The passing away of HS Doreswamy, beloved freedom fighter and tireless activist for public causes, recently was a reminder of a style of social commitment. Selfless, ceaseless, incorruptible, his activist life had given itself over fully to working with those engaged with democratic causes. His involvement, even when small in scope, had the grandness of nation-building behind it.
My first encounter with Doreswamy was through his impassioned short book, Horatada Ditta Hejjegalu, during the course of my doctoral research on modern Mysore two decades ago. Appearing in 1972 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of India’s independence and published later in English as From Princely Autocracy to People’s Government (Translator: R Ramakrishnan) by his own publishing house, Sahitya Mandira, this book sketches the rise of the nationalist movement in Mysore, where the state unit of the Indian National Congress played an increasing role beginning in the late 1920s. Its charged historical narration, where his own contribution to this episode, as a mediator between labour union leaders in Bangalore during the Quit India protests and as editor of Pourawani, the 4-page daily newspaper that was critical of the Mysore government’s wavering attitude towards joining the Indian Union, only find a flickering mention, offers a sense for the moral fire found in him till the end.
Written seven years ago, Doreswamy’s essay, Deshada Indina Stiti (“The state of the country today”) clarifies that a great regard for the sacrifices of the freedom fighters was behind his love of freedom and his sincere belief that India’s independence would make a difference to the worse off in the country. Amnesiac towards the legacy of hard effort and struggle, he rues, the political class was squandering away freedom while the youth mistook freedom as something that lets them do whatever they pleased. If Indians didn’t feel for the wellbeing of “the last man” and fight for it, the future of the country was imperilled.
Doreswamy’s participation in the freedom movement however sat lightly in the speeches and interviews that he gave over the last fifteen years, a period that saw him rise to public prominence in Karnataka. On these occasions, he rarely spoke as an individual with the special authority of past heroic experience. He spoke instead as an ordinary Indian with full rights to offer political criticism. Determination, conviction, moral clarity, good cheer, an absence of anxiety and cynicism, a hope that dissent could yet steer things back to the right path, these stood out in the ethical persona of the tall and lanky figure whose hunch did little to diminish his stateliness.
When a TV reporter asked why he was present at a meeting to protest the Citizenship Amendment Act last year, Doreswamy simply said, “Because I’m concerned for my country, because I’m concerned for my people.” His appeals to fellow Indians often took the form of reminding them of their rights: “If your representative is not doing his work properly, ask him to quit. Tell him that you want someone better suited for it.” His faith in democratic processes was firmly in place as was his insistence that elected politicians stay accountable.
Doreswamy let his membership in the polity matter all the time. The last couple of columns that appeared in the Kannada weekly Nyaya Patha before his hospitalisation for Covid treatment in April well illustrate the point. In what proved to be his final column, he dwelt on the results of the recent state elections in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu before asserting that finding solutions to the problems of the day mattered more than winning elections and claiming that, by this token, the Modi government had to take the blame for not addressing the pandemic crisis responsibly. Two weeks earlier, he had urged the Karnataka government to identify the small farmers with genuine rights of access to government-owned land and offer them title deeds without delay: the bureaucratic formalities, he argued, were proving unbearable for the farmers.
Offering custodianship to Doreswamy’s legacy is by no means an easy obligation to fulfill. Resisting the encroachment of political, economic and civic freedoms and helping advance social justice in our own ways in our spheres of activity is to offer to work towards it.
(Chandan Gowda is the ISEC Professor, who looks for new ways of looking)