WISE COUNSEL
‘COMRADE’ KRISHAN SWARUP GORAKHPURIA 72 SOCIAL ACTIVIST AND EDUCATOR IN GORAKHPUR VILLAGE, HARYANA
His mother told Krishan Swarup that he was eight months old at the time of the “martial law (how many locals refer to the Partition of 1947)”. Although from school and college records, he is now 72 years old. A striking persona with his carelessly wrapped turban and walrus moustache, he is an easy man to talk to, what with the treasure trove of anecdotes he can recount from key moments in India’s post-Independence history.
He says he was just five or six years old when Master Maadu Ram, a local Arya Samaj leader, visited his father’s simple home in Gorakhpur village. Maadu Ram, Swarup says, fascinated him with his fearless advocation of rationalism against blind faith and idol worship. “I have never since stepped inside a temple, mosque, church or gurudwara,” says the man who now devotes all his time to educating others, including young school and college students, employee unions, farmers’ collectives and even local khap panchayats (caste councils) who care to hear his unorthodox views.
Starting out in student politics in the early 1970s, Swarup, then a postgraduate student of history, recalls how he was rusticated from Hisar’s Jat College in 1973, when he preferred to support a statewide school teachers’ strike instead of taking a prized opportunity to work as a stipendiary teacher. “The government was offering the jobs to break the teachers’ strike and I refused,” he says. The early influences and the heady days of student politics made for that inevitable drift to the Left (he became a card holder of the CPI(M).
But it was after 2008, when he withdrew from politics (he says, “I simply did not renew my card in 2012”) that Swarup, who is now respectfully referred to as ‘Comrade Krishan Swarup Gorakhpuria’, really
“He continues to inspire us all. It is because of him that people like us have developed a rationalist viewpoint)” Balbir Singh, a functionary of Gorakhpur’s Comrade Prithvi Singh Yadgar Committee, established by Krishan Swarup in 2008
came into his own.
Back in Gorakhpur, he spearheaded the establishment of the Comrade Prithvi Singh Yadgaar Committee (a tribute to a local Left leader), which now has bustling premises on one edge of the village. It is among several places where he engages with youth, both of the village and from settlements nearby. Discussions range from sports, afforestation, organic and zero-budget farming to advances in science and education. The centre also serves as a sports academy, which sent as many as seven boys to the volleyball nationals this year, and a coaching centre to prepare young boys and girls for competitive examinations.
And while he watches over the centre in Gorakhpur, Swarup spends the remainder of his time addressing employees’ unions, farmers and students. “This is to inform people of their rights and responsibilities,” he says. For instance, he spent weeks during a recent roadways union agitation in Haryana, talking to workers unions, advising them on how best to press for their demands. And he regularly visits government and private schools to similarly engage with students, whom he sees as the workforce of the future. “I engage in agitational and educational activity,” he chuckles. He is also head of one of the most progressive Khap panchayats in Haryana, through which he continues to wage a virtual war against female foeticide and honour killings amid Haryana’s intensely patriarchal rural society.
But the comrade isn’t merely a preacher. Two of his four children are in inter-caste marriages; on his insistence, his matriculate daughter-in-law went on to graduate and to teaching in a local school; and the delight on his face while visiting his grand-daughters in Chandigarh is telling.