Broken Republic

by Arundhati Roy

  A few more speeches. Then the drumming and the dancing begin. Each Janatana Sarkar has its own troupe. Each troupe has prepared its own dance. They arrive one by one, with huge drums and they dance wild stories. The only character every troupe has in common is Bad Mining Man, with a helmet and dark glasses, and usually smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing stiff or mechanical about their dancing. As they dance, the dust rises. The sound of drums becomes deafening. Gradually, the crowd begins to sway. And then it begins to dance. They dance in little lines of six or seven, men and women separate, with their arms around each other’s waists. Thousands of people. This is what they’ve come for. For this. Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing, to put feathers in their turbans and flowers in their hair, to put their arms around each other and drink mahua and dance through the night. No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilization that seeks to annihilate them.

  I can’t believe all this is happening right under the noses of the police. Right in the midst of Operation Green Hunt.

  At first the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, standing aside with their guns. But then, one by one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of olive-green dancers, swirling with all the other colours. And then, as sisters and brothers and parents and children and friends who haven’t met for months, years sometimes, encounter each other, the lines break up and re-form and the olive green is distributed among the swirling saris and flowers and drums and turbans. It surely is a People’s Army. For now, at least. And what Chairman Mao said about the guerrillas being the fish, and people being the water they swim in, is, at this moment, literally true.

  Chairman Mao. He’s here too. A little lonely, perhaps, but present. There’s a photograph of him, up on a red cloth screen. Marx too. And Charu Mazumdar, the founder and chief theoretician of the Naxalite movement. His abrasive rhetoric fetishizes violence, blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal. Standing here, on Bhumkal day, I can’t help thinking that his analysis, so vital to the structure of this revolution, is so removed from its emotion and texture. ‘Only by waging class struggle—the battle of annihilation—the new man will be created, the new man who will defy death and will be free from all thoughts of self-interest’10—could he have imagined that this ancient people, dancing into the night, would be the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest?

  A TRANSIENT MEMORIAL TO THE MARTYRS

  How easily the People’s Army can turn upon the people. Today the Party wants to keep the bauxite in the mountain. Tomorrow will it change its mind? But should we let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

  BHUMKAL BEGINS

  Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing, to put feathers in their turbans and flowers in their hair, to put their arms around each other and drink mahua and dance through the night. No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilization that seeks to annihilate them.

  It’s a great disservice to everything that is happening here that the only thing that seems to make it to the outside world is the stiff, unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party that has evolved from a problematic past. When Charu Mazumdar famously said, ‘China’s chairman is our chairman and China’s path is our path,’ he was prepared to extend it to the point where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan committed genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Because, at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too over the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid achievements of the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat…. And yet, despite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar, in much of what he wrote and said, was a man with a political vision for India that cannot be dismissed lightly. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of ‘the non-violent way’ and his notion of Trusteeship: ‘The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.’

  How strange it is though, that the contemporary tsars of the Indian Establishment—the State that crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly—should now be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path.

  Upside Down. Inside Out.

  China’s Path has changed. China is on its way to becoming an imperial power now, fuelled by the raw materials of other countries. But the Party is still right, only, the Party has changed its mind.

  When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to their every need, then it genuinely is a People’s Party, its army genuinely a People’s Army. But after the Revolution, how easily this love affair can turn into a bitter marriage. How easily the People’s Army can turn upon the people. Today in Dandakaranya, the Party wants to keep the bauxite in the mountain. Tomorrow will it change its mind? But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

  The dancing will go on all night. I walk back to the camp. Maase is there, awake. We chat late into the night. I give her my copy of Neruda’s Captain’s Verses. (I brought it along, just in case.) She asks again and again, ‘What do they think of us outside? What do students say? Tell me about the women’s movement, what are the big issues now?’ She asks about me, my writing. I try and give her an honest account of my chaos. Then she starts to talk about herself, how she joined the Party. She tells me that her partner was killed last May, in a fake encounter. He was arrested in Nashik, and taken to Warangal to be killed. ‘They must have tortured him badly.’ She was on her way to meet him when she heard he had been arrested. She’s been in the forest ever since. After a long silence she tells me she was married once before, years ago. ‘He was killed in an encounter too,’ she says, and adds with heartbreaking precision, ‘but in a real one.’

  I lie awake on my jhilli, thinking of Maase’s protracted sadness, listening to the drums and the sounds of protracted happiness from the grounds, and thinking about Charu Mazumdar’s idea of protracted war, the central precept of the Maoist Party. This is what makes people think the Maoists’ offer to enter ‘peace talks’ is a hoax, a ploy to get breathing space to regroup, rearm themselves and go back to waging protracted war. What is protracted war? Is it a terrible thing in itself, or does it depend on the nature of the war? What if the people here in Dandakaranya had not waged their protracted war for the last thirty years, where would they be now?

  And are the Maoists the only ones who believe in protracted war? Almost from the moment India became a sovereign nation it turned into a colonial power, annexing territory, waging war. It has never hesitated to use military interventions to address political problems—Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, Nagaland, Manipur, Telangana, Assam, Punjab, the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now across the tribal areas of central India. Tens of thousands have been killed with impunity, hundreds of thousands tortured. All of this behind the benign mask of democracy. Who have these wars been waged against? Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Communists, Tribals and, most of all, against the poor, for the most part Dalits, who dare to question their lot instead of accepting the crumbs that a
re flung at them. It’s hard not to see the Indian State as an essentially upper-caste Hindu State (regardless of which party is in power) which harbours a reflexive hostility towards the ‘other’. One that in true colonial fashion sends the Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, Sikhs to Kashmir, Kashmiris to Orissa, Tamilians to Assam and so on. If this isn’t protracted war, what is?

  Unpleasant thoughts on a lovely, starry night. Sukhdev is smiling to himself, his face lit by his computer screen. He’s a crazy workaholic. I ask him what’s funny. ‘I was thinking about the journalists who came last year for the Bhumkal celebrations. They came for a day or two. One posed with my AK, had himself photographed and then went back and called us Killing Machines or something.’

  ~

  The dancing hasn’t stopped and it’s daybreak. The lines are still going, hundreds of young people still dancing. ‘They won’t stop,’ Comrade Raju says, ‘not until we start packing up.’

  On the grounds I run into Comrade Doctor. He’s been running a little medical camp on the edge of the dance floor. I want to kiss his fat cheeks. Why can’t he be at least thirty people instead of just one? Why can’t he be one thousand people? I ask him what it’s looking like, the health of Dandakaranya. His reply makes my blood run cold. Most of the people he has seen, he says, including those in the PLGA, have a haemoglobin count that’s far, far below the standard for Indian women, eleven. There’s TB caused by more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young children suffer from Protein Energy Malnutrition Grade II, in medical terminology called Kwashiorkor. (I looked it up later. It’s a word derived from the Ga language of Coastal Ghana and means ‘the sickness a baby gets when the new baby comes’. Basically the old baby stops getting mother’s milk, and there’s not enough food to provide it nutrition.) ‘It’s an epidemic here, like in Biafra,’ Comrade Doctor says. ‘I have worked in villages before, but I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  Apart from this, there’s malaria, osteoporosis, tapeworm, severe ear and tooth infections and primary amenorrhoea—which is when malnutrition during puberty causes a woman’s menstrual cycle to disappear, or never appear in the first place.

  ‘There are no clinics in this forest apart from one or two in Gadchiroli. No doctors. No medicines.’

  He’s off now, with his little team, on an eight-day trek to Abujhmad. He’s in ‘dress’ too, Comrade Doctor. So if they find him they’ll kill him.

  THE DANCING WILL GO ON ALL NIGHT

  At first the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, standing aside with their guns. But then, one by one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of olive-green dancers, swirling with all the other colours.

  THE DANCING HASN’T STOPPED AND IT’S DAYBREAK

  As sisters and brothers and parents and children and friends who haven’t met for months, years sometimes, encounter each other, the lines break up and re-form and the olive green is distributed among the swirling saris and flowers and drums and turbans.

  Comrade Raju says that it isn’t safe for us to continue to camp here. We have to move. Leaving Bhumkal involves a lot of goodbyes spread over time.

  Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam,

  Jaane vaaley saathiyon ko lal lal salaam,

  (Red Salute to departing comrades)

  Phir milenge, phir milenge

  Dandakaranya jungle mein phir milenge

  (We’ll meet again, some day, in the Dandakaranya forest.)

  It’s never taken lightly, the ceremony of arrival and departure, because everybody knows that when they say ‘we’ll meet again’ they actually mean ‘we may never meet again’. Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Roopi are going separate ways. Will I ever see them again?

  So once again, we walk. It’s becoming hotter every day. Kamla picks the first fruit of the tendu for me. It tastes like chikoo. I’ve become a tamarind fiend. This time we camp near a stream. Women and men take turns to bathe in batches. In the evening Comrade Raju receives a whole packet of ‘biscuits’.

  News:

  60 people arrested in Manpur Division at the end of January 2010 have not yet been produced in Court.

  Huge contingents of police have arrived in south Bastar. Indiscriminate attacks are on.

  On 8 November 2009, in Kachlaram village, Bijapur jila, Dirko Madka (60) and Kovasi Suklu (68) were killed.

  On 24 November Madavi Baman (15) was killed in Pangodi village.

  On 3 December Madavi Budram from Korenjad also killed.

  On 11 December Gumiapal village, Darba division, 7 people killed (names yet to come).

  On 15 December Kotrapal village, Veko Sombar and Madavi Matti (both with KAMS) killed.

  On 30 December Vechapal village Poonem Pandu and Poonem Motu (father and son) killed.

  In January 2010 (date unknown) Head of the Janatana Sarkar in Kaika village, Gangalaur killed.

  On 9 January, 4 people killed in Surpangooden village, Jagargonda area.

  A runner, with ‘biscuits’. Handwritten notes on sheets of paper, folded and stapled into little squares. News from everywhere. The police have killed five people in Ongnaar village …

  On 10 January, 3 people killed in Pullem Pulladi village (no names yet).

  On 25 January, 7 people killed in Takilod village, Indravati area.

  On February 10 (Bhumkal Day) Kumli raped and killed in Dumnaar village, Abujhmad. She was from a village called Paiver.

  2000 troops of the ITBP are camped in the Rajnandgaon forests.

  5000 additional BSF troops have arrived in Kanker.

  And then:

  PLGA quota filled.

  Some dated newspapers have arrived too. There’s a lot of press about Naxalites. One screaming headline sums up the political climate perfectly: ‘Khadedo, maaro, samarpan karao’ (Eliminate, kill, make them surrender). Below that: ‘Varta ke liye loktantra ka dwar khula hai’ (Democracy’s door is always open for talks). A second says the Maoists are growing cannabis to make money. The third has an editorial saying that the area we’ve camped in and are walking through is entirely under police control.

  The young communists take the clips away to practise their reading. They walk around the camp reading the anti-Maoist articles loudly in radio-announcer voices.

  ~

  New day. New place. We’re camped on the outskirts of Usir village, under huge mahua trees. The mahua has just begun to flower and is dropping its pale-green blossoms like jewels on the forest floor. The air is suffused with its slightly heady smell. We’re waiting for the children from the Bhatpal school, which was closed down after the Ongnaar encounter. It’s been turned into a police camp. The children have been sent home. This is also true of the schools in Nelwad, Moonjmetta, Edka, Vedomakot and Dhanora.

  The Bhatpal school children don’t show up.

  Comrade Niti (Most Wanted) and Comrade Vinod lead us on a long walk to see the series of water-harvesting structures and irrigation ponds that have been built by the local Janatana Sarkar. Comrade Niti talks about the range of agricultural problems they have to deal with. Only 2 per cent of the land is irrigated. In Abujhmad, ploughing was unheard of until ten years ago. In Gadchiroli, on the other hand, hybrid seeds and chemical pesticides are edging their way in. ‘We need urgent help in the agriculture department,’ Comrade Vinod says. ‘We need people who know about seeds, organic pesticides, permaculture. With a little help we could do a lot.’

  Comrade Ramu is the farmer in charge of the Janatana Sarkar area. He proudly shows us around the fields, where they grow rice, brinjal, gongura, onion, kohlrabi. Then, with equal pride, he shows us a huge, but bone-dry, irrigation pond. What’s this? ‘This one doesn’t even have water during the rainy season. It’s dug in the wrong place,’ he says, a smile wrapped around his face. ‘It’s not ours, it was dug by the Looti Sarkar’ (the Government that Loots). There are two parallel systems of government here, Janatana Sarkar and Looti Sarkar.

 
; I think of what Comrade Venu said to me: They want to crush us, not only because of the minerals, but because we are offering the world an alternative model.

  It’s not an Alternative yet, this idea of Gram Swaraj with a Gun. There is too much hunger, too much sickness here. But it has certainly created the possibilities for an alternative. Not for the whole world, not for Alaska, or New Delhi, nor even perhaps for the whole of Chhattisgarh, but for itself. For Dandakaranya. It’s the world’s best-kept secret. It has laid the foundations for an alternative to its own annihilation. It has defied history. Against the greatest odds it has forged a blueprint for its own survival. It needs help and imagination, it needs doctors, teachers, farmers.

  It does not need war.

  But if war is all it gets, it will fight back.

  ~

  Over the next few days I meet women who work with KAMS, various office-bearers of the Janatana Sarkars, members of the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (DAKMS), the families of people who had been killed, and just ordinary people trying to cope with life in these terrifying times.

  I met three sisters, Sukhiari, Sukdai and Sukkali, not young, perhaps in their forties, from Narainpur district. They have been in KAMS for twelve years. The villagers depend on them to deal with the police. ‘The police come in groups of two to three hundred. They steal everything, jewellery, chickens, pigs, pots and pans, bows and arrows,’ Sukkali says, ‘they won’t even leave a knife.’ Her house in Innar has been burned twice, once by the Naga Battalion and once by the CRPF. Sukhiari has been arrested and jailed in Jagdalpur for seven months. ‘Once they took away the whole village, saying the men were all Naxals.’ Sukhiari followed with all the women and children. They surrounded the police station and refused to leave until the men were freed. ‘Whenever they take someone away,’ Sukdai says, ‘you have to go immediately and snatch them back. Before they write any report. Once they write in their book, it becomes very difficult.’