Scholar and activist Prof. Anand Teltumbde on Monday demanded a judicial probe into the entire Bhima-Koregaon episode, including the recent arrests of activists across the country for suspected Maoist links and to also to take to task all those responsible for it.
Prof. Teltumbde, whose official residence at the Goa Institute of Management (GIM) campus in Sanquelim in North Goa was searched as part of the recent raids across the country on Dalit intellectuals, writers and human rights activists, was delivering a talk on ‘Decimating Dissent: The Truth behind Bhima Koregaon’, organised by Dakshinayan Abhiyan at Margao in South Goa on Monday.
“There should be a judicial commission’s probe into this (Bhima-Koregaon) episode and whoever did it should be taken to task. In a democracy, the State taking a posture and acting against citizens is unpardonable,” he said.
Reacting to the search of his residence, he said the police could not find anything. “The search by the police was absolute fabrication and utter nonsense. They raided my residence because I had attended the Paris convention organised by the Department of Amercian Studies in Paris in April this year. But it was not funded by Maoists; neither did it have a Naxal link,” Prof. Teltumbde said. He said he had filed a defamation suit against the Pune police.
On the historical background of the Bhima Koregaon protests, he said the Green Revolution was a capitalist strategy, which reduced the Dalits” to a rural proletariat. Through the post-Independence land reforms, the Congress, a “somewhat metropolitan party”, and created a class of rich farmers in rural areas that would be allied to them, he said. “They (the Brahmin landlords) were replaced by these people (the cultivators) and all kinds of markets were created. The Dalits were utterly dependent on the farm wages of the rich farmers.”
He said the battle of Koregaon-Bhima of the early 19th Century was largely unnoticed and only became popular after Babasaheb Ambedkar started visiting the obelisk that was erected by the British in memory of slain soldiers in the battlefield, which included soldiers from the Mahar clan.
On the legacy of the battle, Prof. Teltumbde said: “When Ambedkar came on the scene, the recruitment of Mahars in the British military was stopped. In that context, Bhima Koregaon came in handy for the Mahars to claim that they too belonged to a martial race who had sacrificed a lot.” Mr. Ambedkar's father too was a part of this movement, and when Mr. Ambedkar entered public life, he picked up this issue, and go to the obelisk to pay his respects. “Before that, it was not noticed by anyone. It was under cantonment control,” he said.