The third revolutionary was a more unlikely figure, though more representative than either of the others. Suneetha Kukka was a “surrendered” militant, meaning she had given herself up in exchange for the bounty that was on her own head—Rs20,000, or about $430—and agreed to abandon Maoism. Slim in her best pink sari, she said she was only twelve when she ran away from home to join the militants. A gang of revolutionaries had come to her village and made vigorous speeches against injustice, social evils and the oppression of women. For Suneetha, whose parents were landless labourers who had worked for a lifetime in return for less than a dollar a day, it seemed like a reasonable message. She had never been to school, and was one of eight children; the prospect of a career as a coolie was less appealing than joining a war. Suneetha had been attracted by the singing of the People’s War Group. The more Maoists I met, the more I heard about how they had been motivated and inspired by the local literature, poetry and songs of “resistance.”
“I loved the revolutionary songs. My favourite ones were ‘Land to the Tiller,’ ‘Red Flag,’ ‘Oh, Brave Lady’ and ‘Down with the Boorjuva.’ ” Suneetha was speaking in a rural Telugu dialect, and I asked the interpreter what “boorjuva” meant: it was an appropriation of “bourgeois.” She continued: “After I had been living in the forest for about one year and had done my basic ideological education, I was given a revolver. Since they thought I had a military temperament, I was told to join a Special Action Team. Then I was given a Sten gun. I was the only woman in the team. Our job was to target local politicians and MPs.”
At the age of sixteen, Suneetha became second-in-command of a unit of seven trained killers. Their principal weapon was the home-made land mine, or IED, a devastating device they had learned about from the Tamil Tigers, the rebel group which assassinated Rajiv Gandhi. Sympathetic local coalminers sold them blasting gelatin, which they used to make bombs. “We would take a bucket and put in about five kilograms of gelatin,” she explained, demonstrating with her hands like a children’s television presenter, “and fill it with metal nuts, bolts and nails, and put a polythene cover over the top to make sure nothing got wet. At night, we would bury the device in the road and run wires to a hideout, and connect a camera flashgun to the wires. We would set up a three-point alignment, usually by tying a strip of cloth to the branch of a tree.” What was a three-point alignment? “We needed an exact alignment between the landmine, the strip of cloth and the hideout—like the sights on a gun—or there was a risk we would detonate at the wrong moment. Then we sat and waited, maybe for days, until our target drove past.”
Suneetha told me all this in a matter-of-fact way. She was nineteen now but did not look much older than the schoolgirls with ribbons and satchels I had passed on the way to the police camp in Warangal where we met. She left the revolution because she was ill and being molested by a fellow militant, and felt the Maoists were not achieving very much. Using her uncle as an intermediary, she let a local policeman know of her intention. He brought her before Warangal’s feared superintendent of police, 33-year-old Nalin Prabhat, who accepted her surrender.
In a damaged, brutalized place where the forces of the state had retreated and lawmakers were afraid to visit their own constituencies, the police held great prestige and power. On the way to see Suneetha I had passed Hanamkonda police station, which had been blown up using directional mines hidden in gunny bags. A lone wall was all that remained, attached to the blackened metal frame of the building and shaded by a lacerated tree. In revenge the police had rounded up suspected local militants. Early one morning, four of them were taken to hills on the edge of the town and shot dead in what police referred to euphemistically as an “encounter.” Later that day, the police chief told a press conference they were “cowardly and dastardly criminals.”
Nalin Prabhat was trim and friendly, with high, Himalayan cheekbones and cropped hair, sitting to attention behind his desk, in khaki shirt-sleeves. He was a fan of the thriller writer Jack Higgins, and seemed to revel in his position. Prabhat had been promoted fast, and now he held the power of life and death in his hands. For several years he had faced assassination, after being officially labelled “a threat to the party” by the local Maoists. “There’s no use in worrying about it. These days most of them are riff-raffs, uneducated people. One of their leaders said recently that our chief minister, Mr. Naidu, was using a ‘low-intensity conflict strategy’ given to him by the World Bank. That’s how much they know. They think it’s romantic to be a revolutionary. For the women, it means they no longer get treated like a sexual commodity. If you go into a village with a gun, even the rich landlords have to kiss your feet.
“I know we’re winning. Five years ago there were 3,500 active terrorists here and now there are just over 2,000. We have a generous surrender programme, and the ones who don’t want to surrender will be surgically excised, like unhealthy tissue. I sleep easily at night. I sleep easily because I don’t doubt that any of the people we have killed are guilty. I say prayers every morning. The human rightists don’t realize we are dealing with beasts. I have a colleague, a signals man, who was recently blown up in his vehicle by an IED. His wife was with him, and they left two children, aged five and six. Does anyone ask about their human rights, about the human rights of those children?”
Nalin Prabhat was exuding a cold anger, the anger of a man under extreme, constant pressure.
“I tell you, the Maoists should give up. What good is it in today’s world to continue?
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
“It’s from Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. I quote it to the terrorists when they surrender.”44
I left Andhra in 2002 feeling the Maoist insurgency was in decline. It would not disappear—as Chandrababu Naidu said, you only needed to bury a mine in a road once in a while to keep it going—but I felt the combination of vicious policing, the surrender programme and a redundant ideology would diminish the movement. Instead, the opposite happened: the CPI (Maoist), in its various incarnations, opened a “red corridor” through Dandakaranya, a forested expanse stretching up from Andhra Pradesh through parts of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa. In 2006 revolutionaries in Nepal overthrew the monarchy, emboldening their Indian neighbours. By 2010, Maoist guerrillas controlled about 40,000 square kilometres of territory in India. It was a flimsy control—they were always on the move—but it prevented the infrastructure of the state from functioning, which in turn promoted the conditions in which rebellion flourished. Some officials privately praised the Maoists for their skill in setting up schools and water management projects. The deaths of both militants and security forces usually remained below 1,000 each year, but large numbers of police and paramilitaries were tied up trying to cope with the Maoist problem.
There was an identifiable link between places with extensive rural poverty, rich mineral reserves, a high tribal population and exploitative feudal landlords and a Maoist presence. Government programmes such as a scheme to give guaranteed employment on projects in rural areas had failed to reach outlying areas, with false lists of workers being compiled and money stolen. The Indian government recognized the circularity of the situation, saying in an official report: “Naxalites operate in the vacuum created by functional inadequacies of field level governance structures, espouse local demands, and take advantage of prevalent disaffection and feelings of perceived neglect and injustice among the underprivileged and remote segments of population.”45 An MP in Orissa, who had no sympathy for the Maoists, remarked on their organizational abilities. A timber merchant near Gopalpur-on-Sea by the Bay of Bengal had raped a girl. “The next day he was tried by the ‘people’s court’ of the Maoists. The girl had the choice—death or reparation. They confiscated all his assets, expelled him from the district and took a ten lakh fine [$22,000]. The Maoists gave justice there, and they have a fami
ly for life.”
A deeply destructive government response to the insurgency was the creation of a police-backed militia, the Salwa Judum, in Chhattisgarh in 2005, with funding from the state government and local industries involved in the extraction of iron ore. The members of the militia were recruited in many cases from other Scheduled Tribes, who had grievances against their neighbours. In one district, the Salwa Judum used the strategy of expelling people from villages in “red” areas and putting them in camps as a supposedly temporary measure. When this had been done, anyone left in the red area could be labelled a Maoist and treated brutally. It was a cruel and hopeless solution, which had the paradoxical effect of generating support for the Maoists.
Speaking to a constable in the COBRA contingent of the CRPF, or Central Reserve Police Force, I was surprised by the strictness of the rules of engagement that he had to follow. At the end of 2009 he had been based in Lalgarh, a poor part of West Bengal where villagers were caught between the violence of the revolutionaries and the violence of those who had come to hunt them down. The CRPF constable said, speaking in Hindi: “It’s dense in the jungle, you can’t see anything in there. We are dropped from a helicopter in groups of four. You shin down a long rope with your pack—water, salty biscuits, toffees, two grenades, an AK-47 with 200 rounds, a 9 mm pistol and a long knife like a sword. We have a radio and a sat-nav each. They tell us on the radio where to go, which people we can trust. You won’t believe how the terrorists fight. When we search and see a weapon, we assume they are Naxalites. They are willing to give their lives. If ten Naxalites are in a village, they will give country-made guns to the others and all fight. If one of their people gets shot, they tie a rope and drag him back to the jungle. When we are patrolling, the villagers act as if we are the terrorists—they don’t even speak to us. They are dark, like Biharis. The terrorists have looted the police stations. I have seen so many police stations where there is not a single rifle left in Lalgarh district.” I had known this CRPF constable for years, and he had no reason to lie: I asked him what happened when they caught Maoists or took prisoners who had survived a gun battle. “If we catch someone we have to hand them over to the local police, and they will be taken to jail. We aren’t allowed to do encounter killings. Do I feel sorry for these people? I don’t feel bad for them—I feel like killing them on sight, but we don’t do that because we don’t have the order.”46
The strategy of the Maoist leaders had changed little over the decades, although they had become more efficient. Muppala Laxman Rao, otherwise known as Comrade Ganapathy, was still content to be judge and executioner. If anyone broke the strikes or curfews of the Maoists, they risked death. Kaushik Dutta worked as a contractor for the state electricity board in West Bengal. If he delivered an electricity bill, he was paid Rs2; if he took a meter reading, he was paid Rs2.5. One day in April 2010, Kaushik went with a colleague to a neighbouring village and took some meter readings. He had to support his sickly, elderly parents as well as his wife, Rupali, and their daughter, and knew the Maoists had called a bandh, or general strike, but assumed it did not apply to meter reading. On the way home, the two men were intercepted by Maoists. Their bodies, when they were found, bore marks of beating, stabbing and shooting. The superintendent of the local electricity office said later: “The two were nice, decent, honest and hardworking. I could never have imagined that they would be killed by Maoists.”47 Kaushik Dutta and those like him, many of whom were Adivasis, knew they were easy targets and that the state government could and would do little to protect them.
The portrayal of the Maoist conflict as an Avatar type of story—good people with bows and arrows facing down bad people with machinery, one atrocity paralleling or excusing another—was a romantic and spurious version of a complex reality. In some cases, Maoists faced policemen armed with sticks and whistles. It was a fatal philosophy, not simply because of its brutality, not simply because of the chilling absurdity of Charu Majumdar’s theories about the cleansing effect of bloodshed, but because it was the wrong tool for the conflict. The security apparatus of the Indian state was too powerful to be faced down, and would never be pulverized in the way it could be in smaller, neighbouring places like Nepal. As long as the CPI (Maoist) continued without a fresh approach, the weakest people in the red corridor would suffer, caught between an indifferent state and a dated political idea. It would be the poor who died, whether they were the police or the Maoist foot soldiers.
Whenever the Maoists ambushed a police patrol or blew up a minister’s car, the Indian media would refer to them as if they were an abstract and intractable phenomenon, like a hurricane or an earthquake. Some people assumed they must be funded by China because of their name, though the leadership in Beijing had long ago moved on from their ideology. They liked to remain anonymous, rarely gave interviews and preferred to present themselves as the voice of India’s dispossessed, the authentic leaders of the revolution. In practice they were a bunch of ageing men from upper-caste backgrounds, most of them from landed families in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Ganapathy had grown up on family landholdings near Karimnagar in northern Andhra Pradesh, and after gaining degrees in both science and education he had worked as a teacher before leaving his wife and young son to become a Naxalite. He was from the Velama caste, who were traditionally the feudal lords in the Telangana region. They were known for their dislike of productive work. Other castes had a saying about the Velamas, which translates roughly as: “Even if burning coals fall on a Velama’s thighs, he will expect the bonded labourer to lift them from his body instead of saving himself.”
Ganapathy had turned sixty. The killing continued. In April 2010, in the largest Maoist attack yet, eighty-two police jawans, or constables, were murdered in an ambush in Chhattisgarh because they were “class enemies”; every one of them, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, came from a poor family, most from the villages of Uttar Pradesh.48 More than forty years after the campaign of strategic slaughter had begun, the Maoist superstructure was composed of the same old types. When the Hyderabad journalist Srinivas Reddy read out the names of the senior leadership to me, I asked him whether any Adivasis had yet come on board. He looked down the list: “Forward caste, landed, Brahmin, wealthy family, middle class, lower rung, landed gentry, Brahmin, middle class, landed … not yet. There is one tribal woman in prison who might be a leader.” Only in the middle and lower rungs of the CPI (Maoist) did you find “the people.” What did the leadership want? Another senior member, Mallojula Koteshwar Rao, a Brahmin with a B.Sc. in mathematics who enjoyed calling up newspapers and television channels, had spoken: “Our first role model was Paris [he was referring to the commune of 1871]. That disintegrated. Then Russia collapsed. That’s when China emerged. But after Mao, that too got defeated. Now, nowhere in the world is the power truly in the hands of the people … So there is no role model.”
That was his answer: there was no role model. Every society, every government, was bad; only the Maoists could improve things. “To create a new democratic state,” said Mallojula Koteshwar Rao, “one has to destroy the old one.”49
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Bangladesh crisis, the later part of the Vietnam war and the eruption of Maoism, a generation of students was attracted by the idea of reinventing the world. In India they were responding, although they would not have seen it in this way at the time, to an economy stripped bare by ideology. In a society with innumerable problems, in which the opportunities to pursue a rewarding career were limited, they reacted, ironically, by turning further to the left. Most well-off Naxalites returned home after spending a few months in the jungle, turned off by the bad food and the bloody reality of killing moneylenders, and in some cases they were sent abroad by their parents, usually to the United States, at the instigation of police officials who did not wish to prosecute the children of the rich.
The origin of this political feeling lay in earlier times, in a more practical but still idealistic attempt at social and land re
form in the immediate aftermath of independence. The parliamentary constituency of Vadakara in Kerala passes along a palm-filled coast and is home to a mix of communities: Christians, Muslims and Hindus. Haphazard roads run past paddy fields and fertile forests, and up through rubber and coffee plantations. All along the way, there are rivers, and even glimpses of the sea. Kerala has the highest literacy rate in the world, hovering close to 100 percent, which is in part the result of educational campaigns carried out by communist volunteers. For many years, K. P. Unnikrishnan was MP for Vadakara. In his thinking and outlook when he was a teenager, Unni was typical of a generation of educated Indians. The age of imperialism was over, and he believed something modern and politically exciting was happening that was going to cure old ills—socialism.
“In June 1957 I was invited to Moscow by the Communist Youth Movement,” Unni remembered. “I was only nineteen. We took a train to Delhi and a special flight to Kabul, and on to Moscow. I was impressed by Moscow. There were maybe 30,000 or even 50,000 of us, young people from Iceland, Tahiti, South America, the United States. It was difficult in those days to travel outside of India. In Moscow, we had a cultural programme, theatre, science and technology, lectures about flights into space. Khrushchev inaugurated it. The idea was to influence young people, and it was a big gain for Moscow to get us at that impressionable age. It was the pinnacle of Soviet glory, and I was quite impressed by what I saw.
India Page 23