Broken Republic

by Arundhati Roy

  I’m drinking tea with Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Roopi. Comrade Narmada talks about the many years she worked in Gadchiroli before becoming the DK head of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan. Roopi and Maase have been urban activists in Andhra Pradesh and tell me about the long years of struggle of women within the Party, not just for their rights, but also to make the Party see that equality between men and women is central to a dream of a just society. We talk about the ’70s and the stories of women within the Naxalite movement who were disillusioned by male comrades who thought themselves great revolutionaries but were hobbled by the same old patriarchy, the same old chauvinism. Maase says things have changed a lot since then, though they still have a long way to go. (The Party’s Politburo has no women yet. The Central Committee had Anuradha Gandhy—who died of cerebral malaria last year—and Sheela, an adivasi comrade who is now in jail.)

  Around noon another PLGA contingent arrives. This one is headed by a tall, lithe, boyish-looking man. This comrade has two names—Sukhdev and Gudsa Usendi—neither of which is his. Sukhdev is the name of a very beloved comrade who was martyred. (In this war only the dead are safe enough to use their real names.) As for Gudsa Usendi, many comrades have been Gudsa Usendi at one point or another. (A few months ago it was Comrade Raju.) Gudsa Usendi is the name of the Party’s spokesperson for Dandakaranya. So even though Sukhdev spends the rest of the trip with me, I have no idea how I’d ever find him again. I’d recognize his laugh anywhere though. He came to DK in ’88 he says, when the PWG decided to send one third of its forces from north Telangana into DK. He’s nicely dressed, in ‘civil’ (Gondi for ‘civilian clothes’) as opposed to ‘dress’ (the Maoist ‘uniform’), and could pass off as a young executive. I ask him why no uniform.

  He says he’s been travelling and has just come back from the Keshkal Ghats near Kanker. There are reports of bauxite deposits—three million tonnes—that a company called Vedanta has its eye on.

  Bingo. Ten on ten for instinct.

  Sukhdev says he went there to measure the people’s temperature. To see if they were prepared to fight. ‘They want squads now. And guns.’ He throws his head back and roars with laughter. ‘I told them it’s not so easy, bhai.’ From the stray wisps of conversation and the ease with which he carries his AK-47, I can tell he’s also high up and hands-on PLGA.

  Jungle post arrives. There’s a biscuit for me! It’s from Comrade Venu. On a tiny piece of paper, folded and refolded, he has written down the lyrics of a song he promised he would send me. Comrade Narmada smiles when she reads them. She knows this story. It goes back to the ’80s, around the time when people first began to trust the Party and come to it with their problems—their ‘inner contradictions’ as Comrade Venu put it. Women were among the first to come. One evening an old lady sitting by the fire got up and sang a song for the Dada log. She was a Maadiya, among whom it was customary for women to remove their blouses and remain bare-breasted after they were married.

  Jumper polo intor Dada, Dakoniley

  Taane tasom intor Dada, Dakoniley

  Bata papam kittom Dada, Dakoniley

  Duniya kadile maata Dada, Dakoniley

  They say we cannot keep our blouses, Dada, Dakoniley

  They make us take them off Dada,

  In what way have we sinned Dada,

  The world has changed, has it not, Dada,

  Aatum hatteke Dada, Dakoniley

  Aada nanga dantom Dada, Dakoniley

  Id pisval manni Dada, Dakoniley

  Mava koyaturku vehat Dada, Dakoniley

  But when we go to market Dada,

  We have to go half-naked Dada,

  We don’t want this life Dada,

  Tell our ancestors this Dada.

  This was the first women’s issue the Party decided to campaign against. It had to be handled delicately, with surgical tools. In 1986 it set up the Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (AMS), which then evolved into the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan and now has 90,000 enrolled members. It could well be the largest women’s organization in the country. (They’re all Maoists by the way, all 90,000 of them. Are they going to be ‘wiped out’? And what about the 10,000 members of CNM? Them too?) The KAMS campaigns against the adivasi traditions of forced marriage and abduction. Against the custom of making menstruating women live outside the village in a hut in the forest. Against bigamy and domestic violence. It hasn’t won all its battles, but then which feminists have? For instance, in Dandakaranya, even today, women are not allowed to sow seeds. In Party meetings men agree that this is unfair and ought to be done away with. But in practice, they simply don’t allow it. So the Party decided that women would sow seeds on common lands, which belongs to the Janatana Sarkar. On that land they sow seeds, grow vegetables and build check dams. A half-victory, not a whole one.

  As police repression has grown in Bastar, the women of KAMS have become a formidable force and rally in their hundreds, sometimes thousands, to physically confront the police. The very fact that the KAMS exists has radically changed traditional attitudes and eased many of the traditional forms of discrimination against women. For many young women, joining the Party, in particular the PLGA, became a way of escaping the suffocation of their own society. Comrade Sushila, a senior office-bearer of KAMS, talks about the Salwa Judum’s rage against KAMS women. She says one of their slogans was Hum do bibi layenge! Layenge! (We will have two wives! We will!) A lot of the rape and bestial sexual mutilation was directed at members of the KAMS. Many young women who witnessed the savagery then joined the PLGA and women now make up 45 per cent of its cadre. Comrade Narmada sends for some of them and they join us in a while.

  Comrade Rinki has very short hair. A bob cut as they say in Gondi. It’s brave of her, because here ‘bob cut’ means ‘Maoist’. For the police that’s more than enough evidence to warrant summary execution. Comrade Rinki’s village, Korma, was attacked by the Naga Battalion and the Salwa Judum in 2005. At that time Rinki was part of the village militia. So were her friends Lukki and Sukki, who were also members of the KAMS. After burning the village, the Naga Battalion caught Lukki and Sukki and one other girl, gang-raped them and killed them. ‘They raped them on the grass,’ Rinki says, ‘but after it was over there was no grass left.’ It’s been years now, the Naga Battalion has gone, but the police still come. ‘They come whenever they need women, or chickens.’

  GUNDADHUR LED THE BHUMKAL UPRISING IN 1910

  Bhumkal, Comrade Raju says, means earthquake. He says people will walk for days together to come for the celebration. The forest must be full of people on the move. There are celebrations in all the Dandakaranya divisions.

  ACTORS OF THE CHETNA NATYA MANCH

  ‘There are 10,000 members in CNM now,’ Comrade Leng, head of the CNM, told me. ‘We have 500 songs, in Hindi, Gondi, Chhattisgarhi and Halbi. We have printed a book with 140 of our songs. Everybody writes songs.’

  Ajitha has a bob cut too. The Judum came to Korseel, her village, and killed three people by drowning them in a stream. Ajitha was with the militia, and followed the Judum at a distance to a place close to the village called Paral Nar Todak. She watched them rape six women and shoot a man in his throat.

  Comrade Laxmi, who has a long, thick plait, tells me she watched the Judum burn thirty houses in her village, Jojor. ‘We had no weapons then,’ she says. ‘We could do nothing but watch.’ She joined the PLGA soon after. Laxmi was one of the 150 guerrillas who walked through the jungle for three and a half months in 2008, to Nayagarh in Orissa, to raid a police armoury from where they captured 1200 rifles and 200,000 rounds of ammunition.

  Comrade Sumitra joined the PLGA in 2004, before the Salwa Judum began its rampage. She joined, she says, because she wanted to escape from home. ‘Women are controlled in every way,’ she told me. ‘In our village girls were not allowed to climb trees; if they did, they would have to pay a fine of 500 or a hen. If a man hits a woman and she hits him back she has to give the village a goat. Men go off
to the hills for months together to hunt. Women are not allowed to go near the kill, the best part of the meat goes to men. Women are not allowed to eat eggs.’ Good reason to join a guerrilla army?

  Sumitra tells the story of two of her friends, Telam Parvati and Kamla, who worked with KAMS. Telam Parvati was from Pollevaya village in west Bastar. Like everyone else from there, she too watched the Salwa Judum burn her village. She then joined the PLGA and went to work in the Keshkal Ghats. In 2009 she and Kamla had just finished organizing the 8 March Women’s Day celebrations in the area. They were together in a little hut just outside a village called Vadgo. The police surrounded the hut at night and began to fire. Kamla fired back, but she was killed. Parvati escaped, but was found and killed the next day.

  That’s what happened last year on Women’s Day. And here’s a press report from a national newspaper about Women’s Day this year.

  They even have a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt, it is stripped down. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches… (And backpacks).

  Bastar rebels bat for women’s rights

  Sahar Khan, Mail Today, Raipur, March 7, 2010

  The government may have pulled out all stops to combat the Maoist menace in the country. But a section of rebels in Chhattisgarh has more pressing matters in hand than survival. With International Women’s Day around the corner, Maoists in the Bastar region of the state have called for week-long ‘celebrations’ to advocate women’s rights. Posters were also put up in Bijapur, a part of Bastar district. The call by the self-styled champions of women’s rights has left the state police astonished. Inspector-general (IG) of Bastar T. J. Longkumer said, ‘I have never seen such an appeal from the Naxalites, who believe only in violence and bloodshed.’

  And then the report goes on to say:

  ‘I think the Maoists are trying to counter our highly successful Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (mass awareness campaign). We started the ongoing campaign with an aim to win popular support for Operation Green Hunt, which was launched by the police to root out Left-wing extremists,’ the IG said.

  This cocktail of malice and ignorance is not unusual. Gudsa Usendi, chronicler of the Party’s present, knows more about this than most people. His little computer and MP3 recorder are full of press statements, denials, corrections, Party literature, lists of the dead, TV clips and audio and video material. ‘The worst thing about being Gudsa Usendi,’ he says, ‘is issuing clarifications that are never published. We could bring out a thick book of our unpublished clarifications, about the lies they tell about us.’ He speaks without a trace of indignation, in fact with some amusement.

  ‘What’s the most ridiculous charge you’ve had to deny?’

  He thinks back. ‘In 2007, we had to issue a statement saying “Nahi bhai, humney gai ko hathode say nahin mara” [No, brother, we did not kill cows with hammers]. In 2007 the Raman Singh government announced a Gai Yojana [cow scheme], an election promise, a cow for every adivasi. One day the TV channels and newspapers reported that Naxalites had attacked a herd of cows and bludgeoned them to death—with hammers—because they were anti-Hindu, anti-BJP. You can imagine what happened. We issued a denial. Hardly anybody carried it. Later it turned out that the man who had been given the cows to distribute was a rogue. He sold them and said we had ambushed him and killed the cows.’

  And the most serious?

  ‘Oh there are dozens, they’re running a campaign after all. When the Salwa Judum was first announced in Ambeli they first attacked our village-level activists whom they had invited for the meeting, they beat them up and handed them over to the police. Then all of them, SPOs, the Naga Battalion, police, moved towards Tadimendri. There our local guerrilla squad comrades fired in the air and drove them away. No one was hurt, but Annie Zaidi of Frontline said, and these are her words, “At a meeting at Talmendra, attended by more than 10,000 people, naxalites allegedly opened fire and killed hundreds of people.”7 That same day the Judum went to Kotrapal—you must have heard about Kotrapal? It’s a famous village; it has been burnt twenty-two times for refusing to surrender. When they reached Kotrapal, our militia was waiting for it. They had prepared an ambush. Three Salwa Judum goons were killed. The militia captured twelve, the rest ran away. But the newspapers reported that the Naxalites had massacred dozens of poor adivasis. Even K. Balagopal, the human rights activist, who is usually meticulous about facts, put the figure at eighteen in a press release by the Human Rights Forum. We sent a clarification. Nobody published it. Later, in his book, Balagopal acknowledged his mistake…. But who noticed?’8

  I asked what happened to the twelve people who were captured.

  ‘The Area Committee called a Jan Adalat [People’s Court]. Four thousand people attended it. They listened to the whole story. Two were sentenced to death. Of them one escaped. The rest were warned and let off. The people decided. Even with informers—which is becoming a huge problem nowadays—people listen to the case, the stories, the confessions and say, “Iska hum risk nahin le sakte” [We’re not prepared to take the risk] or, “Iska risk hum lenge” [We are prepared to take the risk]. The press always reports about informers who are killed. Never about the many that are let off. Never about the people whom these informers have had killed. So everybody thinks it is some bloodthirsty procedure in which everybody is always killed. It’s not about revenge, it’s about survival and saving future lives…. Of course there are problems, we’ve made terrible mistakes, we have even killed the wrong people in our ambushes, thinking they were policemen, but it is not the way it’s portrayed in the media.’

  The dreaded ‘People’s Courts’. How can we accept them? Or approve this form of rude justice? On the other hand, what about ‘encounters’ fake and otherwise—the worst form of summary justice—that get policemen and soldiers bravery medals, cash awards and out-of-turn promotions from the Indian government? The more they kill, the more they are rewarded. ‘Bravehearts’ they are called, the ‘encounter specialists’. ‘Anti-nationals’ we are called, those of us who dare to question them. And what about the Supreme Court that brazenly admitted it did not have enough evidence to sentence Mohammed Afzal (accused in the December 2001 Parliament Attack) to death, but did so anyway, because ‘the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender’.9

  MILITIA AT BHUMKAL CELEBRATIONS

  In this tranquil-looking forest, life seems completely militarized now. People know words like Cordon and Search, Firing, Advance, Retreat, Down, Action! To harvest their crops they need the PLGA to do a sentry patrol. Going to the market is a military operation.

  CURTAIN-RAISER AT THE BHUMKAL CELEBRATION

  I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to the Bhumkal celebrations. I fear I’ll see traditional tribal dances stiffened by Maoist propaganda, rousing, rhetorical speeches and an obedient audience with glazed eyes.

  At least in the case of the Kotrapal Jan Adalat, the Collective was physically present to make its own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, but still presumed to speak on behalf of an absent Collective.

  What should the people of Kotrapal have done? I wonder. Sent for the police?

  ~

  The sound of drums has become really loud. It’s Bhumkal time. We walk to the grounds. I can hardly believe my eyes. There is a sea of people, the most wild, beautiful people, dressed in the most wild, beautiful ways. The men seem to have paid much more attention to themselves than the women. They have feathered headgear and painted tattoos on their faces. Many have eye make-up and white, powdered faces. There’s lots of militia, girls in saris of breathtaking colours with rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. There are old people, children, and red buntings arc across the sky. The sun is sharp and high. Comrade Leng speaks. And several office-bearers of the various Janatana Sarkars. Comrade Niti,
an extraordinary woman who has been with the Party since 1997, is such a threat to the nation that in January 2007 more than 700 policemen surrounded Innar village because they heard she was there. Comrade Niti is considered so dangerous, and is being hunted with such desperation, not because she has led many ambushes (which she has), but because she is an adivasi woman who is loved in the village and is a real inspiration to young people. She speaks with her AK on her shoulder. (It’s a gun with a story. Almost everyone’s gun has a story: who it was snatched from, how and by whom.)

  A CNM troupe performs a play about the Bhumkal uprising. The evil white colonizers wear hats and golden straw for hair, and bully and beat adivasis to pulp—causing endless delight in the audience. Another troupe from south Gangalaur performs a play called Nitir Judum Pito (Story of the Blood Hunt). Joori translates for me. It’s the story of two old people who go looking for their daughter’s village. As they walk through the forest, they get lost because everything is burnt and unrecognizable. The Salwa Judum has even burned the drums and the musical instruments. There are no ashes because it has been raining. They cannot find their daughter. In their sorrow the old couple starts to sing and, hearing them, the voice of their daughter sings back to them from the ruins: The sound of our village has been silenced, she sings. There’s no more pounding of rice, no more laughter by the well. No more birds, no more bleating goats. The taut string of our happiness has been snapped.

  Her father sings back: My beautiful daughter, don’t cry today. Everyone who is born must die. These trees around us will fall, flowers will bloom and fade, one day this world will grow old. But who are we dying for? One day our looters will learn, one day Truth will prevail, but our people will never forget you, not for thousands of years.