But, how do the Maoists expect the middle class in cities to be sympathetic to their cause? In fact, the middle class fears that if the Maoists come to power, they would be annihilated and their properties confiscated. Ganapathi tried to address this issue in his interview. He said: 'Only a very small percentage of the upper crust in the middle classes join the upper classes (elite) and turn anti-people. But the entire middle class, the majority of the intellectuals and democrats who belong to the middle class would either join the movement or would stand in support of the movement. Not only during the revolution but in a post-revolutionary society too, the role of the intellectuals in building a new society would be excellent. When they join their hands with the working people, we will be able to complete the revolution sooner and also build the new society at a rapid pace. Due to the prejudices propagated by the ruling classes and some of their stooges, who lick their boots, a negligible number of them may have some fears but we want to clearly say that it is not at all the truth.'
The Maoists are currently facing problems on account of very little recruitment from the urban areas. The Maoist movement is not attracting youth from universities and other academic institutions the way it did in the '70s and '80s. Ganapathi accepts that this indeed is a problem. 'It is true that at present we are not able to mobilise workers, students and intellectuals as we had done in the '70s and '80s. There have been some considerable changes and phenomena in those conditions. It has become very complex to work in areas where the enemy is strong and in the trade union movement where the revisionists have entrenched themselves. This is not just the case in India. This condition is prevailing in the whole world,' he says. But he is sure that their movement would be able to overcome this. 'In order to liberate this country we have to concentrate on organising the peasantry. At present we would strengthen our movement among the peasantry and definitely extend it to the urban areas. On the other hand, this peasant movement is inspiring the urban people and is having a great impact on them. So, the days when we would vastly organise peasantry of plain areas, the suburban people and urban people are not that far off,' he says.
In the meantime, the Maoists are trying their best to increase recruitment, and, according to intelligence sources, they have cadres in students' hostels and slums from where they try to recruit youth, especially targeting Dalit and tribal youth. Recently, the Maoists have been on a recruitment drive in their erstwhile bastions of Andhra Pradesh as well.
The Maoist leadership believes that due to the government's 'pro-imperialist' policies, more and more people are getting affected and isolated. I had asked Ganapathi whether he thinks the Maoist movement will ever be as successful in Guragon, Haryana, as in Giridih (a Maoist stronghold in Jharkhand). He replied: 'All the riches between Giridih and Gurgaon have been produced by people from poor areas like Giridih. It is the poor Dalit and Adivasi labourers who are spilling their sweat and blood for the construction of huge mansions and infrastructure by Indian and foreign corporate lords. The majority of the workers and employees who work in the shopping malls and companies are from these areas. In terms of social, economic and cultural ties or in terms of movement relations Gurgaons and Giridihs are not two unconnected islands as such. They both are influencing each other. This is creating a strong base for our extension. If Giridih is liberated first, then basing on its strength and on the struggles of the working class in Gurgaon, Gurgaon would be liberated later.'
That may be a far cry, but not as far as it may sound to the government.
29The Telegraph, 4 March 2010.
30'Raman Kirpal, 'The Crimson Brief, Tehelka, 22 May 2010.
31Interview to the author.
Postscript
THE DEATH OF A
BALLOON SELLER
On New Year's Eve 2011, when thousands of revellers were celebrating across Delhi's numerous clubs and hotels, a 35-year-old balloon seller Bhima died on a roundabout outside the illustrious Indian Agricultural Research Institute. Even his name could not save him from the biting cold after a temporary shelter he used to take refuge in was demolished by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. About a month later, in a park near the same roundabout, a pregnant homeless woman delivered her child in shock after a policeman chasing beggars hit her with a lathi. After her husband was sentenced to life imprisonment, Binayak Sen's wife Ilina Sen said she feared for her security following her husband's imprisonment, and that the only recourse she could think of was to walk into some embassy and seek political asylum. In its new avatar, the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, now called the Maa Danteshwari Adivasi Swabhimani Manch, called for the deaths of three local journalists who had been trying to expose the facts about everyday atrocities and human rights violations. In a statement the group said that whoever worked against its interests would have to leave Bastar otherwise 'you will die like a dog'. In Gurgaon, meanwhile, a textile trader and his family were busy setting their dog upon their eight-year-old domestic help Usman (not his real name). He was rescued after facing two months of torture at the hands of his employers that included regular beatings with shoes. A neighbour who reported the case said later that he hadn't seen anybody even treat an animal the way Usman was being treated. Metres away from where Usman was rescued, a Citibank employee, Shivraj Puri was arrested on charges of fraudulently collecting 400 crore rupees from high net worth individuals. Also in the month of January, a UK-based art gallery brought a sculpture titled 'Eternal Spring' worth Rs 62,000,000 to Delhi, hoping to sell it during an art summit.
But there is another Delhi—unknown, unseen—which the government does not pay heed to but the Maoists are well aware of One such area is north-west Delhi's Bawana that the TV journalist Ravish Kumar calls the Bastar of Delhi. In a medium obsessed with pretty faces and glam news, Ravish does something that the big bosses of TV journalism term as 'downmarket': he visits areas like Bawana, inhabited by the poor, and chronicles the life of people living in such areas in his weekly show. What Ravish has seen has left him shocked. He speaks of meeting women who earn 60 paise a day after a day's hard labour. 'I couldn't show that in my show because no one would believe me,' he says. But such women do exist, he says, here in the national capital. These are women who sift through mountains of paper waste out of which about a kilo of cardboard is prepared for which they are paid an amount ranging from 60 paise to Rs 1.25 a day. He has met women who glue together key chains commemorating the Commonwealth Games, and after putting together 144 such keychains, the women are paid three rupees. Out of this, 50 paise is taken as commission by the contractor. Not only this, they have to collect the material from the contractor and bring it back on a cycle rickshaw that costs them two days' labour. He speaks of women who stitch 144 socks that takes them three hours for which they are paid two to five rupees. He says 80 per cent of such women have just started working three to four years ago when the little incomes their husbands brought home would not suffice. With their own little income, they buy small things—like a pack of cheap glucose biscuits or a pouch of milk for their children,' Ravish says. These women, he says, cannot even work as domestic servants since they live very far away from homes where demand for such maids exists. These people now cook their food in zeera instead of onions and eat potatoes instead of dal since both onion and dal are beyond their reach.
In January, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Centre and the Andhra Pradesh government on a petition seeking a judicial probe into the killings of Maoist leader Azad, 58, and journalist Hemchandra Pandey, 32. 'We cannot allow the Republic killing its own children,' a court bench observed. The two were shot dead together in July 2010 by security forces in an alleged fake encounter. Azad had on him a letter written by Swami Agnivesh, the mediator appointed by the Centre for talks with Maoist insurgents. The police said that Hemchandra was a Maoist as well and that both were killed in an armed engagement in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, close to the Maharashtra border. Civil rights activists, however, allege that both of them were picked up from a ho
tel in Nagpur, flown in a helicopter to the jungles of Adilabad, and then executed in cold blood. Azad was supposed to travel to Bastar from Nagpur to seek the opinion of a section of the Maoist leadership on talks with the Centre. The postmortem reports of both Azad and Hemchandra suggest that they were shot from very close range, even as an independent probe carried out by human rights groups, tears apart the police version of events in Adilabad's jungles. Activists allege that Hemchandra was killed alongside Azad because the police did not want an eyewitness to survive.
On 23 March 2010, the deam anniversary of Bhagat Singh, Naxalbari's leading light Kanu Sanyal committed suicide at his residence in West Bengal by hanging himself. Over the years, he had become a staunch opponent of the current Maoist movement, and he would express this by saying that killing a traffic constable on a busy street could not bring about a revolution. The Maoist leadership called him an opportunist. During the Lalgarh siege, Maoist leader Kishenji even called him a pheriwala, a hawker. In October 2010, forty years after the encounter death of Kerala's Naxal leader A. Varghese, a court sentenced to life imprisonment a former inspector general of police in his murder.
On 10 September 2008, Raghuram Rajan, noted economist and honorary advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, delivered a speech at the Bombay Chamber of Commerce where he spoke about how most of India's billionaires did not derive their wealth from IT or software but from land, natural resources, and government contracts or licences. He spoke of India being second only to Russia in terms of wealth concentration (the number of billionaires per trillion dollars of GDP). To show how extraordinary this number was he quoted the case of Brazil which had only 18 billionaires despite a greater GDP than India. Or Germany, which had three times India's GDP and a per capita income 40 times India's but had the same number of billionaires. 'If Russia is an oligarchy, how long can we resist calling India one?' he wondered.
What Rajan said is complete truth. One such case to prove this point is the bizarre manner in which the Orissa government bent over backwards to give clearance to Vedanta University, floated by Anil Agarwal, the chairman of the London-based Vedanta Group, now venturing into oil and gas. Forbes magazine's 2010 list of billionaires ranks him the world's thirteenth richest Indian, his net worth estimated at $5.5 billion. Investigations showed that the state government had flouted norms to let Vedanta acquire more than 6,000 acres of land even as the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research had identified 1.82 million tonnes of thorium-bearing monazite resources along the Orissa coast—the same area, coincidentally, where Agarwal wants his world-class university. Those opposed to the deal called it 'India's biggest land grab', and alleged that Vedanta was being favoured because it had funded the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha election campaigns of the state's ruling party, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). They contended that when some of the world's top universities such as Harvard or MIT had main campuses under 400 acres, why did Vedanta require so much land? (They had initially asked for more than 10,000 acres). In Delhi's Tees Hazari court, meanwhile, inside room number 308, Kobad Ghandy sits on a chair, wearing a striped formal shirt and worn-out sandals, flanked by uniformed men of the Delhi Police. His sister sits next to him. After about ten minutes, he is to be produced in front of the judge. They make him get up. He walks straight, keeping his head high. He listens to his lawyer's arguments and then that of the government's. In a few minutes, the hearing is over. Another date. Kobad's sister wants to buy him a pair of shoes. She asks him to put his foot on a piece of paper. She marks the outline of his foot with a pen. And then he is taken away.
Like all his comrades in the jungles of Bastar, and elsewhere, Kobad Ghandy believes too much in the cause he has taken up. He has too much belief in the idea of revolution. He may be condemned, it will not matter to him. He would say, as Fidel Castro said in his famous 1953 speech: 'History will absolve me.'
That is about him. To us, Kobad may not matter. Or Ganapathi. But what does Nobel laureate Amartya Sen have to say about what the pink newspapers often term as India's elephant-sized growth opportunities? 'India cannot be seen as doing splendidly if a great many Indians— sometimes most Indians—are having very little improvement in their deprived lives,' he said in a recent newspaper article.
Now, let us translate this into one particular image. For a moment, think: what if Usman ever gets to go to Giridih? Or what if Giridih visits him in Gurgaon?
Afterword
COMRADE ANURADHA
GHANDY AND THE IDEA
OF INDIA
On 5 February this year, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, a 16-year-old Dalit girl was attacked by three upper-caste youth. While she was returning from the fields, they dragged her away in an attempt to rape her. When she resisted and shouted for help, they fled. But before running away they chopped off her ears and part of her hand with an axe and badly injured her face. The inhumanity of this action would be unthinkable in any civilised society. But here, in India, it is hardly noticed. This is routine. In our highly patriarchal system, a girl's life is cheap; a poor Dalit girl is less than a chattel in the prevailing upper-caste/ upper-class social thinking.
This single incident brings out three factors. First: the intolerance to any form of Dalit assertion, even if it is an assertion to resist rape. Second: the impunity with which Dalits can be attacked even in a state ruled by a Dalit leader that comes from the knowledge that the establishment will not touch the culprits. Third: it brings out the arrogance of the upper-caste youth, a superiority complex instilled since birth.
Rahul Pandita's Hello, Bastar coincides with the third death anniversary of Anuradha Ghandy. It is an occasion to remember her monumental contribution to the understanding of the caste/Dalit question in India and the significance of its resolution for the democratization of the individuals, and with it, the society. In a society where a small percentage of people consider themselves superior to all others merely due to birth, there can be no democratic consciousness. Where major sections of society are seen as inferior (and nearly 20 percent treated as untouchable) merely due to their birth, what results is a society that is hierarchical and not democratic. Even nation building and national consciousness get sacrificed at the altar of caste. Caste consciousness supercedes national consciousness, identity, loyalty—everything.
Anuradha's pure simplicity, her total lack of any ego or arrogance and her innate attitude to see all others as her equal drew her to the issue of caste in her early college days itself. The outbreak of the Dalit Panther movement in Mumbai (1974) further helped fuel thought on this question. She began studying the caste/Dalit question at a time when the issue was anathema to most shades of Communists. And by 1980 itself she had presented extensive analytical articles on the issue. The Dalit question and Ambedkar's role in taking it up was not in fashion amongst the Left then, and Anuradha's writings resulted in hostile reactions from many of these circles. But Anuradha stood her ground. Even as a lecturer later in Nagpur, she lived in a Dalit basti and worked among them thereby getting a practical experience of their lives—the horrific humiliation they face, and their struggles for self-respect much before their desperate struggles for livelihood.
Anuradha was one of the few in the 1970s to understand the negative impact of casteism on genuine democratization of society—a disease worse than the apartheid in South Africa. Anuradha's creativity and intellect was a product of the fact that her mind was not fettered by hundreds of ego complexes. She was modesty personified. Her child-like simplicity with no element of pretence, trickery, or cunning allowed her to focus fully on whatever issue she took up. Her mind was not dissipated in varied futile directions to create impressions, appearances and images. As a result, her mental sharpness and intellectual capacity continued to flower and grow even towards the last years of her life, even after she was afflicted with the deadly disease, systemic sclerosis. In the 35 years that I knew her—from a simple student leader to a mass leader—she never lost her straightforwardness and pristine honesty.
I never saw her struggle to achieve this; it all came very naturally to her. One tends to see these values amongst the simple tribal folk who live with nature and have not as yet been corrupted by the system and are also outside of the caste framework.
Through all our ups and downs we were often apart for months. But the times we were together are the most cherished periods of my life. Her fiercely independent thinking acted as a great help to rational understanding of events, people and issues. There was no other person with whom I have had as vehement debates. This normally brought a balance to my often one-sided views.
Back to Hello, Bastar. This book by Rahul Pandita is an authentic introduction to a subject that is being much debated in the media. There have been other books on this subject, but they have primarily been based on secondary sources. But Rahul has personally investigated the issue, traversing difficult and often risky terrain. Such investigative journalism is a refreshing breeze in the stagnant air of superficiality that dominates reporting today. Having personally studied the developments in Chhattisgarh and having interacted with many revolutionaries and their sympathisers, the author has no doubt added to the reliability of the information. One may agree or disagree with the views presented, but the facts of the Maoist movement seem well elucidated. So, this book becomes an important source material for anyone seeking to study the particular model of development. For even if one does not agree, it is necessary to know the efforts and viewpoints going on in the country today. This is important in order to seek effective solutions to the problems—problems that are serious.
Generally, to the ordinary reader of the mainstream media, the issue is just that of violence. This book brings out that the question of violence is secondary; the key question is how to develop the country and its people. The Maoists have one method as reflected in their policies as elaborated in this book while the established government has another, seen in their economic and political policies over the past years.
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