Sukhiari, who as a child was abducted and forcibly married to an older man (she ran away and went to live with her sister), now organizes mass rallies, speaks at meetings. The men depend on her for protection. I asked her what the Party means to her. ‘Naxalvaad ka matlab hamara parivaar [Naxalism means our family]. When we hear of an attack, it is like our family has been hurt,’ Sukhiari said.
SUKHIARI, SUKDAI AND SUKKALI
In 1986 the Party set up the Adivasi Mahila Sangathan, which evolved into the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan and now has 90,000 members. Are they all going to be ‘wiped out’?
I asked her if she knew who Mao was. She smiled shyly. ‘He was a leader. We’re working for his vision.’
I met Comrade Somari Gawde. Twenty years old, and she has already served a two-year jail sentence in Jagdalpur. She was in Innar village on 8 January 2007, the day that 740 policemen laid a cordon around it because they had information that Comrade Niti was there. (She was, but had left by the time they arrived.) But the village militia, of which Somari was a member, was still there. The police opened fire at dawn. They killed two boys, Suklal Gawde and Kachroo Gota. Then they caught three others, two boys, Dusri Salam and Ranai, and Somari. Dusri and Ranai were tied up and shot. Somari was beaten within an inch of her life. The police got a tractor with a trailer and loaded the dead bodies into it. Somari was made to sit with the dead bodies and taken to Narainpur.
I met Chamri, mother of Comrade Dilip who was shot on 6 July 2009. She says that, after they killed him, the police tied her son’s body to a pole, like an animal, and carried it with them. (They need to produce bodies to get their cash rewards, before someone else muscles in on the kill.) Chamri ran behind them all the way to the police station. By the time they reached their destination, the body did not have a scrap of clothing on it. On the way, Chamri says, they left the body by the roadside while they stopped at a dhaba to have tea and biscuits. (Which they did not pay for.) Picture this mother for a moment, following her son’s corpse through the forest, stopping at a distance to wait for his murderers to finish their tea. They did not let her have her son’s body back so she could give him a proper funeral. They only let her throw a fistful of earth in the pit in which they buried the others they had killed that day. Chamri says she wants revenge. Badla ku badla. Revenge. Blood for blood.
I met the elected members of the Marskola Janatana Sarkar that administers six villages. They described a police raid: They come at night, three hundred, four hundred, sometimes a thousand of them. They lay a cordon around a village and lie in wait. At dawn they catch the first people who go out to the fields and use them as human shields to enter the village, to show them where the booby traps are. (‘Booby traps’, like ‘RV’, has become a Gondi word. Everybody always smiles when they say it or hear it. The forest is full of booby traps, real and fake. Even the PLGA needs to be guided past villages.) Once the police enter the village they loot and steal and burn houses. They come with dogs. The dogs catch those who try to run. They chase chickens and pigs and the police kill them and take them away in sacks. SPOs come along with the police. They’re the ones who know where people hide their money and jewellery. They catch people and take them away. And extract money before they release them. They always carry some extra Naxal ‘dresses’ with them in case they find someone to kill. They get money for killing Naxals, so they manufacture some. Villagers are too frightened to stay at home.
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. The markets are full of mukhbirs (informers) who the police have lured from their villages with money ( 1500 a month). I’m told there’s a mukhbir mohallah—informers’ colony—in Narainpur where at least 400 mukhbirs stay. The men can’t go to market any more. The women go, but they’re watched closely. If they buy even a little extra, the police accuse them of buying it for Naxals. Chemists have instructions not to let people buy medicines except in very small quantities. Low-price rations from the public distribution system, sugar, rice, kerosene, are warehoused in or near police stations making it impossible for most people to buy.
~
Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:
Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
~
All the walking seems to have finally got to me. I’m tired. Kamla gets me a pot of hot water. I bathe behind a tree in the dark. But I can’t eat dinner and crawl into my bag to sleep. Comrade Raju announces that we have to move. This happens frequently, of course, but tonight it’s hard. We have been camped in an open meadow. We’d heard shelling in the distance. There are 104 of us. Once again, single file through the night. Crickets. The smell of something like lavender. It must have been past eleven when we arrived at the place where we will spend the night. An outcrop of rocks. Formation. Roll call. Someone switches on the radio. BBC says there’s been an attack on a camp of Eastern Frontier Rifles in Lalgarh, West Bengal. Sixty Maoists on motorcycles. Fourteen policemen killed. Ten missing. Weapons snatched. There’s a murmur of pleasure in the ranks. The Maoist leader Kishenji is being interviewed. When will you stop this violence and come for talks? When Operation Green Hunt is called off. Any time. Tell Chidambaram we will talk. Next question: It’s dark now, you have laid landmines, reinforcements have been called in, will you attack them too? Kishenji: Yes of course; otherwise people will beat me. There’s laughter in the ranks. Sukhdev the clarifier says, ‘They always say landmines. We don’t use landmines. We use IEDs [improvised explosive devices].’
Another luxury suite in the thousand-star hotel. I’m feeling ill. It starts to rain. There’s a little giggling. Kamla throws a jhilli over me. What more do I need? Everyone else just rolls themselves into their jhillis.
By next morning the body count in Lalgarh has gone up to twenty-one, ten missing.
Comrade Raju is considerate this morning. We don’t move till evening.
~
One night people are crowded like moths around a point of light. It’s Comrade Sukhdev’s tiny computer, powered by a solar panel, and they’re watching Mother India, the barrels of their rifles silhouetted against the sky. Kamla doesn’t seem interested. I asked her if she likes watching movies. ‘Nahi, didi. Sirf ambush ka video.’ (No, didi. Only the videos of our ambushes.) Later I ask Comrade Sukhdev about these ambush videos. Without batting an eyelid, he plays one for me.
It starts with shots of Dandakaranya, rivers, waterfalls, the close-up of a bare branch of a tree, a brainfever bird calling. Then suddenly a comrade is wiring up an IED, concealing it with dry leaves. A cavalcade of motorcycles is blown up. There are mutilated bodies and burning bikes. The weapons are being snatched. Three policemen, looking shell-shocked, have been tied up.
Who’s filming it? Who’s directing operations? Who’s reassuring the captured cops that they will be released if they surrender? (They were released, I confirmed later.)
I know that gentle, reassuring voice. It’s Comrade Venu.
‘It’s the Kudur Ambush,’ Comrade Sukhdev says.
He also has a video archive of burnt villages, testimonies from eyewitnesses and relatives of the dead. On the singed wall of a burnt house it says, ‘Nagaaa! Born to Kill!’ There’s footage of the little boy whose fingers were chopped off to inaugurate the Bastar chapter of Operation Green Hunt. (There’s even a TV interview with me. My study. My books. Strange.)
>
At night on the radio there’s news of another Naxal attack. This one in Jamui, Bihar. It says 125 Maoists attacked a village and killed ten people belonging to the Kora tribe in retaliation for giving police information that led to the death of six Maoists. Of course we know, the report may or may not be true. But if it is, this one’s unforgiveable. Comrades Raju and Sukhdev look distinctly uncomfortable.
The news that has been coming from Jharkhand and Bihar is disturbing. The gruesome beheading of the policeman Francis Induvar is still fresh in everyone’s mind. It’s a reminder of how easily the discipline of armed struggle can dissolve into lumpen acts of criminalized violence, or into ugly wars of identity between castes and communities and religious groups. By institutionalizing injustice in the way that it does, the Indian State has turned this country into a tinderbox of massive unrest. The government is quite wrong if it thinks that by carrying out ‘targeted assassinations’ to render the CPI (Maoist) ‘headless’ it will end the violence. On the contrary, the violence will spread and intensify, and the government will have nobody to talk to.
~
On my last few days we meander through the lush Indravati valley. As we walk along a hillside, we see another line of people walking in the same direction, but on the other side of the river. I’m told they’re on their way to an anti-dam meeting in Kudur village. They’re over ground and unarmed. A local rally for the valley. I jumped ship and joined them.
The Bodhghat Dam will submerge the entire area that we have been walking in for days. All that forest, that history, those stories. More than a hundred villages. Is that the plan then? To drown people like rats, so that the integrated steel plant in Lohandiguda and the bauxite mine and aluminium refinery in the Keshkal Ghats can have the river?
At the meeting, people who have come from miles away say the same thing we’ve all heard for years. We will drown, but we won’t move! They are thrilled that someone from Delhi is with them. I tell them Delhi is a cruel city that neither knows nor cares about them.
Only weeks before I came to Dandakaranya, I visited Gujarat. The Sardar Sarovar Dam has more or less reached its full height now. And almost every single thing the Narmada Bachao Andolan predicted would happen has happened. People who were displaced have not been rehabilitated, but that goes without saying. The canals have not been built. There’s no money. So Narmada water is being diverted into the empty riverbed of the Sabarmati (which was dammed a long time ago). Most of the water is being guzzled by cities and big industry. The downstream effects—saltwater ingress into an estuary with no river—are becoming impossible to mitigate.
There was a time when believing that Big Dams were the ‘temples of Modern India’ was misguided, but perhaps understandable. But today, after all that has happened, and when we know all that we do, it has to be said that Big Dams are a crime against humanity.
The Bodhghat Dam was shelved in 1984 after local people protested. Who will stop it now? Who will prevent the foundation stone from being laid? Who will stop the Indravati from being stolen? Someone must.
~
A CHECK DAM BUILT BY THE JANATANA SARKAR
The Bod hghat Dam will submerge the entire area that we have been walking in for days. All that land. All that forest, that history, those stories.
On the last night we camped at the base of the steep hill we would climb in the morning, to emerge on the road from where a motorcycle would pick me up. The forest has changed even since I first entered it. The chironjee, silk cotton and mango trees have begun to flower.
The villagers from Kudur send a huge pot of freshly caught fish to the camp. And a list for me, of seventy-one kinds of fruit, vegetables, pulses and insects they get from the forest and grow in their fields, along with the market price. It’s just a list. But it’s also a map of their world.
Jungle post arrives. Two biscuits for me. A poem and a pressed flower from Comrade Narmada. A lovely letter from Maase. (Who is she? Will I ever know?)
Comrade Sukhdev asks if he can download the music from my iPod into his computer. We listen to a recording of Iqbal Bano singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Hum dekhenge’ (We will witness the day) at the famous concert in Lahore at the height of the repression during the Zia-ul-Haq years.
Jab ahl-e-safa-Mardud-e-haram,
Masnad pe bithaiye jayenge
When the heretics and the reviled,
Will be seated on high
Sab taaj uchhale jayenge
Sab takht giraye jayenge
All crowns will be snatched away
All thrones toppled
Hum dekhenge
Fifty thousand people in the audience in that Pakistan begin a defiant chant: Inqilab Zindabad! Inqilab Zindabad! All these years later, that chant reverberates around this forest. Long live the Revolution! Strange, the alliances that get made.
The home minister has been issuing veiled threats to those who ‘erroneously offer intellectual and material support to the Maoists’. Does sharing Iqbal Bano qualify?
At dawn I say goodbye to Comrade Madhav and Joori, to young Mangtu and all the others. Comrade Chandu has gone to organize the bikes, and will come with me up to the main road. Comrade Raju isn’t coming. (The climb would be hell on his knees.) Comrade Niti (Most Wanted), Comrade Sukhdev, Kamla and five others will take me up the hill. As we start walking, Niti and Sukhdev casually, but simultaneously, unclick the safety catches of their AKs. It’s the first time I’ve seen them do that. We’re approaching the ‘Border’. ‘Do you know what to do if we come under fire?’ Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Immediately declare an indefinite hunger-strike.’
He sat down on a rock and laughed. We climbed for about an hour. Just below the road, we sat in a rocky alcove, completely concealed, like an ambush party, listening for the sound of the bikes. When it comes, the farewell must be quick. Lal Salaam, Comrades.
When I looked back, they were still there. Waving. A little knot. People who live with their dreams, while the rest of the world lives with its nightmares. Every night I think of this journey. That night sky, those forest paths. I see Comrade Kamla’s heels in her scuffed chappals, lit by the light of my torch. I know she must be on the move. Marching, not just for herself, but to keep hope alive for us all.
March 2010
The law locks up the hapless felon
who steals the goose from off the common,
but lets the greater felon loose
who steals the common from the goose.
ANONYMOUS, ENGLAND, 18211
In the early morning hours of 2 July 2010, in the remote forests of Adilabad, the Andhra Pradesh state police fired a bullet into the chest of a man called Cherukuri Rajkumar, known to his comrades as Azad. Azad was a member of the Politburo of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), and had been nominated by his party as its chief negotiator for the proposed peace talks with the Government of India.
Why did the police fire at point-blank range and leave those telltale burn marks when they could so easily have covered their tracks? Was it a mistake or was it a message?
They killed a second person that morning—Hemchandra Pandey, a young journalist who was travelling with Azad when he was apprehended. Why did they kill him? Was it to make sure no eyewitness remained alive to tell the tale? Or was it just whimsy?
In the course of a war, if, in the preliminary stages of a peace negotiation, one side executes the envoy of the other side, it’s reasonable to assume that the side that did the killing does not want peace. It looks very much as though Azad was killed because someone decided that the stakes were too high to allow him to remain alive. That decision could turn out to be a serious error of judgement. Not just because of who he was, but because of the political climate in India today.
Trickledown Revolution
Days after I said goodbye to the comrades and emerged from Dandakaranya forest, I found myself charting a weary but familiar cours
e to Jantar Mantar, on Parliament Street in New Delhi. Jantar Mantar is an old observatory built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur in the eighteenth century. In those days it was a scientific marvel, used to tell the time, predict the weather and study the planets. Today it’s a not-so-hot tourist attraction that doubles up as Delhi’s little showroom for democracy.
For some years now, protests—unless they’re patronized by political parties or religious organizations—have been banned in Delhi. The Boat Club on Rajpath, which has in the past seen huge, historic rallies that sometimes lasted for days, is out of bounds for political activity now, and is only available for picnics, balloon-sellers and boat rides. As for India Gate, candlelight vigils and boutique protests for middle-class causes—such as ‘Justice for Jessica’, the model who was killed in a Delhi bar by a thug with political connections—are allowed, but nothing more. Section 144, an old nineteenth-century law that bans the gathering of more than five people—who have ‘a common object which is unlawful’—in a public place has been clamped on the city. The law was passed by the British in 1860 to prevent a repeat of the 1857 Mutiny. It was meant to be an emergency measure, but has become a permanent fixture in many parts of India. Perhaps it was in gratitude for laws like these that our prime minister, while accepting an honorary degree from Oxford, thanked the British for bequeathing us such a rich legacy: ‘Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration and they have served the country well.’2
Jantar Mantar is the only place in Delhi where Section 144 applies but is not enforced. People from all over the country, fed up with being ignored by the political establishment and the media, converge there, desperately hoping for a hearing. Some take long train journeys. Some, like the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, have walked for weeks all the way to Delhi. Though they had to fight each other for the best spot on the burning (or freezing) pavement, until recently protestors were allowed to camp in Jantar Mantar for as long as they liked––weeks, months, even years. Under the malevolent gaze of the police and the Special Branch, they would put up their faded shamianas and banners. From here they declared their faith in democracy by issuing their memoranda, announcing their protest plans and staging their indefinite hunger strikes. From here they tried (but never succeeded) to march on Parliament. From here they hoped.
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