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Human Rights Forum, which the late K. Balagopal (1952-2009) helped found after ending his long association with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), has recently reissued the book being reviewed in this article – Ear to the Ground: Writings on Class and Caste by K. Balagopal – expanding the earlier edition published by Navayana in 2011 with additional papers. The volume is organised into seven sections and contains forty-four essays, written over three decades (1980s to 2000s), largely engaging questions of caste, class, the Left movement, and contemporary populist politics.

They are ably introduced by V. Geetha, a distinguished scholar of these issues in her own right. Most of these writings originally appeared in Economic and Political Weekly and some in other periodicals. Together they weave granular field observation, political economy, and radical democratic imagination into a critique of Indian society that refuses the abstractions of both naïve class analysis and caste denialism. Taken together, they constitute a substantial volume of 536 pages – an apt tribute to Balagopal’s intellectual range, political integrity, and analytical brilliance.

The book is a rare intellectual artefact – a lived testament of a Mathematician turned civil rights activist who became an incisive political theorist. Balagopal maps Indian society with unflinching clarity, showing caste and class not as discrete variables but as interwoven infrastructures of power. What he offers is not consolation but analytical precision: an account of how inequality is produced, reproduced, and politically weaponised at the very core of India’s so-called democratic institutions. Each essay in the book bears the mark of his distinctive intellectual capacity to pierce the surface of events and theorise their underlying logic, transforming empirical immediacy into enduring political insights. This review just offers a glimpse to them.

A model of a scholar-activist

The unique insights arise from a dialectical unity of theory and practice, sustained by an uncompromising commitment to the vision of a just society. I had a good fortune to know Balagopal over the years as a fellow traveller in a fraternal organisation. As general secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, Balagopal embodied an ethic of relentless presence: He would rush with his shoulder bag by any available means, walking long distances to sites of police violence, sustaining himself on cups of tea, and copiously documenting encounters, custodial killings, mass arrests, and torture. In this near-ascetic commitment, he functioned as a one-man army, forcing the realities of counter-insurgency in Andhra Pradesh into national consciousness and exposing the state and society that normalised coercion in the name of order. These were years of near-permanent emergency, marked by the resurgence of the Naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh and constant threats to his life; Balagopal was repeatedly arrested and assaulted.

Yet, repression neither pushed him into dogma nor partisan silence. Over time, he grew increasingly critical of Naxalite violence, insisting that a civil liberties platform must retain autonomy from armed politics and condemn violence irrespective of its source – a position that drew criticism from those, who argued that state violence and people’s violence in defence could not be judged on the same scale. Balagopal understood this asymmetry better than most: he recognised that insurgent violence was rooted in the state’s brutality and denial of democratic redress, and that its scale was incomparably smaller. But he also saw how the rhetoric of armed revolution alienated potential allies and foreclosed wider democratic support. His distinction was precise: the state, as a constitutional entity, bears a qualitatively different responsibility, and its systematic violations constitute structural domination rather than error; yet this does not exempt insurgent violence from ethical scrutiny.

What set Balagopal apart was this refusal of both false equivalence and false exemption. Civil liberties, for him, were a non-negotiable democratic principle, tested most severely in moments of conflict – a balance that unsettled both the state and its armed opponents, and gives his work its enduring credibility.

Framing the post-colonial state

In the first section of the book – Balagopal offers a structural reading of the postcolonial Indian state in which nation-building appears not as a neutral or moral project but as a necessary by-product of ruling-class enrichment. After........

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