![]() The book more or less reset our history of civil rights movements in India. In 2016 Anand Teltumbde published a book titled Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt. ![]() ![]() Be that as it may, it would be useful, at this juncture, when the surveillance State is beginning to emerge as the new normal, to revisit the relationship between civil rights and truth-telling. For, rights violations are seldom acknowledged as such and are continuously justified in the name of protecting the State’s sovereign – and securitized – interests. In today’s context, official truth comes in many guises and it has become more difficult than ever to “truth-tell”, especially from a classic civil rights perspective. Such truth-telling, though, was not easy, since it had to prevail over and against civil beliefs, which were predisposed to concur with “official” truth and to affirm it. Writing on the “disappeared” young men in Punjab in the 1980s, civil rights activist Ram Narayan Kumar observed that, in this instance and several others, where horrible crimes had been committed, with the tacit sanction of the State, truth-telling in public was entirely necessary to elicit social recognition of wrong-doing and the suffering it had caused. ![]()
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