed issues the Adivasis face?

(The author was one of the four who went to attend the meeting and was illegally detained by the police in the local Upper Primary School building. Two of the four are not alive today: B Janardhan Rao (research scholar in Public Administration, Kakatiya University then, later became a professor and died in 2002), G Linga Murthy (one of the speakers at the meeting, later became the leader of Peoples War and died in a Krishna river accident in 2002). K Seetarama Rao (research scholar in Public Administration, Kakatiya University then, now Vice Chancellor, Dr BR Ambedkar Open University.)