Review: Land, Guns, Caste, Woman; The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy
“Why don’t we kill him?” was Gita Ramaswamy’s suggestion when a fellow party member wanted to surrender. She was underground with her comrades during the Emergency in India in the mid-1970s — a defection to the police risked exposing their shelters. A decade later, in the Sangam, a collective working for land and wage rights near Hyderabad, she advocated assaulting landlords and even killing one because “it was easier to get acquitted in a murder case than get justice”.These vignettes exemplify the candour with which…