‘Dalit Voice’ and V T Rajshekar’s frustrated revolution

V T RAJSHEKAR died in 2024, at the age of 93, in Mangalore – not far from Onthibettu, the bucolic village of his birth. Born into a family of property and stature belonging to the dominant Bunt community, he spent his life fighting the iniquities his origins represented. 

Historically, the Bunts are the landed gentry of coastal Karnataka: a fertile strip between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea whose principal crops are areca nut, paddy, coconut and cashew. In the 1930s, when Rajshekar was born, this was still the South Canara district of Madras Presidency. By that time, the community had leveraged its generational wealth to gain prominence in business and civil administration. Rajshekar, heir to considerable ancestral lands and political connections, nevertheless renounced both his inheritance and his caste surname: Shetty. 

His rebellion began early. In the first decades of India’s independence, South Canara was a hotbed of Communist activity. In the early 1950s, when the Communist Party of India was subject to strict surveillance and persecution, Rajshekar became a clandestine supporter, helping revolutionaries in the district evade his father – a special magistrate appointed to try them. 

When Rajshekar got expelled from Mysore Law College, his worried father sent him to be counselled by K Hanumanthaiah, the chief minister of what was by then Mysore State. Thinking journalism would suit the boy’s restlessness, Hanumanthaiah helped get him a job at Deccan Herald in Bangalore. For about two decades Rajshekar worked both in mainstream newspapers and the Communist movement. The years only hardened his rebellion. By 1981, fed up with the discrimination and regressive caste politics endemic among his comrades and colleagues, he broke ties with both to found what is now his lasting legacy: Dalit Voice.