Kannabiran interview

PUCL : Message: Kannabiran interview:

`Mainstream politics is all rubbish'
By R Akhileshwari, Deccan Herald, 10 Aug., 2006

K G Kannabiran, president of the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), has devoted his life to fighting for people's rights. He is one of the leading lawyers in Andhra Pradesh, and has taken up the legal cudgels against the state's attempts to suppress the people's movements and curtail the people's right to protest. He has been involved with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee since its inception 38 years ago and has fought every major legal case involving revolutionary poets, balladeers, fighters and sympathisers. He was the moving spirit behind the setting up of the Concerned Citizens' Committee that facilitated peace talks in 2004 between the government and People's War Naxalites, as the Maoists were known then. Deccan Herald spoke to Kannabiran (72) on the fallout of the war being waged by the Andhra Pradesh government against Maoists and the consequent mowing down of eight Maoists, including the state committee secretary of CPI (Maoist) Madhav in the Nallamalla forests on July 23.