WHO'S TO BLAME?
[A pApam evvaridi?]
Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastri
(tr. Abhi Nimmagadda)
Detail from Poster –– V. Mayakovsky
Translator’s Introduction: 2026 marks the 35th anniversary of the murder of Narra Prabhakara Reddy. Four masked men broke into his home and shot him in the chest and head in front of his wife before fleeing the scene. He was 35 years old. Narra Prabhakara Reddy was a lawyer who was known for providing legal aid and counseling to those charged for Naxalism under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act, i.e., for participating in the longest ongoing Maoist insurgency in the history of the world, the Naxalbari-Maoist Insurgency. He was also the district convener in Warangal district in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh state for the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), which he revived after the murders of Japa Lakshmareddy and Dr. A. Ramanatham.
2026 also marks the 41st anniversary of Dr. A. Ramanatham’s murder. He was chased out of his clinic in Warangal by policemen and shot in the back of the head. A pediatrician by profession, he was involved in many struggles for the liberation of the proletariat and was well known in the area for his commitment to democratic ideals. He was assassinated in retaliation for the killing of a police officer by a local Naxalite group. He was also the Vice President of the APCLC.
2026 further marks the 34th anniversary of the attack on Dr. K. Balagopal, the then-General Secretary of the APCLC. A mathematician by training, he was involved heavily in journalistic work uncovering extrajudicial executions (“encounters”) by the police. It is this attack that prompted Srikakulam lawyer and writer Rachakonda Viswanathasastri to compose the following piece.
A hallmark of Rachakonda’s narrative style is his use of the voice of a lawyer arguing in court; this piece too follows in that tradition. In his argument, he relies heavily on two recurring themes: religion and nature. Both of these are intertwined from the very beginning as Rachakonda invokes the act of eating and ties it to both the rules animals follow in choosing their meals and to the Brahmanical scriptures that dictate how and what a supposedly pious person might consume. This relationship gains revolutionary potency by the end of the piece, when Rachakonda invokes the equine iconography of Kalki, the prophesied ender of the current (unjust) world order, and grafts it onto the image of the natural escalation of a gust into a full blown typhoon.
Published in 1992 in Srujana, a magazine established by the leftist writers group Viplava Rachaitala Sangam, this piece is not important for its (relative lack of) fame, nor for its theoretical strength, but for its genre-bending approach to expressing Rachakonda’s contempt for the coordinated state attacks against the APCLC and leftists writ large. Part op-ed and part prose-poem, "A pApam evvaridi," which Srujana classified simply as a “response” at the time of publication, offers one template through which to build a new leftist aesthetic.
Tigers don't eat tigers. Lions don't eat lions. Similarly, dogs don't eat dogs nor do pigs eat pigs. However, I've been told that fish eat fish, just as snakes eat snakes. Regrettably, this is not something I’ve been able to confirm myself. In any case, there are some people who eat fish, birds, insects, and other types of living creatures that don’t make an exception to eating other people. And further, even those who remain vegetarian in keeping with the scriptures will still sacrifice goats, though they have to hold their nose to do so. Per those same scriptures, they may then “ritualistically” partake in the carcass. We must condemn these hypocrites, these sinners who exist among all sections of our society, including among our politicians and policemen.
The police can be further subdivided into several factions. One very important faction is the IPS, which stands for “Indian Police Service.” But still within the IPS there is another faction, the “Indian People’s Persecuting Service” or “Indian People’s Russian Roulette Sector.” They shoot and kill the people who oppose them, or kill and shoot them, or shill and koot them, or koot and shill them. These are cannibals, man-shaped khaki monsters—enemies to the hungry and agitated masses. I can say with the utmost confidence that these same demons recently attempted to murder a true friend of the people, Dr. Kandala Balagopal.
Still, there is one line the police won't cross: fraternity. Even the most upright police officers won’t stop the evil ones among their ranks; they will simply turn a blind eye to any and all misdeeds. How else is it that a police force that prides itself on being able to catch an ant that had bit someone even if it were to flee to some dark corner in a seven-story building—how else is it that such a police force could fail to capture the criminals who murdered Dr. Ramanatham and Narra Prabhakara Reddy in broad daylight? Nor will the pigs who attempted to murder Dr. Balagopal face any consequences.
The great poet Sri Sri wrote of a starving old lady on the verge of death, and the wind that had thought to consider who's to blame for her plight before blowing away. But even he didn’t know as he wrote about it that that wind, now standing asleep in some distant land like a horse, will someday return having become a typhoon, ready to settle the score.
Abhi lives on the traditional homelands of the Council of Three Fires. You can reach him at @sent_fish on Twitter.