[LOST & FOUND] K. G. Satyamurthy

K. G. Satyamurthy ‘Sivasagar‘ (1931–2012), lifelong Communist who eventually broke with his party largely over the issue of its caste-blindness.

Towards the end of his life, Satyamurthy told one reporter:

Sujatha Gidla who conducted extensive interviews with Satyamurthy shortly before he died confirms the impression of a movement riddled with caste prejudices and of the profound impact this had on ‘SM’. “Talk of caste feeling inside the party had always been taboo. But the political climate had changed in the wake of a shocking massacre that year [1985] in the village of Karamchedu, where an entire madiga settlement was brutally attacked by a mob of two thousand kamma men”. In 1987 Satyamurthy was expelled from the party for ‘conspiring to divide the party’. In case it isn’t clear what that means, he was expelled for raising the issue of casteism and caste discrimination within the party.

Ostracized by the PWG and ‘on the run with a price on his head’, some years later he intervened at an annual conference of the Revolutionary Writers’ Association to try and explain what lay behind his expulsion from the party. Gidla says,

What large parts of the traditional (or tradition-dominated) Left in India have never seen clearly is that class oppression is worst at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, so that caste and class are realities that fuse in a kind of ‘overdetermination’ of the contradictions of India’s capitalist society.