Episode 5: KG Kannabiran

Transcript

<Clip of K. G. Kannabiran speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

K. G. Kannabiran: “Mr. Kannabiran, these Naxalites want to overthrow the government, overthrow the Constitution and all that. Why should they seek protection under the Constitution? Then I told them that when such cases come before this court, it is not their values which are under trial but your values. Your values are on trial. Your Constitution is on trial.“

Host: That’s the lawyer Kandala Gopalaswamy Kannabiran or KG Kannabiran, speaking in the film The Advocate, a documentary about his life by the filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj. Kannabiran passed away in 2010 at the age of 81, after a lifetime spent fighting for human rights and against state impunity. Some called him a “Naxalite lawyer”, as he became the movement’s go-to advocate in Andhra Pradesh in the turbulent 1970s. But, as he says in that clip, his fight wasn’t for the values of the Naxalites. It was for the values of our Constitution. Kannabiran’s mission was to ensure that all Indians were protected by the Constitution, even those who denounced it and the Indian state. 

For over 50 years, Kannabiran was in the forefront of India’s civil liberties movement. He argued cases for hundreds of poor and disadvantaged prisoners, including some on the death row. During the Emergency, he fought for political detainees. He exposed so-called encounter killings. He was a leading voice on labour and working-class rights.  All through, Kannabiran was resolute in his belief that constitutional protections and freedoms had to be enjoyed by everybody. Here is his daughter, Kalpana Kannabiran, a lawyer, activist and academic telling us about how her father described his work:

Kalpana Kannabiran: His description of himself for a very long time has always been Sisyphus because he believed that he was doing work and kept doing and redoing the same work. It was Sisyphean labour that was unceasing. And this was his imagination of his work.

Host: Sisyphus is a character in Greek mythology who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill each day, only for it to roll back down every night. 

So much of what KG Kannabiran did resonates today, as governments imprison their critics,  pass new repressive laws, vilify civil society and throttle fundamental rights. By delving into some episodes of his career and his approach to the law, we hope to illuminate what it means to fight the good fight for the Constitution day in and day out. Welcome to season 3 of Friend of the Court. I am your host Raghu Karnad. 

<Intro>

Host: India had become a republic on 26 January 1950, and its Constitution marked a new social contract between the people and the state. This contract pledged to uphold citizens’ freedoms as well as to secure them social and economic justice. In the early decades of independence, especially, the state struggled to keep this  promise. In many parts of the country, landlords held onto their traditional power, including over the lives and bodies of those who worked on the land. In the 1960s, peasants and tribal sharecroppers began taking up arms and rejected the Constitution as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. This came to be known as the Naxalite movement. 

In popular imagination, the word ‘Naxalite’ conjures up the image of a domestic terrorist. The word comes from a place called Naxalbari, a village near Darjeeling. The movement was led by the communist leader Charu Majumdar, who believed that violence was necessary to break the patterns of age-old, feudal exploitation. Many peasants in the region answered his call. They gathered weapons and fought their landlords and the police. The movement grew, and attracted young people, college professors, and working class volunteers from across the country. They all wanted to fight for the swift end of class inequality.

The movement spread further and faster than anyone anticipated. In the late 1960s, it swept the tribal areas of northern Andhra Pradesh, terrorising the police and landlords. Naxalites killed nearly 300 people over the following years.

In response, the state government launched an aggressive, colonial-style crackdown. It used a 1948 law to declare the entire tribal belt in northern Andhra a “disturbed area.” This gave the police special powers in these areas. They could make arbitrary arrests and even shoot and kill anyone they believed was a threat to public order. 

Soon, news of encounter killings and custodial deaths was coming out of these districts. Within a few years, thousands were arrested as Naxalites. Rule of law seemed to have become an alien concept. The police saw the Naxalites as seditious rebels who did not deserve fair trials or the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution. 

A group of activists and lawyers were determined to bring the government to account. In 1969, they organised a meeting in Hyderabad to chalk out a legal defence strategy for activists accused of being Naxalites. Around 40 lawyers attended the meeting. One of them was KG Kannabiran. 

<Clip of K. G. Kannabiran speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

K. G. Kannabiran: “There was no civil liberties organisation, there was no organisation worth  the name which could raise its voice against this kind of atrocities. Then my friend Ravi Subbaraju was in the CPI, he was very much  interested in defending these cases and in fact he wrote to me actually he was the person who said you must come and help us so I agreed and then we met at Hotel Haridwar in Sultan Bazar.“

Host: That’s Kannabiran, in another clip from the documentary The Advocate. Kannabiran showed up at the hotel, a fading blue and white building in the heart of Hyderabad. By this time, Kannabiran had established a flourishing law practice. But a life in law had not always been on the cards. He was born in Madurai in 1929. Later, he took a masters degree in economics at Madras University, and sat for the civil services exams, before finally choosing to study law. His daughter Kalpana Kannabiran is a lawyer, activist and academic whose work explores the intersections of sociology, law, human rights, and gender. She has also translated and edited The Speaking Constitution, a collection of her father’s writings. 

Kalpana Kannabiran: In his days, it was law or the civil services or teaching. Yeah, there weren’t too many options, shall we say. So yeah, so law was an option which he took. I wouldn’t say that he was ever uninterested in it because he was interested in questions of justice or fairness.

Host: Kalpana says her father’s interest in these questions was piqued by a cousin who was a Communist. 

Kalpana Kannabiran: There were many people from both sides of the family who were engaged particularly in the communist movement. So he did have a background in movements and had a background on observing issues playing out. His oldest brother was a member of the Communist Party. 

Host: Kannabiran enrolled at the Madras high court in 1954. In the early years of his practice he was mentored by another cousin, a successful lawyer there.  

Kalpana Kannabiran: And… a cousin who was a lawyer who was supporting him. And so he kind of decided to do law rather than take up a job as a clerk or something after a BA or a BA honours.  

Host: In 1960, Kannabiran, by now married, decided to move to Hyderabad and start his own practice. He took on a mix of criminal and civil cases, political cases and service matters. He later wrote that he never sought out work, and simply took whichever case came to him. He became a lawyer for Parry and Company, a leading sugar firm, and dealt with several company matters. While he continued to follow debates in the Communist Party, there was nothing overtly political about his work. Until that meeting in Hotel Haridwar a fading blue and white building in the heart of Hyderabad

That evening  he was appointed the convenor of the newly formed Naxalite Prisoners’ Defence Committee. 

<Clip of Kannabiran’s wife Vasanth speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

Vasanth Kannabiran: “Actually around ‘69-70 when Kanna started getting all these cases of defence and of political prisoners my whole life changed.“

Host: That’s Kannabiran’s wife Vasanth, a college professor, also in an interview from The Advocate. 

<Clip of Kannabiran’s wife Vasanth from The Advocate continues>

Vasanth Kannabiran: “Till then it was a nice comfortable middle-class life: children, husband, job, school, whatever, but when this started happening, there was a qualitative change about life…. From a nice middle-class cocoon-like existence we were suddenly becoming a part of history.“

Host: The lawyers in the defence committee distributed the cases among themselves. They had their differences with the Naxalites, but they all agreed on one thing: the state was using excessive power to crush the movement. This wasn’t a particularly popular view. Kalpana explains:

Kalpana Kannabiran: And I think there were not too many lawyers who were willing to take up the cause of defending personal liberties or political dissidents because we had inherited, at the time of independence, an animus towards Communism, particularly in the state of Andhra Pradesh. And so it was quite to be expected that there wasn’t a really large group of people or a generalised sympathy towards Communist detainees. 

Host: By rejecting the Constitution and taking up arms, the Naxalites threatened the legitimacy of the Indian state. The Andhra police responded by suppressing the movement. For Kannabiran, the response was reminiscent of the colonial state. Instead of addressing the problems that provoked the uprising, the state resorted to killing and detaining its own citizens.

Holding the police to account was never going to be easy. The Naxalites’ side of the story rarely made it into the media – they were arrested or killed before they could speak. Police and the media painted them as the worst kind of criminals. The challenge before Kannabiran and his colleagues was to make the court see Naxalites in a different light. He had a novel approach. He didn’t just defend his clients against the state. He turned the courtroom into a stage for dialogue about the idea of citizenship under the Constitution. 

Kalpana Kannabiran: And he was one of the people who was engaged in the dialogues even within the profession and willing to take up the cases that came before him. From that time till the time that he died, the single-minded focus was on personal liberty.

Host: After the Hotel Haridwar meeting, Kannabiran filed about 250 writ petitions to challenge the arbitrary arrests of Naxalites under preventive detention laws. Among the detainees were three revolutionary writers and poets: Nikhileshwar, Jwalamukhi and Cherabanda Raju. The government had booked them for inciting violence against the state. Their case came to be known as the Digambara poets case, as the group called themselves “Digambara Kavulu” or naked poets. 

Nikhileshwar: So we as poets, young poets, as we believe in radical change, thought the mere writing of poetry, but we should be active. As such and the poet’s writing should be, again, should be associated with the movement also, people’s movement also.

Host: This is the Telugu poet and Sahitya Akademi Award winner K Yadav Reddy, better known by his pen name Nikhileshwar. As he says, Telugu poets, writers and artists of the 1970s believed that art had a role to play in the progressive transformation of society. Nikhileshwar and others founded the Revolutionary Writers Association, also known as VIRASAM in 1970. They soon became an influential force in the world of Telugu literary criticism.

Nikhileshwar: Virasam released a book Jhanjha, a poetry anthology. That became so popular that within two, three months, it went into three, four editions. And then the government was scared. The government thought that it was going to be a wildfire among the youth. So they banned that. 

The Home Minister termed us as “verbal Naxalites.” And now they are called — what do you call it now – urban Naxalites. So in 1970 itself, in assembly itself, he termed us as verbal Naxalites. And he said that they are more dangerous than the real Naxalites. 

Host: The 86-year-old with a shock of white hair and spectacles met us at his home in Hyderabad, where he still remains active in the literary scene. In 1971, this genial, soft-spoken gentleman was arrested for inciting violence through his words. 

Nikhileshwar: Three of us were arrested under the Preventive Detention Act. 

So, the three of us were charged with various charges, particularly 124A, sedition charges. That is working, writing against the (sic)… to overthrow the well-established government, so we were put into jail. 

Host: The government said that the poets were a threat to the state and wanted to wage war against it. Such crimes constitute offences against the state and attract the strictest punishments — life imprisonment or the death penalty. Unlike crimes like murder or theft, offences against the state are vaguely defined, leaving room for the police to apply the law arbitrarily. For instance, sedition is defined as inciting hatred or contempt against the government through words or actions. The police could apply this to anything from criticism of the ruling party to plotting to destabilise the government. When Kannabiran caught wind of the poets’ arrests, he offered to defend them. P Venkateswarulu, another lawyer, joined him. 

Nikhileshwar: They came forward on it literally without charging any fees or anything at all. Because they thought that our movement was a real movement, people’s movement. So they came forward, took the case and then the process went on.

Host: Kannabiran and Venkateswarulu filed a writ petition asking for the arrested poets to be produced in court. They also questioned the validity of Andhra’s 1970 Preventive Detention Act. This law said that a court could not dismiss a detention order simply because the charges it made out were vague or irrelevant. Kannabiran and Venkateswarulu said this was unfair and unreasonable. 

One morning, the three poets were produced before a packed courtroom. Kannabiran had a wily piece of courtcraft up his sleeve. He asked the poets to recite their work in the courtroom and urged the judges to decide for themselves whether they were seditious or not. 

Nikhileshwar (original in Telugu): Fear/ Wears a deathly countenance / turning blood/ to water, it/ drenches/ the veins….. 

Host: We just heard Nikhileshwar recite one verse, he explains its meaning for us.  

Nikhileshwar: This is the Telugu original poem. 

The essence is, Bhaya means fear. So to overcome the fear, in that particular Bhaya, I express my idea of fear, saying that live a life of full strength without fearing the establishment. 

Host: Kannabiran’s idea was to demonstrate the actual nature of the poems and the absurdity of the charges against the writers. And it worked.

Nikhileshwar: So, obviously, after reading our poetry we were, we were, the judges felt that there was nothing wrong in that poem. They are not seditious. We were released of course.

Host: In their judgement, Justices Chinappa Reddy and ADV Reddy noted that “nobody can be detained for possessing opinions and expressing them.” Not only were the poets released but the judges also reviewed the Andhra Pradesh Preventive Detention Act. The bench struck down the provision which said that a court could not examine the grounds of arrest. Then, in 1973, the high court once again set aside the preventive detention orders of other poets and writers. But these court pronouncements did little to deter the government. In fact, it took things to the next level. 

<Clip of Varavara Rao speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

Varavara Rao (in Telugu): “Preventive Detentionlu vesthu-unte, High Court kotti vesthunnadi. Chattallanu kotti vesthunnadi.“

[Translation: The High Court was setting aside the preventive detention orders. It was striking down the laws.]

Host: This is the poet and activist Varavara Rao speaking in Deepa Dhanraj’s documentary. Today, we know him as one of the accused detained by the police in 2018 in connection to the Bhima Koregaon case. Rao was finally released on bail in 2022 after spending four years in jail without trial. But this wasn’t the first time he experienced something like this. Back in the 1970s, he was a member of the literary association, VIRASAM and was detained by the Andhra police for inciting violence through his writings. Kannabiran came to his rescue and got him released. But as Rao says in this clip from the documentary, the government was in no mood to give up:

<Clip of Varavara Rao speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

Varavara Rao (in Telugu): “Rendu saarlu alaa jarigindi kaabatti. Rachayitalunu, veelu cheptunna matalunu veellu rasthunna rachatalaku jaruguthunna cheriyalaku oka immediate sambandham unnadi.“

[Translation: It happened twice. So it was portrayed as though there was an immediate connection between their writings and what was going on.]

Host: Rao is referring to what came to be known as ‘conspiracy cases’, that the government pursued against the Naxalites. Twenty two such cases were filed between 1969 and 1974, with other sporadic cases being filed in the 80s and 90s. Rao was himself charged in some of them. Kannabiran argued in six of them and a large part of his legacy lies in how he dealt with these cases. 

Conspiracy cases were a tried and tested method of the British to delegitimize communist movements in India before independence. In the 1970s, the Andhra Pradesh government took a leaf out of that playbook to weaken the Naxalite movement. Hundreds of Naxalites were booked for various crimes such as dacoity, murder, conspiracy to wage war and sedition in police stations across Andhra Pradesh. The police would link all these cases together, describing them as a unified plot against the state. Then, the police accused revolutionary writers, poets and other activists of being party to the conspiracy, even if they had committed no crime themselves. Kalpana tells us more: 

Kalpana Kannabiran: There were too many cases in which people who were, you know, implicated in one conspiracy case, they’re also implicated in another and where it was not a single crime. So there was a pooling of crimes, each of which had its own, you know, trial process and process of conviction and so on.

Host: The chargesheets in these cases emphasised the Naxalites’ rejection of the Constitution and their Communist beliefs. There was no rigorous investigation or evidence gathering.  The cases  hinged on public meetings of the Naxalites which were attended by hundreds of activists, writers and others. The police drew up a list of such  meetings and linked them with the offences. 

<beat>

Kannabiran’s guile and talent lay in unpacking the police chargesheets bit by bit. He picked on factual and procedural inconsistencies to cast doubts on the credibility of the charges. Some of these cases, like the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case dragged on for 15 years. The hearings were disrupted by frequent changes on the bench. Many of the accused stayed in prison for years even as the trial went on.  The real punishment wasn’t the sentence; it was the long drawn-out process. Trials caused tremendous stress and uncertainty for the accused and their families.  Everyone knew that a conviction was a long shot, but the state used these cases to harass dissidents and put them through the legal wringer. In the end, they were never found guilty of conspiracy. Kalpana Kannabiran tells us more:  

Kalpana Kannabiran: And in the Naxalite conspiracy cases, all of them led to acquittals. The majority of people were acquitted, some were, you know, of minor crimes, not for conspiracy, but either convicted under the Arms Act or other minor offences and for reduced sentences, but very few like that. Almost all were acquitted. And so the charge of conspiracy was not made out in what are touted as the major conspiracy cases… 

The charge of conspiracy was not made out. And there were huge holes in the argument of the police at different points, right from the procurement of arms to the carrying out of offences, to the location of offences, to the pooling of different crimes into a single case. 

Host: Kannabiran spent 30 years of his career defending Naxalites in conspiracy cases. During this time, his stature as a civil liberties leader grew.  In 1974, he became a founding member of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee or APCLC. This committee served as a watchdog of state violence in Andhra and called out suspicious encounter killings and disappearances. 

All through, the Naxalite movement endured in pockets across the state and so did the government retaliation. In fact, in the mid-70s the conflict was only getting worse. 

<Clip of the Emergency being declared by Indira Gandhi>

“Bhaiyon aur behnon, rashtrapatiji ne apatkaal ki ghoshna ki hai”

Host: Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency on the night of 25 June 1975. The government suspended fundamental rights and threw thousands of opposition leaders in jail. Kannabiran became an even busier man during the Emergency. His phone often rang through the night — news of his friends or associates being arrested and people calling to ask him to take up their cases. The illegal arrests and detentions of Naxalites, student leaders and activists spiralled. Kannabiran later wrote that he was being surveilled and sensed that the government could arrest him too. 

Still, the environment of fear and suspicion did not stop him from representing detainees. 

Kalpana Kannabiran: He never refused a case. It was as simple as that. He never said, I’m not going to appear free. I think there was a way in which he approached his work that conveyed to people that they can take the liberty of saying that he is representing them. And in the same prison, in the same jails, there were also people who he was representing. So if there was an unrepresented detenu in jail and it wasn’t easy to get hold of a lawyer, he was just told as he was going out by his fellow detenues, just say, he’s your lawyer and he will come and argue for you. 

Host: On June 27, Kannabiran filed a writ petition against the detention of P Venkateswarulu, his colleague and secretary of the APCLC. The police had raided Venkateshwarulu’s house and confiscated his books and APCLC documents. In court, Kannabiran challenged this arrest, and the validity of the preventive detention law MISA or the Maintenance of Internal Security Act. He also questioned the legality of the Emergency itself. Kannabiran told the court there were simply no grounds for his client to have been arrested. Here’s Kannabiran recalling the case in the documentary The Advocate:

<Clip of K. G. Kannabiran speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

K. G. Kannabiran: “It was at the admission stage, initial stages of the hearing and if they have grounds, direct the public prosecutor to produce them, produce the order and the grounds. Then the public prosecutor foolishly got up and said the grounds are being typed….. I said, well the court may record the statement of the public prosecutor and release Mr. Venkateshwarulu because grounds are not in existence when he was arrested and it’s being typed now so he’s entitled to release.“

Host: The court did not accept Kannabiran’s position. But it’s a classic anecdote that pops up frequently in mentions of him. In a single spontaneous exchange, he exposed the intent of the state; the ridiculousness of first arresting someone and providing reasons for it only later. Even as this case was being heard, hundreds of other people were being arrested and detained across Andhra Pradesh. Kannabiran ended up filing more than 200 petitions in those years. His daughter, Kalpana, was in high school then and watched her father hard at work. She tell us more:

Kalpana Kannabiran: And it was incessant. It was like, you know, morning, noon and night. There were always cases to be argued. I mean, he was always required to be in multiple courts at the same time. Among those people who were detained, there were several who also argued their own cases. So it was, you know, I mean, one has to actually, I think, imagine him in that court in the midst of a significantly large set of people who were resisting the emergency. And the court was that space of theatre and performance of resistance against the emergency. And the Constitution itself then acquires a very, very different quality. So he is reading the Communist Manifesto to the judge. He is quoting William Shirer to the judge. He is quoting revolutionary poets in Telugu. And then they’re all coming out of court and addressing people and telling not just the press, but also telling people what the case was about, what transpired in court, and what their arguments were. So it was a huge exercise in public education.

Host: Meanwhile, reports of Naxalites and activists getting killed in police firing kept emerging from across Andhra Pradesh. After the Emergency was lifted in 1977, Kannabiran and other civil rights activists were determined to investigate its gruesome state violence. 

D. Nagasaila: Of course, encounter, encounter deaths, which has been like his lifetime work, labour of love that he calls, you know, which has been to make the state responsible for the acts of murder committed by the men in uniform. And I think just to drive home the point that an “encounter death” is nothing other than a homicide.  

D. Nagasaila: I am Nagasaila. I am an advocate practicing at the Madras High Court. I am also an active member of PUCL here in Tamil Nadu. 

Host: The People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a body that Kannabiran headed for two decades. D Nagasaila worked with Kannabiran on several major cases

D. Nagasaila: But when you start using terms like, you know, euphemistic terms like encounter deaths, you are kind of whitewashing it and legalising it. And it is that rendering of legitimacy, that veil of legitimacy which the state was trying to give to an act of murder. He spent his entire life, a good part of his life was spent in trying to pierce through that veil and show it for what it was, which is a murder.

Host: In April 1977, the Janata government led by Morarji Desai appointed a committee to investigate encounter killings in Andhra Pradesh. The committee was headed by former Bombay High Court judge VM Tarkunde and Kannabiran was one of its eight members. On the whole, the Committee examined 77 alleged encounter killings. Kannabiran and others criss-crossed the state speaking to people, collecting evidence and picking apart the police narratives bit by bit. 

<beat>

The Committee published an explosive report. Its title was “Encounters are Murders.” For the first time, supposedly spontaneous encounters with Naxalites were exposed as well-planned murders by the police. The report named specific police officers and called for a more detailed judicial enquiry. Under pressure, in August 1977, the central  government set up a one-man commission under Justice Vashishtha Bhargava, a retired judge of the Supreme Court. The commission had to investigate 300 encounter killings in Andhra Pradesh. Kannabiran appeared before it, and laid out the Tarkunde Committee’s findings. 

<beat>

But the commission was wound up within a few months because of witness intimidation and political interference. Kalpana Kannabiran told us that the Tarkunde Committee report still managed to spark a state-wide conversation about state violence and police power. 

Kalpana Kannabiran: Although the Bhargava Commission itself was folded up and not allowed to continue till the stage of its final report. I think that entire public discussion, if you look at the newspapers, for instance, of 1977, 78, you’ll find a stunning coverage on police encounters. So nobody any more treated encounters as armed encounters between armed criminals and the police. You know, began to treat encounters as shoot at sight on unarmed people. I mean, the entire – the whole meaning of encounters – changed as a result of the work of civil libertarians in that period between 76 and 80 or so. 

Host: The public response to the exposé energised Kannabiran and his fellow activists to organise more investigations or independent fact-finding missions. These have long been an important tool to fight state abuse and oppression. In 1978, Kannabiran was elected president of the APCLC, and under his leadership, the Committee committed itself to independent fact-finding.These investigations were a form of constitutional labour; they contributed to upholding rights. In Deepa Dhanraj’s documentary, Kannabiran spoke about what he hoped to achieve:

<Clip of K. G. Kannabiran speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

K. G. Kannabiran: Tarkunde Committee really was a pointer to us that we should constitute this kind of fact-finding committees and go on releasing the information to the people more to educate the people about this than to reach across to the government because we knew that the government is absolutely impervious, indifferent to this kind of killings. 

Host: In the 1983 state election, police violence became a campaign issue for the first time. The Telugu filmstar and newly-minted politician N.T. Rama Rao or NTR promised a government that would keep the police in check. His party, the Telugu Desam Party, promised to abide by democratic principles and traditions. But NTR abandoned his promise soon after he won. Within the first year of his term, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee or APCLC itself became a target of police repression. Its members were booked for obstructing police on duty, and printing presses were ordered to stop printing the Committee’s pamphlets.

<Transition>

Host: As we heard earlier, Kannabiran often referred to his work as Sisyphean – meaning that progress and change was elusive, despite his constant efforts. This was especially true of his fight against encounter killings. No matter how many exposés the APCLC and other organisations carried out, police brutality never seemed to end. But when one chapter of a fight ended in a fact-finding report, the next one began in the courtroom. Sometimes the fight got personal, as in the case of a man named Madhusudhan Raj Yadav. 

Almost 20 years after the Tarkunde Committee report, Kannabiran read in a local paper that a Naxalite had been shot and killed in an alleged encounter in Hyderabad. The person was not named in the papers, but Kannabiran heard that this might be Madhusudan Raj Yadav. Yadav had helped Kannabiran in the past, during the Tarkunde Committee’s investigation. Kannabiran was friends with the young man, and had even attended his wedding. Now it looked like Yadav had become a victim himself. The next day, he walked into the courtroom of the chief justice of the Andhra Pradesh high court and made an oral application himself. The case was eventually filed as KG Kannabiran vs Chief Secretary of Andhra Pradesh. 

V. Suresh: There was an encounter which had taken place, which he got to know and somebody called Yadav who was killed and nobody was wanting to appear to file a PIL against him. So it was at that point in time that Kannabiran came forward to become the petitioner. 

Host: This is V. Suresh, a lawyer and the national general secretary of the PUCL, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.  Suresh and his wife D Nagasaila worked with Kannabiran on several major cases.

Host: Kannabiran pointed out that the death was suspicious and that the court should ensure, first of all, that the police did not dispose of the body to cover up evidence. The two-judge bench passed an interim order directing this. Two weeks later, Chief Justice PS Mishra and Justice CVN Sastri passed a judgement. They pulled up the state police for failing to investigate the suspicious death. Crucially, they took the matter out of the police’s hands and directed the CBI to investigate.

<Clip of K. G. Kannabiran speaking in the documentary The Advocate plays>

K. G. Kannabiran: “He gave a judgment saying that encounter is a homicide, it has to be investigated and on investigation the person who committed the murder must be prosecuted. After so many years of toiling in 1997 I got this judgment.“

Host: Kannabiran saw this judgement as a personal victory, and a victory for the civil-rights movement as a whole. He had been fighting to hold police accountable for encounter killings for almost 25 years. This was the first time that a judge had ruled so strongly on the issue.   

V. Suresh: Now the point to be noted in that case, for 25 long years he had been waging a battle on this legal principle that encounters is nothing else but homicide done by people in uniform. 

For 25 long years, there were hundreds of cases which had been dismissed. He kept on and on and on and on. He never gave up hope that someday the principle will be accepted. And until eventually in this particular case, it was accepted by the then Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court. 

Host: Those who saw Kannabiran at work said he approached his cases with one eye on the details and the other on the bigger picture. One aspect was to present a case by telling a story, to draw the judges in. Suresh tells us more about Kannabiran’s style in court:

V. Suresh: He taught us a lot of court craft. There are two parts to the court craft he taught us. One are the jurisprudential principles. The second thing are the court practices. He would tell us, think of the court as a classroom and think of a judge as somebody whom you’re training to be thorough with the law. So you take a class in the court and you may not believe it, but ever since then, now for 35 years now, I am quite famous in the court for starting out with the bird’s eye view and I start a storytelling session. Stories are the best way to reach out to judges.

Host: As Suresh says, Kannabiran wasn’t afraid to challenge judges, or or to appeal to them with unconventional techniques. His methods also created empathy for Naxalites and others who were often described as the worst kind of criminals. In a story that has entered legal folklore, he once sparred with Justice Madhusudhan Rao of the Andhra high court in a Naxalite case. Let’s hear about it from Suresh. 

V. Suresh: And when the judge, the senior judge told him, Mr. Kannabiran, you are arguing based on the constitution principles about these Naxalite prisoners. These Naxalite prisoners don’t owe allegiance to the Constitution. They have rejected the Constitution. So how can you ask us now to apply the Constitution in their case? So Kannabiran immediately said that was something that was wonderful with him. His repartees were fantastic. He would talk from Shakespeare, he will talk from Byron, he will talk from Upanishads. He will talk from just about everything. He put it into a very simple way. He shot back at the court, telling the court, let me remind this court that what is at test is not the political principle of the Naxalites, but the constitutional principles of this court. So when we are coming here to say that the Constitution has to be followed, what is the test is the constitution and the High Court.

Host: This exchange distilled the essence of Kannabiran’s practice. He saw lawyering as a way to reinvent the meaning of justice, freedom, liberty and dignity. In the process, he made both the state and the Naxalites subject to the Constitution. His approach earned him the respect of the bench. Kalapana explains:

Kalpana Kannabiran:  He would go into a district court like in the Coimbatore bomb blasts case. The judge just said, I have  read your wages of impunity. So they were connecting emotionally with him through his constitutional arguments… 

You know, so he was, I mean, what is the moral high ground you must occupy to be able to ask judges to put compassion above the status or their prerogatives under the law?… 

I mean, the way he just held governments to account. Now, judges are watching all of that, whether or not they rule in favor of the petitioner and against the government is another matter. But they’re watching what you are doing. And that is what contributes to the way in which they approach you as a person. 

Host: His stature also meant he was called on to help find a political solution to the Naxalite conflict. From the 1980s, he was frequently invited by the government to negotiate with Naxalites. Despite severe repression, the movement remained  strong and carried out attacks on police officers and public infrastructure. In 1987, it kidnapped seven IAS officers and held them hostage, demanding the release of Naxalite prisoners in exchange. The government asked Kannabiran to help free the officials. The poet Nikhileshwar reflects on that episode:

Nikhileshwar: He negotiated the cases between the government and the Naxals also, Haragopal, etc. I think we heard about that particular thing when, when some IAS officers were kidnapped by the Naxals in East Godavari district. Mr. Shankaran and all those things, you know. So that one of the significant events in his life, wherein along with Mr. Professor Haragopal, he boldly went forward and talked with the Naxalites and got them released. 

Host: Prof. Haragopal is an academic, activist and a long time colleague of Kannabiran. They convinced the government to keep police out of the negotiations, and they secured the safe release of the officers. From then on, Kannabiran was crucial to brokering peace between the state and the rebels. He spent decades trying to create an environment for peace talks and for ending the violence. There were many false starts; and the dialogue finally fell apart in the 2000s. But Kalpana Kannabiran told us that he was optimistic throughout:

Kalpana Kannabiran:  I think there was never an opportunity that he passed up to try and see if something is possible in terms of a dialogic deliberation around the restoration of democracy, a restoration of constitutionalism. He just tried every possible avenue that opened up. 

Host: Kannabiran participated in milestone moments in the human rights movement, outside Andhra as well. He was president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties or PUCL for 25 years. Under his leadership, the organisation joined a civil society-led inquiry into the 2002 Gujarat riots. Their report showed a clear collapse of law and order, and sharply indicted the state government. He also passionately argued against the death penalty, and at once even argued for one of the accused in the Parliament Attack case of 2001. 

Throughout, Kannabiran opposed excessive state power and called on law enforcement agencies to  follow the law themselves as well as the principles of the Constitution. Kannabiran himself worked into his day-to-day practice and his activism a profound dedication to constitutional principles. He was not blind to the challenges surrounding him and his colleagues. He did not rest on hard-fought victories, however small or large. Kalpana Kannabiran told us that her father sometimes expressed anguish over the work that lay ahead but he was determined to carry on. She tells us what kept him going: 

Kalpana Kannabiran:  So one part of it is that he was not alone in the struggle. There were so many people and he was pooling in those collective energies outside. The other part of it is he was not alone at home either. So there were, there was always a spouse, children, dog, grandchildren. His house was never without a dog. His dog was his best friend, you know, and yeah, so, and all of these kind of, you know, helped him just, I wouldn’t say unwind. It just helped him be the kind of person he was. He loved music of all kinds. He could sing all the old Telugu film songs. He could sing the old Hindi film songs. 

Host: Kannabiran made it his mission to free institutions like the police and the courts from colonial practices and legacies. In the process, he developed a jurisprudence of civil liberties which strengthened the ideas of democratic citizenship laid down in the Constitution. He turned the courtroom into a site of vibrant dialogue on our constitutional ideals – all while defending the people often branded by the government as the nation’s enemies. In case after case, he urged the bench to see past this narrative and give his clients their due rights. His approach expanded the meaning and scope of our rights and freedoms as citizens of a democracy. His daughter, Kalpana, described this approach as insurgent constitutionalism. She explains:

Kalpana Kannabiran:  The only way to work the Constitution is to work it insurgently. Because what you are doing in the course of bringing about a constitutional order is toppling the status quo. And that toppling of the status quo requires you to adopt a very different approach to constitutional interpretation. I mean words have meanings of course, but meanings are not fixed. And meanings can be imaginatively crafted to tune with the spirit of a provision. And I think basically that was, you know, our approach to it. And you’ll see it in several of his cases as well.

Host: In recent years, we have witnessed new state efforts to crack down on civil liberties activists and movements. For some, like the Telugu poet Varavara Rao, life has come a full circle. Rao was entrapped in some of the conspiracy cases that Kannabiran fought in the 1970s and 1980s and he was again implicated in the Bhima Koregaon case in 2018. It’s almost as if nothing changed in the intervening years. This brings us back to Kannabiran’s description of his work as “Sisyphean.” The fight for human rights may feel like one step forward and two steps back, but it is essential to keep on going.