By Bharat Patankar

Bharat Patankar is an intellectual-activist based in India. A recent New York Times obituary of his life-partner Gail Omvedt, noted that Patankar has led Shramik Mukti Dal (toilers' liberation league), "an organization credited with launching some of the largest organized mass movements against injustices experienced by workers in rural India." He comes from an intergenerational heritage which links the nineteenth-century visions of Savitribai Phule and Karl Marx; with those of the 1940s Prati Sarkar parallel government as well as B.R. Ambedkar; to the new social movements facing the 1970s Emergency; to the contentions of 21st-century India. As people today face a regime of intensified communal, brahmanist and patriarchal exploitation — Patankar works to build alternatives at the intersection of economic, political as well as cultural fronts. Patankar will reflect on his decades leading farmer-labor movements in land and water struggles, over development and climate concerns—while forging dreams of a radically transformed economy and ecology. And he will speak to the theory and practice of leftist and liberation work—forging solidarity across caste, gender, religion and class struggles, towards emancipation for all.

Bharat Patankar is an activist-intellectual based in India. Patankar has led mass-based social movements for decades, particularly through Shramik Mukti Dal (toilers' liberation league). SMD has organized farmers and laborers across Maharashtra, India’s second-most populous state with a population of over one-hundred million. He is one of the architects of a prevailing framework for equitable water distribution. He has organized drought-affected villages and dam-displaced communities, towards alternative development models with respect to dams and irrigation. These movements link working-class livelihood needs with feminist, anticommunal and anticaste (Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi) solidarity commitments. Patankar's articles have appeared in journals such as Race & Class, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Critical Asian Studies, and Economic & Political Weekly. His books include For Human Liberation, The Songs of Tukoba (with Gail Omvedt), and Sakhi: Poems.