Vithal Mahadev Tarkunde

From Philosopedia

Tarkunde, V(ithal) M(ahadev) (3 July 1909 - 22 March 2004 )

V.M. Tarkunde, known as the doyen of civil liberties and human rights movement in India, was born at Saswad in Pune.

In 1930-1931, he did his Barrister at Law from England, then started practising law in Poona in 1933.

He joined the Congress Socialist Party along with S.M. Joshi in 1933 and did extensive social work in the surrounding villages. He became associated with M.N. Roy in 1936. In 1938 he became a member of All India Congress Committee but left it in 1940 on the question of war. He gave up his practice in 1942 to become a full time member of Radical Democratic Party and went on to become its General Secretary in 1944. In 1948 he started practising again in the Bombay High Court.

Tarkunde was given the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) at its World Congress in London in 1978. He was appointed as a judge in the Bombay High Court in 1957, from where he resigned in 1969 and shifted to Delhi to practice as a Senior Advocate in the Supreme Court of India. He was the president of the Indian Radical Humanist Association and had been editing the Radical Humanist, a journal founded by M.N. Roy, since 1970.

Tarkunde is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He signed Humanist Manifesto II and signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

In 1952, he was on the first Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).

In 1976, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association.

In Amsterdam at the Sixth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress (1974), he addressed the group, as he did also at the Seventh held in London (1978). In 1978, he received that group’s Humanist Award for defending the values of democracy. For Freedom in 1984 commemorated his seventy-fifth birthday. In 1983 he wrote Radical Humanism. Tarkunde is a contributing editor to Free Inquiry and, in his eighties, is editor emeritus of Mumbai’s Radical Humanist. Indian humanists regard him both as a theoretician and as an activist on behalf of humanism. He once wrote,

I believe in a country of mass poverty and ignorance, like India, humanism must take a radical form. It must be concerned with developing a movement aimed at spreading the humanist-democratic values of freedom, rationalism, and secular morality among the people so that they can take the necessary initiatives for the elimination of poverty and removal of mass ignorance.

Speaking in 1995 at a conference of humanists in India, Tarkunde said,

In many post-colonial countries, democracy was replaced by dictatorial regimes and democracy almost disappeared from India in 1975 when Mrs. Gandhi took emergency powers. At present, Indian democracy is being threatened from a different direction. A Hindu chauvinist party (the BJP) which also claims to be ardently nationalistic, has a chance of coming to power in New Delhi. A party which combines religious chauvinism with aggressive nationalism is likely to establish a Fascist regime of an Indian variety.

To resist this, he called upon Indian humanists to provide a democracy of the people, “not of political parties which represent them” as in Western Europe and America. “The State should consist,” he continued, “of a network of local republics which may be called People’s Committees, that as much power as is possible should be invested in the primary People’s Committee, that power which is required to be exercised at higher levels of government should be in the hands of persons who are the real representatives of the people and who are subject to their control and recall and that Parliament should be the apex of such People’s Committees and intermediate centres of power.”

In 1996, Levi Fragell interviewed Tarkunde in India. As to the conflicts between humanism and religion, Tarkunde saw no danger, stating, “I believe that we are so strongly committed to rationalism that contact between us and religious humanists is likely to augment their rationalism without affecting ours.” In 1998 at the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s congress in Mumbai, Justice Tarkunde was cited as the “father of modern humanism and human rights in India.” In an address, he lamented that of India’s population of 900+ million one-third live below the povery line and 60% of women and 40% of men are illiterate.

(See entry for G. Vijayam Also, see memories by Y. P. Chhibbar, Fali S. Nariman, and M. A. Rane.)

{FUK; HM2; HNS2; New Humanist, February 1996; SHD}