I work mostly by myself, and have resisted joining alumni associations and WhatsApp groups. I am, in other words, broadly of the same mind as Groucho Marx, who famously said that he would never join a club which would have him as a member.
Yet for a few brief years in Delhi in the 1980s, I associated myself with the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, a citizens group that sought to hold the Indian State to account for the varied crimes it committed against Indian citizens. I attended the PUDR’s Saturday meetings at the Triveni Kala Sangam, paid a very modest amount from my stipend to help fund its reports, and on one occasion even joined a fact-finding group it had organised.
I was never a core member of PUDR, merely a fellow traveller, a sympathiser hovering around its outer circle. However, I admired the organisation and its work enormously, and thus felt a certain kinship with it, which was lost when I left Delhi for Bangalore in the early 1990s. Memories of what the PUDR had once meant to me came back while reading Ankita Pandey’s recently published book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India.
Pandey views civil liberties groups as an illustration of...
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