In this episode of The Unofficial Seminar, Arup K. Chatterjee sits down with political scientist Professor Ankita Pandey (Associate Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University) to discuss her Cambridge University Press book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India. The conversation explores the concept of “ally activism” — how lawyers, professors, and judges historically mobilized on behalf of political prisoners, Naxalite detainees, and riot victims without direct personal stake. Professor Pandey unpacks her “politics of amplification” framework, contrasts civil liberties movements in Kolkata and Delhi during the 1970s Emergency era, and traces the concept back to Gandhi’s 1917 Champaran fact-finding inquiry. It is a must-watch for students of Indian political history, civil rights, constitutional law, and social movement theory.
Arup K. Chatterjee: When privilege ceases to be your source for exception or indeed guilt, it becomes what political scientists tend to call ally activism. It’s a subject that we are going to talk about today with a very special guest, Professor Ankita Pandey. Professor Ankita Pandey studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of Delhi, and the University of Oxford. She teaches political science — she’s a political scientist. She’s a professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, and she’s also a research associate at the Global and Area Studies Department at Oxford. Professor Ankita Pandey is the author of a fascinating book called Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India, published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Pandey, welcome to my podcast. How have you been?
Ankita Pandey: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Arup K. Chatterjee: I ask this question to sociologists and political scientists, and it does end up irking them quite a bit, so I hope you don’t feel the same way. Does a political scientist look at politics or society in the same way that a scientist looks at water molecules, or is there a fundamental difference?
Ankita Pandey: We have been taught for many years about the essential difference between the scientific method and the social science method. A social scientist or a political scientist is interested fundamentally in questions of power, and is no longer looking for the kind of objectivity that we look for in the sciences. The scientific method seems to be — back in the day at least, more so than today — more positivist, more quantifiable and objective, than the social science and political science method, which seems to be more interpretive. So yes, I’d say that there is a fundamental difference in the method. In fact, at JNU, you mentioned JNU — at JNU, the department is called the Centre for Political Studies, and not the Centre for Political Science, precisely to mark that kind of divergence.
Arup K. Chatterjee: And that interesting distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences sort of underpins the rationale of your title as well. I suppose you call your book Becoming Allies — that’s a very beautiful title, very polysemic. It could very well be a novel, going by the rest of the description. And that title, Becoming Allies, also delves into the concept of ally activism, which you distinguish from something like a social movement. Now, if I was reading the themes of your book in a civics lesson in my school, then I would be calling this something like a social movement, or maybe a civil rights movement, which you touch on in your subtitle. So your book features a dramatis personae of lawyers, professors, judges — people in positions of privilege, and a good deal of agency — and they are standing in for people with whom they have almost no connections, and surely no kinship: political prisoners, some of them Naxalite prisoners and riot detainees. By calling this ally activism, you are trying to distinguish it from other kinds of social movements. So why do you think that’s important?
Ankita Pandey: Thank you for that question, and also thank you so much for reading the book so closely. Let me start with a brief description of the book itself — it will also help the audience follow the conversation. The book is born out of the question of why it is that some people devote themselves to fighting injustices that don’t affect them directly. And I don’t mean individually — why is it that some people actually create a collective platform to do this? I’m not asking a question of behavioural psychology. I’m not trying to imply that some people are of superior moral character or something. I’m approaching this question from a political and sociological lens, because we know a great deal about social movements, political parties, and protest. When we think about social movements — think of any of the big movements that must have taken place in the last decade — the narrative is state versus the movement. This is what the state did, this is how the movement responded, this is the strategy the movement adopted, and this is how the government reacted.
What we know very little about is the people who stand alongside various movement groups, who come to support the movement without being directly affected by the cause. And of course it is gratifying in many ways to be able to live one’s politics — I’m not saying they don’t benefit from or get any value from their participation. But the book is trying to tell the story of a particular kind of activism, which I call ally activism, through the history of civil liberties groups and their collective practice. I call the process by which they make these struggles visible “the politics of amplification.”
What do they do? They help connect movements with institutions. They might help bring public support. They might ensure that issues are heard not just by the communities directly affected, but also by the larger public. So in the book, I say that they serve as a kind of infrastructure — they’re creating a mechanism through which local voices and struggles become visible, credible, and difficult to ignore. And I’m looking at the 1960s to the 1980s — a time when social media is not present. Movements don’t have the kind of, to use a popular word, “PR” that we now have with the presence of social media. I’m trying to talk about how democracy actually depends on this infrastructure being in place, so that claims can travel from local groups that are protesting to the district court, to the high court, to the Supreme Court, or to the national media, or to the right institutions. They build links between movements, courts, media, and the public. That was my reason for not using the term “social movement,” or even the broad term “activist.” Those are both fine — it’s not incorrect to use them — but they don’t quite capture the distinct form of politics that this is.
I mean, I can talk a little more about this as we go on.
Arup K. Chatterjee: I was thinking, while reading particular sections of the book — and my next question is about the two metropolitan spaces, Kolkata and Delhi, during the ’60s and ’70s, especially the JP andolan and the Naxalite movement. But even before that, while reading the introduction, I was wondering if the history of colonial India couldn’t have been given a new direction if we were to evaluate it through the lens of this concept. Anyway, that’s a concern for later. My next question would be: you write in your book that Delhi and Kolkata used to approach the central government in different ways, and activists from Delhi and activists from Kolkata had very different views of the centre. Kolkata was skeptical — skeptical of Gandhi, and also skeptical of the Indian state, and for good reasons. Many of us have read about the policing, the police state, of the 1970s, and that particular regime created such a bloody divide between the Naxalites on the one hand and the common citizenry — there were lawsuits on both sides, and there was a brutal crackdown by the police. Kolkata had very good reasons to be skeptical of the state. New Delhi, on the other hand, was more trusting toward the centre, but its dreams were crushed after 1975. Is there some allegorical value you’re trying to draw from this? And are there any parallels you find — I know your book is not about the twenty-first century, but just off the cuff, would you like to draw any parallels, or do you think that would be overreaching?
Ankita Pandey: Thank you again. The colonial India bit that you mentioned — I actually continue to be very interested in that. I wish I had the skills of a historian and could access archives, because I would be very interested in tracking the history of fact-finding as a social movement tactic — independent fact-finding done by a group of citizens coming together. I would very much like to see how far back it goes, and hopefully someday I will find the time to do that.
As a person — and I must start with a disclaimer — there is a very strong civil liberties activism tradition in southern India, with Andhra being a very important location. But given my limitations of language, I chose to look at Delhi and Kolkata. The reason being that Delhi is the place that sees the first national civil liberties groups in India, and Kolkata is one of the places where civil liberties activism began in 1972 — there’s a group called the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights, APDR, formed in the aftermath of the counterinsurgency operations against the Naxalite movement.
So I went and met activists in both these spaces, in Kolkata and in Delhi — first-generation people who were in their twenties in that period, the ’70s to ’80s. They were in their twenties or thirties then; at the time I was interviewing them, they were in their seventies and eighties. Looking back at their activism now — and of course I’m not saying everyone in one city thinks the same way — but what was a striking contrast is that a lot of the time, people in Kolkata would talk about how they were deeply skeptical of state power from the outset, as you mentioned. They weren’t approaching the question of bail for one of their comrades who was jailed from a place of faith — they kept using the word “tactical.” “We went and approached the courts tactically.” It was a strategy — they were making it very clear that it was a strategy.
While the people in Delhi — quite a few of them, overwhelmingly — said that the Emergency was a watershed moment for them, in 1975. One of them told me, “I can’t believe that Nehru’s daughter would do that.” So there was a sense of disenchantment, and their journey was from a place of faith to disenchantment, while for a lot of the activists in Kolkata, the journey was from skepticism to some degree of strategic use. That contrast was useful for me to establish the point that there isn’t a single political tradition that gave birth to civil liberties activism — the activism has multiple origins. There are those who are liberal democrats, and there are those from the Left. In Kolkata, for a lot of them, it emerged in the context of state violence in response to the Naxalite movement, and in Delhi, for many of them, it started with the anti-Emergency mobilization, which had disappointed them and then transformed them. So they were talking much more in a constitutional framework, with some degree of faith in democratic institutions and the hope that they would be able to bring it back. There was an element of restoration that I did not find as much in Kolkata. So the contrast helps me talk about how commitment to civil liberties can be shaped by very different political journeys. People don’t arrive at it from the same route.
Arup K. Chatterjee: In terms of the perception of these groups — I’m sorry to use that very loose phrase, “these groups,” I almost sound like prime-time television media — but yes, that’s the subject of my next question. When we look at these groups, these civil rights activists or ally activists, especially when we are very skeptical, we tend to club them as non-state actors, and we mean that phrase pejoratively, generally — as actors, as agents with some kind of hidden incentive, hidden agendas. Maybe they are funded by the opposition, again in quotes. Now, this is relatively a post–social media phenomenon, but what kind of history does it have in India? Were political parties, was the press, calling civil rights activists “non-state actors funded by the opposition” even back in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s?
Ankita Pandey: Actually, interestingly, well before the current moment, well before social media, governments of different colours across independent India — and globally — any activism that is seeking to expose the official truth or official narrative around something typically gets this treatment. The attempt is not to oppose what activists are saying; the government’s attempt is to delegitimize it. And the way to delegitimize something is to use one of three or four repeated tropes — you can observe this globally — the trope of it being foreign-funded, or the trope of it being unpatriotic or anti-national in some way, or the trope of it being the overground face of something that is actually an underground movement, or people who are somehow interested in bringing shame.
I remember, as you mentioned — I remember that Ashis Nandy has a book where he mentions an activist opposing what Nandy calls one of India’s first environmentalists, who was writing to the government consistently opposing the Damodar Valley Corporation — one of the first articulations against big dams and their aftermath. Nandy shows how the Amrita Bazar Patrika had reported about this activist, saying this is Pakistan-funded — no, actually not Pakistan — they said this is a hostile foreign power that possibly is encouraging this person to say these things. Very interesting that this has become the trope. I think it’s an ongoing battle, and I think it will always be that way. I think it’s meant to be an adversarial system, and it sort of works only when it remains adversarial in that manner.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Your chapter in the book refers to a set of scholars in the 1980s — 1984, to be specific — Rajni Kothari, Harsh Sethi, and D.L. Sheth, who had coined the term “non-party political formations.”
Ankita Pandey: Because this is a time when a range of grassroots movements and social movements in India are emerging, and to capture all of that they had come up with this term, non-party political formations. They deeply believed that these movements had come up because of a certain disappointment with political parties — political parties are not able to represent the people, and therefore people are having to choose other groups. Now, I thought that when it came to civil liberties groups, this term, this label, “non-party political formations,” didn’t quite fit, because when I interviewed the activists, I noticed that they are not “non-party” in the sense that they’re removed from party — they’re not operating in a zone that is away from party. Many of the leading civil liberties activists had been members of political parties. During the Emergency, they worked very closely with parties of the opposition. Some later joined the Janata government; some advised political parties.
So I noticed that the label “non-party” was a little misleading, and therefore I say it might be a better idea to talk of them as “third party,” because “third party” allows us to understand that they are independent — they are guarding their organizational autonomy quite carefully, and they are engaging with political parties as and when they need to. They lobby with them, sometimes, and they defended people across ideological divides. They criticized governments of different political colours. They disagree with parties; they are sometimes working with political parties. That’s why I thought “third party” is a better way to understand their location analytically than “non-party.”
Arup K. Chatterjee: That’s also very useful to understand something like the Aam Aadmi Party — I think it is very openly a third-party embodied agent. Wouldn’t you say that?
Ankita Pandey: Yes, absolutely. I think because it was able to mobilize very big numbers, I think it would be completely fair to call it a social movement like any other social movement. I think — and your audience will feel this too, I’m sure — one difference between civil liberties groups and, say, that movement, is that civil liberties groups are not reported on by newspapers. At most they’ll say “civil society groups,” or sometimes “human rights groups,” but you don’t actually know the names, you don’t know the people, because much of this work is in fact the work of supporting someone by somewhat invisibilizing oneself. The logic of this kind of politics is not to get the spotlight on oneself — that’s not to say this never happens, but the logic of the politics is not to have the spotlight on oneself, but on the issue you want amplified. So in that sense, there’s a difference between something like the Aam Aadmi Party, which mobilizes large numbers on the streets, and something like civil liberties activism, where you get a lawyer to work pro bono for a political prisoner — that’s never going to become a mass issue on which thousands of people show up at Jantar Mantar. It’s a very different kind of work — relatively quieter work.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Which brings me to my next question, because I think I told you at the beginning of this conversation that there’s something quite ennobling about that title, Becoming Allies. I did feel like it was a slight de-visibilization of the “I,” or the egotistical identity, and surely it was a self-conscious draining away of your privilege — which makes me think, is there something distinctly Gandhian about this? You mentioned Gandhi, you mentioned the fact-finding investigation spearheaded by Gandhi in 1917 in Champaran. Walk us through that, and please tell us if it’s not too much of an overreading that there’s something Gandhian in ally activism, in that you’re trying to use a vocabulary and idiom — in this case, of the law — to fight against the state, even when you perhaps do not believe in the law, or you don’t believe in the law anymore. Gandhi was a barrister, he was a lawyer, and he had a practice in South Africa, but perhaps in India, law is not the first thing he believes in anymore. He believes in many other kinds of institutions, like Satyagraha — but he still continues to stick to law vigorously. So is it using the vocabulary of the other — and in this case the other is a much bigger entity than ourselves, in this case the state, the colonial state — using their vocabulary to try to instill reform in them? Quite typically biblical, wouldn’t you say? Is that what ally activism is also aiming for?
Ankita Pandey: Thank you, that’s a very interesting question, and something I’d be happy to think more on. Using the law doesn’t necessarily mean that activists — Gandhi included — would believe that the legal system is perfect, or even that the legal system is just. There is something — and I want to think about this deeply and write about it someday — about the use of the form of law in fact-finding. When you convert people’s testimonies into a format that is compatible with evidentiary acts and is admissible in a court, it acquires a certain credibility that just memory or people’s narratives do not have. So law can become a strategic resource for activists to challenge the state on its own terms — something admissible in a court of law. Gandhi did this quite well, and one of the things I’ve tried to show in the book is that this has a long history in India. We mentioned colonial India — fact-finding, in fact, emerged well before the modern human rights moment in the Indian subcontinent, back in the anti-colonial period — 1917, and even before. Gandhi does this inquiry in Champaran — we know this inquiry well — against the kinds of taxes imposed on indigo plantations, and he organized a very systematic investigation. He and his colleagues travelled across villages; someone from the CID was there. They recorded testimonies of peasants — they would get the peasants to put a thumbprint, they would read the testimony back to the peasant to ensure they were documenting it properly. They would collect and assemble evidence around it, and in many ways it mirrored an official inquiry, even though it was conducted independently. That’s what I mean by the form of the law helping acquire credibility, even in movement politics — these reports, many of them may never go to a court, but that form helps acquire public visibility and credibility. That practice becomes a kind of template.
To that extent, one can say this is Gandhi — civil liberties fact-finding groups have travelled to sites of violence, continued to interview witnesses. I think the People’s Union for Democratic Rights has done more than 3,000 fact-finding investigations. They collect testimonies, reconstruct the events, produce reports, and challenge the official version of what happened. And when I was speaking to these activists, they aren’t naive about law — many of them know that courts can fail, governments can ignore legal norms, justice can be deeply unequal — and yet they continue to use legal language, legal procedure, and constitutional principle, because they think this is one way in which the state can be publicly held accountable and shown a mirror.
But would I say the civil liberties movement, in that sense, is Gandhian? It’s Gandhian plus other traditions. There are Gandhians, but as I just said, there are also liberal democrats who were very disappointed with the imposition of the internal Emergency. There are socialists — a very significant number of Gandhian socialists are part of the opposition back in that day — and there are, of course, Marxists who are part of this. So the practice of fact-finding in Champaran becomes a milestone which later civil liberties groups inherit, but there are certainly more ideologies feeding into it.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Right, right — which is very interesting, and which feeds into my next question, which perhaps might be the last one for you today, because we hope to have you back many more times. Professor Pandey, I was just thinking — this is perhaps not directly related to your discipline and your theoretical vocabulary — but I couldn’t help but recall the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who brought a very significant change in the way we look at cultural history in general, meaning broadly, experiences located in time. We used to look at history, maybe fifty years ago, as being rather straightforward — there’s an official version and an unofficial version. But it seems there are multiple strands of history one can think of, and Raymond Williams referred to at least three kinds of structures — he called them the dominant, the residual, which was trying to both oppose the dominant but also feel nostalgia for a previous dominant, hoping for its return in the future, and then the emergent, which was antagonistic to both. Now, ally activism — I’m focusing on that concept here — when a book like this comes out, and when a member of the common public, like myself, looks at the book, we sometimes tend to think, is this book going to make any difference? And sometimes that’s a positive skepticism, and sometimes that could be a very negative kind of skepticism, in which we do not really want it to make a difference, and therefore we are skeptical. So my question, rather bluntly, is: is this concept trying to capture a kind of reality as it has been shaped in the past, and as it has been shaping society until the ’80s and the ’90s — or does this concept, ally activism, contain certain affirmative, reaffirmative possibilities of helping reality evolve? To put it more simply — is it capturing a structure of feeling, or is it also trying to take advantage of the knowledge of that structure of feeling, by distinguishing itself from social movements, so that ally activists can learn to help better kinds of revolutions in social movements and civil rights movements in the field? I don’t know if that’s making sense to you.
Ankita Pandey: No, absolutely, and thank you — there are two or three wonderful things to think about there. You’re absolutely right that the book looks particularly at history, but I myself am very interested in trying to look at the question of civil liberties activism today — what is its shape, what is the state of allyship and ally activism today. One of the spaces I look at is digital liberties activism — a lot of the concerns around liberty, around opposition to censorship, around ensuring that the digital divide reduces, against content moderation online, against internet shutdowns entirely. So a lot of the activism around this — the question of liberties seems to have also substantially moved into the digital realm, just as governance moves into the digital realm.
Now, even today, movements in remote areas no longer need an actual physical group of people to convey and carry their message from remote rural areas to the national capital, with the presence of social media — they can amplify it themselves. But what they do need is still an infrastructure that will help ensure their claims actually travel to the right locations. The documenting, the providing of legal aid, the conducting of fact-finding, the support that journalists or audiences can provide — that remains very significant even today. In fact, I would be very surprised if there is any movement — meaning, the movement always reaches a point where it needs a crack in the system, and it could be a person who will leak some information, or someone a little more sympathetic to the movement who will actually talk to those in authority — there will often be an intermediary who plays some role within most movement contexts. I actually think the need for ally activism in the present is not diminished at all — it has perhaps become even more important, given how polarized things are today. Given that polarization, I think all this work — documenting the abuses, providing legal aid, creating documentaries, doing fact-finding, and defending people in court — continues to be very important.
This bit about structural change and the structure of feeling — ally activism by itself, of course, will not produce structural change. Civil liberties groups will not be able to abolish inequality, or patriarchy, or communal violence, or even transform the state structure. They are very state-facing, but they cannot do that. What they will do, as I said previously, is create an infrastructure — a little bit like a road — and make sure that evidence does not disappear, that it reaches the right places. They will connect local struggles to the wider public, and that translation of grievances, that passing of the mic to the local group, is important.
Now, in terms of this structure of feeling — I’m not a person who has studied literary theory, but I can say that the first-generation civil liberties activists I met definitely inhabited a particular political world. There was some sense of a collectively shared understanding of what is ethical self-conduct in politics — what am I expected to do politically, as a person of some privilege, as a person who has education, as a person who can speak the English language, as a person who has a friend from my college or school days who is now a bureaucrat, or now a senior police officer. So the cultural and financial capital that a certain group of salaried professionals had in the 1960s and ’70s — they definitely shared a collectively held value of wanting to be a vigilant citizen, to ensure that state actors do not abuse the immense power they have, and perhaps even a desire for leadership, to do something in society, to lead in some way.
To that extent, maybe they do inhabit a structure of feeling — I’m more familiar with political theory, so I would say what Hegel called a zeitgeist. But they draw from several different traditions, so in that sense it’s ideologically a little diverse — from Left sympathizers, to Gandhians, to socialists, to liberals. Many of them share this collective sense, and even a romance for constitutionalism and constitutional politics.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Democratic institutions …
Ankita Pandey: Yes …
Arup K. Chatterjee: Sorry, please go on — I didn’t mean to interrupt.
Ankita Pandey: I was saying there was a shared need to keep the state accountable, a shared sense of wanting to play a role in politics. Now, if you look at these ideologies — the Gandhian emphasis on Seva, and on not joining government but continuing to work in some kind of civil society domain, the Marxist emphasis on vanguard politics — all of them are actually coming together to influence a generation of people who have a collective sense of ethical conduct.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Well, fascinating. And I hope we come back to the book in the coming months. Professor Pandey, thank you so much for giving me your valuable time, and thank you so much for taking the time to answer my somewhat convoluted questions.
Ankita Pandey: Thank you so much. I think the questions were great, and a couple of them have also helped me think about what I could do next. So thank you for that.
Arup K. Chatterjee: That’s very kind of you. Dear audience, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast of The Unofficial Seminar. Please like, share, and subscribe to the channel. Professor Pandey, thank you once again for giving me your precious time, and I hope to see you soon in the same institution that employs both of us. Dear audience, until next time. Thanks.
Arup K. Chatterjee 