Cyber action against Vedanta plc - visit websites

Dear readers,
As you know Vedanta plc- the criminal mining company, which is going to have a catastrophic effect on the people and environment of Orissa, eastern India- is having their AGM in London on 28 July.

A cyber action against Vedanta plc has been launched from 2 websites.

This is an extremely easy and effective way of sending thousands of emails to:-

Jairam Ramesh (India's Minister of Environment & Forestry), India's Prime Minister and 10 other senior politicians,

To some major banks with investments in Vedanta.


To UK's government body DfID (Department for International Development). You can go to http://www.niyamgiri.net/ and send emails from there to Jairam Ramesh with cc's to the Indian Prime Minister and others.

If you send this, the next screen will ask you to contact the banks and DfID with a link to http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_mine


Or of course you can go direct to http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_mine


Please network this as widely as you can. Please invite any friends who may be interested to visit http://www.niyamgiri.net/ where, with a few clicks of the mouse, they can send emails to Indian decision makers and the financiers bankrolling this destruction.

Over 200,000 Narmada Dam oustees still to be rehabilitated; a crime that goes unpunished for 25 years.

To those who are opposed to the people's uprising in India; Even your safety valve tricks are not working here.

Its 25 long years lost in the lives of the poor in India though its 25 years of opportunity for the NGOs and 'Bachao' people to get some foreign funds. The so called peace lovers are asking the suffering people not to revolt. But read this article to know what's happening to those people who are protesting peacefully.

Over 200,000 Narmada Dam oustees still to be rehabilitated; a crime that goes unpunished for 25 years.

Ground Reality

For 25 years now, they have struggled to get justice. In a peaceful and democratic manner, over 200,000 people displaced from the rising waters of the Narmada dams, have waited endlessly for a rehabilitation package, which is their legitimate right. Justice has been denied to them.

Yesterday, July 24, about 200 displaced people were present in the Gandhi Bhawan, in the heart of Bhopal city, to listen to the conclusions and recommendations of the three-member Independent People's Tribunal on displacements in the Narmada valley. Chaired by Justice (Retd.) A P Shah, former chief justice of the Delhi and Madras High Courts, I had the privilege and honour of being part of the panel. We had travelled through some of the affected areas in the Narmada valley in the first week of the month, and then spent some days putting it all together in the form of this report.

Twenty five years after the work for a series of dams on the mighty Narmada began, the displaced people, a majority of them being adivasis, have been treated worse than cattle by successive governments. Looking at their plight, and their lost years, and knowing that they will continue to be deprived of justice, I wonder why have these people not picked up arms? At a time when the UPA government is asking the naxalites in neighbouring Chhatisgarh State to give up arms and come to the negotiating table, I fail to understand why the government is not talking to those who never picked up the gun?

Narmada valley is not far away from Bhopal.

I bow my head before these poor and hapless for teaching us the true meaning ofahimsa. And yet, the nation has failed them. Every political party is responsible for this crime, a crime against humanity. Every bureaucrat who has been posted with the Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA), Narmada Control Authority (NCA)and the Grievance Redressal Authority (GRA) is guilty. They need to be simply hauled up and put in jail. Ministry for Environment & Forests, and Ministry for Water Resources and Planning Commission have been a willing partner to the crime.

I am saddened by what I saw, by what I heard. I can never forget the pain in the eyes of the women whom I met, the tears all dried up in the long drawn struggle for the past quarter of a century. We as a nation are responsible for inflicting these displaced people with so much of scorn and indifference that deep down in their hearts they know we (the fortunate) are not the people they fought to be independent for.

And yet they have not given up on hope.

Let me just read out a couple of paras from the report.

1. It is clearly established that the Governments of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat have violated the rights to life, livelihood and rehabilitation of thousands of oustees of the Sardar Sarovar Project,guaranteed by the Constitution and re-affirmed by numerous international conventions ratified by India by causing illegal and unjustifiable displacement of adivasis, and other farmers.

2. We wish to state at the very outset that our Tribunal was shocked to note as to how the NCA and the NVDA have stated that there are '0 families' who are to be rehabilitated, when in fact, in every village, hundreds of people not only welcomed us, but demonstrated to us the full community life, with the houses in various mohullas, schools, panchayat, bhawans, temples, masjids, agricultural fields, trees etc and narrated not just their individual complaints but the overall situation and problems with adequate analysis.

3. The Supreme Court in its judgement of Mar 15, 2005, whereby it upheld the Narmada Award 1979 and reiterated that land based rehabilitation of project affected persons (PAF) along with provisions of house sites with requisite amenities must be completed one year before submergence. The judgement admitted the entitlements of minimum of 2 hectares of cultivable, irrigable and suitable agricultural land to all major sons and unmarried daughters of landholder PAFs.

4. As a consequence of the progressive Rehabilitation Policy, as a part of the Narmada Tribunal 1979 and protracted struggle by the people, about 10,500 adivasis families have been given land in lieu of the land submerged or acquired for the project in Maharashtra and Gujarat, but to this date not a single family has received acceptable agricultural land in Madhya Pradesh.

5. Madhya Pradesh government has expressed its inability to provide 'land for land' saying it has no surplus land for rehabilitation, and nor can it buy land for the oustees since the land prices have gone up in the recent past. But it expects the oustees to purchase suitable land with the compensation package being provided under 'Special Rehabilitation Grant' that replaces land allocation with a cash package. However, in case of Madhya Pradesh, the Writers and Publishers Limited, Indore, is nationally the 7th largest multi product Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in terms of area, slated to come up on 4,050 hectares of land and has already received the "in principle" approval.The total land that this one single SEZ occupies is approximately the total land that would be required to rehabilitate most of the SSP oustees.

6. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan while addressing the Pravasi Bhartiya Sammelan in New Delhi, Jan 2010, had invited the NRIs with open arms to set up industrial units."Madhya Pradesh has no law and order problem, land is available in plenty, and clearances for setting up industrial units can achieved very fast."

So you can see. No limitation of land for industries and SEZ, but no intention of providing land to the oustees, even going to the extent of defying the Supreme Court orders. As an oustee asked us at the Public Hearing at Badwani on June 3: "Does the Supreme Court apply its contempt laws on the State governments also? Or is it only meant for lesser mortals like us?"

Indian People's Tribunal releases report on Narmada Projects
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/other-states/article484041.ece

By Mahim Pratap Singh
The Hindu, June 25

The Indian People's Tribunal (IPT) released its report on issues of massive displacement, rehabilitation, environmental compliance and overall cost-benefits of the big dam projects like, Sardar Sarovar, Indira Sagar, Omkareshwar and Jobat, here on Thursday.

The report was released by A.P. Shah, the former Chief Justice of Delhi and Madras High Courts, and agricultural analyst, Devinder Sharma, in the presence of Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) leader, Medha Patkar and other activists in Bhopal.

It was brought out following the public hearings conducted during a two-day visit to the affected areas of the Sardar Sarovar Project by Justice Shah, Devinder Sharma and Prof. Jaya Sagade, Vice Principal Indian Law Society, Pune.

Both Justice Shah and Mr. Sharma expressed shock and concern over the magnitude of “planned displacement and unplanned developmentin the valley”, including sustained non-compliance of environmental guidelines and violation of law.

The report observed that since there had been “serious non-compliance on the pari-passu implementation of rehabilitation and environmental measures, we have appealed to the Prime Minister to constitute a High Level Committee of Ministers, officials, experts and representatives of the people's movements to undertake a comprehensive review of all the projects, and take a decision not to further fund or carry forward the project-work until this process of review is complete”.

The Tribunal also noted the “grave consequences” of the badly plannedcanals, running though the agricultural fields in Indira Sagar and Omkareshwar.

Responding to the serious allegations of legal and human rights violations in the Jobat-dam area ,the Tribunal re-asserted the right to land-based rehabilitation of all those displaced, which is already guaranteed in the State Rehabilitation Policy of Madhya Pradesh and in the clearances granted to the projects by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).

Welcoming the findings and recommendations by the Tribunal, Medha Patkar stated that the Report affirmed the seriousness of the issues that people have been continuously raising for all these years, with little response and concrete action from authorities, both at the Central and State.

The report recommended that the concerned state governments and the Centre purchase private land for rehabilitation . A comprehensive survey of all affected families must be undertaken in consultation with the Gram Sabha to ensure compliance with the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, and regulatory bodies and ministries like the MoEF , Narmada Control Authority and Grievance Redressal Authority must act strongly to ensure compliance with law and norms of the Projects, the tribunal said

To All Who Are Concerned About the People of India: An Appeal from the Indian Workers Association (Great Britian)

Add Your Voices to Stop the War on Indian People

Once it was Operation Blue Star, now it is Operation Green Hunt.

Do you know?

The Indian government has declared war against its own people? It is called Operation Green Hunt. According to the government they have deployed 150,000 troops in India’s central and eastern states. Independent witnesses say the numbers are closer to 250,000. This is more than the number of US troops in Afghanistan. This is war on the Indian people.

Recent statistics show 37% of the country’s people suffer from chronic malnutrition and 50% are undernourished. The government’s response?

To sign MoUs with large foreign and Indian companies to grab land from people, to displace them, so that corporations can prosper. The government introduced the Special Economic Zones Act in 2005 which allows large companies to acquire land, exempts them from tax, foreign exchange laws, labour and environmental laws, agricultural laws

That nearly a third of India is under army occupation with no democratic freedoms? That all over India arrests, detentions, disappearances have increased to alarming levels since the people began resisting the corporate take over of India?

The People’s Response?

The people of India, in particular the Adivasis (tribal people), peasants in rural areas are resisting the displacement, evictions and the military occupations. Since 2005 a series of struggles have broken out throughout in India. The landmarks include Kalinganagar (January 2006), Singur (May 2006), Nandigram (March 2007) Lalgarh (November 2008) Jagatsingpura (Feburuary 2009) (Narayanpatna (November 2009). Within India, government’s military offensive, Operation Green Hunt, has aroused widespread opposition from democratic and progressive sections of the people committed to justice for the oppressed.

At this crucial juncture, it is vital that all progressive and democratic minded people outsideIndia rally behind the people of India in their opposition to the war and the destructive economic policies pursued by the government.

The numbers of people affected by this full scale war are several times larger than the whole population of Iraq and Afghanistan put together. The people of Britain have a long and enduring relationship with the people of India. British people committed to democracy and a just society stood by the Indian people in their struggle for independence, in their struggle against the Emergency in 1975. Indian people are once again fighting against tyranny and injustice. We call on all people in Britain to join together and raise their voice against the Indian government’s war against the Indian people. We call upon British people to support the just struggle of the most dispossessed and poorest people on earth that have dared to challenge the might of the international monopolies and corporations.

For more information on the Indian government’s war on the Indian people visit International Campaign Against War on People of India: www. icawpi.org

Let us lend voice to the international demands:

Immediate cessation of all armed operations against the people.

Immediate suspension of land acquisitions and displacement

Stop extra judicial killing

Release all political prisoners

Get Involved. Contact: Indian Workers Association (GB)

iwagb1938@hotmail.com

India: Maoist ‘land reforms’ for tribals & landless

The Telegraph – Calcutta
Wednesday , May 26 , 2010
PRONAB MONDAL

Dharampur (West Midnapore), May 25: Maoists in Lalgarh have said they would distribute among the poor and landless the land and property belonging to CPM leaders and workers who have fled the area.

A local Maoist leader said on Sunday that the rebels would resist if the administration tried to “hamper” their “land-reform initiative”.

“CPM leaders like Anuj Pandey (the zonal committee secretary of Binpur), whom we consider anti-people, have become rich by exploiting the poor. We have taken the decision (to distribute land and property) for the benefit of the tribals. We will fight back if the government tries to hamper our mission,” Ratan, a member of the Dharampur local committee of the CPI(Maoist), told The Telegraph.

The Naxalites are distributing leaflets, informing the residents of Lalgarh and Dharampur — where they plan to start the “mission” — about the move.

“These reactionaries (CPM leaders and workers in Lalgarh) are anti-people. They have fled their villages because of the people’s movement. We will have to take possession of their land and property and distribute them among landless farmers and day labourers. If there is not much land, then farming should be done by forming co-operatives,” the leaflet said.According to CPM sources, more than 50 party leaders, workers and supporters have fled their homes in Lalgarh and Dharampur in the past two years. In June last year, Maoists drove out Pandey from Dharampur and demolished his two-storey house.

Explaining the “new initiative” of the Maoists, Ratan said that while distributing land and other assets among the poor and the landless, they would “take into account their financial condition and daily earnings”.

“We will turn the ponds belonging to the escaped CPM leaders into fisheries, which will be run by co-operatives. We are creating a database of the land and other assets available,” Ratan added.
Pandey, who has taken refuge in Midnapore town, said he was helpless. “I have left everything behind. What can I do if they (the Maoists) take away my land and property?” he said.
West Midnapore superintendent of police Manoj Verma said the police would take action if the victims lodged complaints. “If we receive any complaint, we will register a case of trespassing against the offenders and initiate legal action. We can also start a suo motu case if we have enough evidence that land has been forcibly occupied,” he said.

Intelligence sources said they had informed the state government that Maoists from Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand had assembled at the Bhalukbasha forest, 30km from Lalgarh town, on Tuesday.

“A group of 42 armed Maoists has arrived at the Bhalukbasha forest. They are carrying explosives like gelatine sticks. We believe that they have come to either carry out a major operation or resist any attempts by the government to stop the Maoists’ initiative,” an intelligence official said.

Whither Maoists?

This article appeared in Sanhati

April 28, 2010

By Saroj Giri (Guest Contributor, Sanhati)

Abstract

Congress heavy-weight Digvijay Singh’s attack on the pro-corporate and hawkish Home Minister Chidambaram’s approach to the ‘Maoist problem’ seems to strengthen civil society initiatives calling for talks and dialogue. However in declaring that the Maoists are not really against corporate interests and are integrated in business as usual at the local level, Singh revealed attempts at a liberal-left appropriation of Maoists, in order to settle scores with the Chidambaram faction. If Operation Civil Society is the name for such an appropriation, then this might prove as dangerous for Maoists as Operation Green Hunt. This means that unless they are able to advance the (class) struggle into new areas and new classes, it might be difficult for their ‘correct line’ to stop them from going the way of the Nepali Maoists. Physical liquidation of the Andhra model might be replaced by democratic liquidation.

****

“The sheen of Maoist political ideology seems to be wearing off… do we have an instance where Maoists have stopped mining operations in affected areas or have taken up the cause of the tribals for higher wages or better living and working conditions for them? If they have done so sometimes, the issue has been resolved amicably after some deal was struck.”– Digvijay Singh criticizing Chidambaram’s hawkish approach to Maoists.

“They are no enemies… We must talk to our Naxal (Maoist) friends”– Congress leader Keshava Rao in the Rajya Sabha.

The recent guerrilla action killing 76 CRPF jawans seems to show that the Maoists are not only here to stay but can also hit back and unnerve the state machinery. Its fall-out seems even graver now that dissensions within the Congress on the Maoist question are out in the open. A Congress heavy-weight like Digvijay Singh publicly taking on another heavy-weight the Home Minister, perhaps with the tacit consent of Sonia and Rahul Gandh, is not a trivial matter. If they want, Maoists thus have good reasons now to gleefully applaud themselves for inciting ‘contradictions within the ruling classes’. But is there need for a serious concern here?

Indeed the Maoists today seem to stand on the cusp of a major transformation in terms of their strengths and capacities, as they have over the past two years catapulted onto the national scene like never before. So far they had only a more spectacular presence, portrayed as engaging in dramatic acts of kidnapping, blocking the Rajdhani Express or carrying out armed actions, jailbreaks and so on. Similarly, the Prime Minister portrayed the Maoists in dramatic, spectacular, almost hysterical, terms as the largest internal security threat in the country.

However, with Digvijay Singh’s recent article, ‘Re-think counter-Maoist strategy’, attacking Chidambaram and his pro-corporate ‘law and order’ approach, there are signs that a more cool-headed and concrete appraisal of the Maoist phenomenon is taking place in the ruling circles. That is, it will be terribly mistaken to regard this as just a Singh versus Chidambaram spat – for sure, that is all that might be visible to those like us outside the charmed circles of power, but there are indications that much is happening.

What is emerging is such a ‘realist’ thinking: now that the Maoists do not seem to be fizzling out anytime soon, nor getting decimated by Operation Green Hunt or military actions, they might be as well be engaged with, if not accepted, as a stakeholder of power, at least as a structure of command, control and power which the dominant ruling classes must reckon with. Such a ‘sane’ appraisal of the Maoist presence seems clear from Singh’s piece. Further, Congress leader K Keshava Rao announces in the Rajya Sabha, post-CRPF massacre, that Naxals are no enemies and we must talk to “our Naxal friends”. What is needed is a ‘political process’: thus former Chief Minister of Chattisgarh Ajit Jogi points out in support of Singh that “there are three aspects to the Maoist problem: the socio-economic, the law and order side and the political process”. It is important to note that ‘political process’ is the new addition to this discourse.

This is already in addition to Mani Shankar Aiyar’s extremely vocal statements against the hawkish approach and ‘1000 per cent’ support to Singh’s article. Further, Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi seem to be tacitly even if ambiguously supporting these voices. The two Gandhis have either avoided saying anything much on the Maoists or have pointed out lack of development and just government policies as the real problem – what also seems in line with the Congress’s aam admi approach.

With this soft stance towards Maoists emerging from within the ruling party, the possibility of talks increases. But what can also be expected is the machinations and maneuvers of all kinds of vested interests taking a progressive, liberal-left stance in favour of talks and dialogue with the government. To start with, one must notice that Singh’s appraisal of the Maoists is not just the vintage socio-economic approach pitted against the law and order approach attributed to Chidambaram. Crucially, Singh claims that the Maoists are not really against corporate interests and it is in portraying such a less-than-revolutionary face of the Maoists that he is able to challenge the need and rationale of Operation Green Hunt against them and argue for talks instead.

The aam admi faction seems to portray, fashion, appropriate Maoists in ways that allow them to take on the hawkish faction – a mere ruling class game, at one level. But is there a tacit suggestion here that talks can materialise under pain of, one way or the other, rendering Maoists less-than-revolutionary? If the Maoists are really serious about talks should they then strike a tacit deal, ‘a gentleman’s agreement’ with the pro-talk, aam admi faction within the Congress? Flipping the question around, is this faction piggy-riding on the Maoists to settle their scores with the hawkish faction? In any case, at a slight stretch, it seems not utterly futile to ask: is Operation Civil Society silently at work scripting what could be a ‘democratic liquidation’ of the Maoists? It is an ungrateful question but also an ungrateful task, my task here, exploring it.

The political terrain

Marking the present politico-ideological terrain is of course the fact that Singh’s views echo Congress’s, as in Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s ‘progressive’ aam admi agenda of reaching out to the poor. Also Singh’s opposition to Chidambaram’s line would find approval among a large section of what the media has termed the jholawalas, lefties and NGOs. Chidambaram, on the other hand, is presented as alienating the Congress from the aam admi and instead playing along with hawkish upper middle class jingoism who are all for a strong state and free rein to corporate interests. We cannot then overlook this terrain constituted by the contention between the two factions within the Congress mobilising different social bases, ‘the masses and the classes’, for their political power. Thus, the same Congress-led government see-saws between the pro-corporate Special Economic Zone Act and the ‘pro-people’ Employment Guarantee Act: carrot-and-stick policy.

The internal composition and particular configuration of the social basis of political power within the ruling Congress today is to a very large extent determined by this contention and tension between the two factions. It is within this context of the murky waters of interests and counter-interests, the machinations of power blocs, played out currently as corporate vs. aam admi approaches, that the Maoist comes to be cognized by those in power. However the corporate versus aam admi divide cuts across parties beyond the Congress and then gets translated state-wise in regional Maoist-affected contexts in slightly changed idioms. Recent Lok Sabha debates were marked by every party accusing the other of colluding with the Maoists: Singh himself wrote BJP is colluding, BJP says Congress colluded in Andhra, Mamata of course saying Maoists are same as CPIM, CPIM in turn accusing Trinamool of colluding, Shibu Soren and Nitish Kumar too colluding and apparently unwilling to implement Operation Green Hunt so on. Muddling waters further Arun Jaitley insinuates that Mamata Banerjee and Mani Shankar Aiyar are ‘half-Maoists’ and ‘consultants to insurgents’ sitting in the House. It is as though all these parties have to displace their own hidden illegality onto the Maoists, to be able to present themselves as constitutional, legal and legitimate in the first place!

Factional enframing of the Maoists

That is, the conflict and competition between these two factions within the ruling bloc means that the Maoist gets portrayed in different ways by each of them. Now the first kind of enframing coming from Chidambaram faction that the Maoists are out to violently overthrow the India state, and are against the very idea of India, is clearly applauded by large sections of the upper middle classes. The BJP fully backs this up and so do large sections within the Congress. Arun Jaitley was overly shrill in the Lok Sabha calling upon the Congress to rally behind the Home Minister and his hard approach towards the Maoists. What is it about the Maoists that allows such a hawkish approach to be adopted by a large section of the ruling classes? And here we know that this shows that the Maoists are indeed true to their political ideology, leading the struggle for a ‘violent’ overthrow of the Indian state and the establishment of communism. This means that the Maoists are indeed to a large extent on the path of protracted people’s war – testified therefore by the Indian’s state antagonistic and repressive actions against them. Or, for the more skeptical, they are at least arraigned against corporate interests and waging some kind of a struggle, perhaps a class struggle.

While then this first enframing follows from Maoist revolutionary politics, the second seems to offer a different picture – of Maoists who have lost the sheen of their political ideology. The second enframing is of course the left-liberal one propounded by Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar and in fact large sections of liberal civil society and democratic rights groups. And here we have Singh himself in his article.

He makes three points. One, he challenges the narrow approach of the Home Minister, who “is treating it purely as a law and order problem without taking into consideration the issues that affect the tribals”, issues of “governance and livelihood” and instead “converting the serene and calm environment of Bastar into a battlefield”. Interestingly, another Congress leader Amaresh Mishra, close to Singh, had written elsewhere how “the Congress’s reformist agenda however was not liked by a powerful lobby of upstart corporate interests”, clearly pointing fingers at the Chidambaram lobby. Second, Singh presents an ambiguous picture of the Maoist approach towards corporates, and towards mining and other activities. There is no “instance where Maoists have stopped mining operations in affected areas”. And if at all the Maoists raised issues of wage increase for tribals or better living conditions, “the issue has been resolved amicably after some deal was struck”. Third, Singh calls for focusing primary attention on the plight of the tribals on issues related to governance and development, land and resources, and the need for benign policies in order to undercut the Maoist base.

While the contention between these two corporate factions in the Congress is evident, what is interesting is how this contention not only centres around working out the right approach in countering the Maoists but also offers a new appraisal of the latter. This new liberal-left appraisal does not just say that Maoists cannot be treated as a law and order problem and must be treated as primarily if not exclusively a socio-economic problem – implement PESA, Forest Rights Act and so on. It says something more and this is new: it says that the Maoists are not against corporate interests and in fact are quite well integrated in the local economy and business as usual wherever they are strong. “The sheen of their political ideology seems to be wearing off” as they facilitate business as usual. Thus “traders, forest contractors, industrialists and mining companies carrying on their business without a problem, in fact, quite merrily, in the Naxalite dominated areas. The Maoists, simply, are collecting protection fees.” In fact, after the massacre of CRPF jawans, when you would imagine that corporates are going to run for their lives from Maoist areas, Tata Steel MD H. M. Nerurkar calmly tells this about their steel venture in Chattisgarh: “We are not dropping the project on account of the naxal problem.”

Now there are two aspects to this issue of Maoists not being seen by sections within the ruling circles to be as radical as the ideological claims they make. One is of course the actual activities of the Maoists and their relationship with corporates in the different areas they are strong in. This is one which needs empirical verification which we cannot do here. The other aspect is the imperatives of the ruling parties that drive them to view Maoists as such, as fulfilling a particular role and function which is in consonance with the internal needs of the particular faction – and the liberal-left faction cannot present itself as going soft on a force which is openly against corporate capital. Thus here the liberal-left faction enframes the Maoist as not inimical to the overall corporate interests and business, except for the tax and levies they charge.

Liberal-left allied to corporate capital

What we see is that the liberal-left approach cannot of course break from the dominant order of corporates and big capital. So it somehow has to present the case of tribal upliftment and addressing socio-economic issues without antagonizing corporate capital. Thus it cannot advocate adopting a socio-economic approach to the Maoist problem, in the face of the ongoing corporate-backed military strategy of Chidambaram, without assuring that Maoists are not against corporates as such and that they arise out of the issue of alienation of tribals from their land and resources.

Now such a liberal-left approach aligned finally with big capital is nothing new. Right since the days of so-called Nehruvian socialism large sections of the left, often including the CPI and later the CPIM, have played second fiddle or openly facilitated the depredations of capital in the country. Post-liberalisation of course we see the CPIM at the vanguard of implementing some of the most aggressive policies of capital and the state. On the other hand, it can be argued that NREGA and a host of other social policies including the Forest Rights Act were all designed to contain social discontent and cushion the effects of market globalization as much as to garner votes through populist policies.

What is new then about this liberal-left in the light of the strong Maoist presence, as also of so many other movements against corporate plunder today, is that the ‘social discontent’ which pro-poor policies are trying to ‘ameliorate’ or ‘contain’ has now taken a distinct form, gone out of hand and getting articulated as a political force, as in fact counter-veiling power. Since now this power, the Maoists, do not seem to be petering out soon or decimated whenever the powers that be so desire, they are now being cognized by the liberal-left as a force to be engaged with. In cognizing the Maoists as such, it is imperative on the liberal-left to portray and appropriate them in ways that suit its own interests – hence as not inimical to corporate interests. Earlier, the Expert Committee on Left Wing Extremism of the Planning Commission too carried on such an approach of trying to enframe Maoists as some kind of less-than-revolutionary, radical social democrats (ok sometimes with a gun!) out there to seek justice. But then this means that there is here also a veiled suggestion to the Maoists as to what they should do if they want to endear themselves to the pro-talk, liberal-left faction, how they should in fact dilute their political ideology and so on. Will this have any impact on the Maoists, leading them to act as less-than-revolutionary?

Revolutionary movements at the service of reformist ones?

Thus if rendering the Maoists less-than-revolutionary is the hidden basis on which the talks and dialogue are to take place then one must raise certain questions about Operation Civil Society. Do scrapping Chidambaram’s hawkish policy and then talks and dialogue only mean the possibility of democratic liquidation of the Maoists, wearing off of their political ideology and so on? Do those opposing Operation Green Hunt do so thinking, as it seems Rahul Gandhi and Digvijay Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar do, that Maoists dilute their political ideology in practice and can definitely be contained through socially oriented policies – and in turn be made the reason why more such policies be brought about, strengthening thereby the left-wing of capital and the state.

The more Operation Green Hunt fails to decimate the Maoists and the more Maoists are able to expand and proliferate, the more assertive the liberal-left is going to get, proffering their approach and solution. No wonder Singh’s article comes after the massacre of the CRPF jawans, when it seemed like Operation Green Hunt is not taking off. The Maoist presence and Chidambaram’s failure to eliminate it will clearly bring cheers to the liberal-left and allow them great leverage within the corridors of power. If this happens of course this might mean a larger realignment within the ruling bloc in favour of more people-oriented policies and applying some restraint on private capital and economic reforms – thanks to the Maoist presence!

On the other hand, objectively speaking the Indian state and ruling classes have lost touch with vast masses of people, particulary adivasis so that Maoists came to be the only credible force, to fill up what CPI leader from Bastar Manish Kunjam called a ‘political vacuum’ (Frontline, April 24 – May 7, 2010). Now apart from the subjective intentions of the Maoists the point is that objectively speaking big capital and the state in India today might look to the Maoists as facilitating this mediation between the tribals and the corporates - unless big capital is willing to go for an all out extermination of the tribals and capture the land and resources. This is the context in which we must understand ruling class parties accusing each other of being soft on the Maoists to secure electoral victories in Maoist areas – the Congress is supposed to be soft on Maoists to secure electoral gains in states like Chattisgarh with a BJP government. This only means that one way or another these parties are forced to deal with the fact that the Maoists are the only credible force with mass support in certain areas of sharp struggle against corporate capital.

Thus in terms of the internal composition of the ruling bloc today there is a possibility of talks and dialogue between the Maoists and the government, in fact of reconciliation too. However as we saw the enframing horizon within which such dialogue and reconciliation is envisioned clearly means co-opting the Maoist challenge in order to revive and refuel the old Nehruvian left ideals in the times of corporate globalization. No wonder arch-Nehruvian Aiyar declared his ‘one thousand percent’ support to Singh’s critique of Chidambaram. Social movements and civil society groups too have become more vocal demanding proper implementation of PESA, Panchayats, gram sabhas, different progressive Acts.

What is interesting and a paradox if you like, is that the Maoist movement far from rekindling a radical left or Marxist imagination consonant with the Naxalbari legacy, has instead fuelled and activated generally welfarist, left-of-centre sections – and in fact increased their bargaining power vis-à-vis those favouring corporate capital and a strong state. Is Maoist revolutionary subjectivity at the service of reformist movements? Prachanda’s promised fusion between people’s war and peoples movement in Nepal too turned out to be people’s war sacrificed towards a broad and vague peoples movement to the advantage of otherwise popularly hated, mainstream political parties. Bhoodan movement and the Gandhian movement itself got a new lease of life after Independence when it presented itself as a response or ‘humane solution’ to the Telegana armed uprising. This question of the subsumption of radical, revolutionary, ‘violent’ movements into infusing life and legitimacy in the existing order, with the ‘official left’ playing the intermediary, comprador role has to posed again today. Perhaps it is a problem of articulation, perhaps it is more substantive than that, or perhaps it is a sign of the overall logic of society, state and politics today – this needs more understanding.

Coming back to the present situation: the Maoists physically are not doing too bad confronting the military heat of Operation Green Hunt and the hawks within the Home Ministry; but what they seem not yet fully aware of is this ideological streamlining and sequestration of their subjectivity, twisted to rejuvenate the progressive ideals of the self-same Constitution and the progressive legislation ‘the sham of Indian democracy’ has churned out in no small quantities. If they realize, Maoists are today reeling under both Operation Green Hunt and Operation Civil Society! There is a however a tendency among the Maoists to be a bit too jubilant whenever civil society hotshots shower recognition and praise on them.

Now whether Maoists, in the face of conciliatory gestures and proposals from the liberal-left, will slowly come to some kind of an understanding with the Indian state or it will continue with its revolutionary aim and objective of New Democratic Revolution is a question we cannot settle here. What we can do is reflect on this model of armed struggle inflected and refracted in and through contradictions within the ruling circles and the calls and possibilities for talks and dialogue through some kind of civil society intervention and mediation. This way we can perhaps see that the ability of sections of the ruling classes to enframe the Maoists in ways that help reconfigure and renew the legitimacy of dominant power, might be a fall-out of a particular way of doing armed struggle.

Armed struggle ‘model’?

At the risk of oversimplification, let me outline the realist (definitely not the Marxist) account of armed struggle of the Maoists.As pointed out by several writers, Maoists started work in areas where the Indian state is weakest or hardly has any presence as in Dandakaranya, where there exists intense exploitation and oppression by agents of the state like Forest Department officials or by private contractors and traders. Maoists then, what has been narrated better by other writers, took up struggle for wage increase, higher prices for forest produce from traders, against women’s oppression and landlordism and so on.

In most cases Maoists soon gain a lot of popularity. They become a major power network there, running people’s courts, collecting taxes, levies on local contractors and traders. In any case, the Maoists soon gain real power on the ground, which becomes counter-power to the dominant order. They are able to challenge the armed might of the state too. Once this is achieved, the key point is whether this power allows Maoists to further radicalize the struggle and eventually build up towards a total replacement of the existing state order and society. Or, with this not happening, whether it starts negotiating with the already established dominant state order. Of course there are no binaries like that – for negotiations can be a step towards intensifying the struggle through strategic retreat. In any case, no matter what the objective, Indian Maoists are, as of today, keen to negotiate or go for talks and do not seem to be able to take the movement to a higher level. And this seems to be following on the features of a traditional armed struggle model.

In this model, the state response is of course to initially overlook them, if they have not become a credible threat yet to the ruling order, to business as usual and the authority of the state and parliamentary political process. The same was the case when the Maoists launched their people’s war in 1996 in Nepal: they were totally marginal to national politics. In fact this was the approach of the Indian state till recently. But then once they start being seen as a threat and also expanding, there are two kinds of responses. To physically eliminate them, particularly if the ruling order is not itself split from within and is internally cohesive in its approach. Or, as we saw with the liberal-left approach, to simultaneously befriend them if the internal dissensions within the ruling bloc mean that this threat can be used to buttress the claims of this one faction against the other faction.

In this realist account of the model of armed struggle, then, the rebels first establish themselves as a major power network (as a revolutionary force); the state and established order then try to dislodge them; if they cant, then there is a tendency to accommodate them; talks and negotiations begin, figuring out possible outcomes and compromise positions. But even though Maoists have emerged as a structure of power, not easily dislodged, the government today is not readily willing to negotiate and is putting strong conditionalities like ‘abjure violence’ and so on. This has of course to do with corporate capital’s strong linkages with the state. Companies like Vedanta, Arcelor Mittal, Tata Steel, Essar are openly and brazenly promoted by the Indian state.

More importantly, the government today feels that it does not lose its democratic legitimacy in making ‘war on its own people’. And that has to do with the upper middle class support base which is cheering on Chidambaram to go ahead and finish off the Maoists. Calls for using maximum force to finish off the ‘anti-national’ Maoists, egging on Chidambaram to go on no-holds barred, were on full display in the aftermath of the killing of 76 security personnel in Dantewada. On this count, negotiations are still not so much on the cards for the Indian state.

The other reason is also of course that precisely due to such a nature of the upper middle classes and intense corporate hegemony even among the lower classes, radical resistance among urban workers is extremely sporadic and falls short of acquiring a critical mass. And if they are unable to expand, Maoists might be more willing to go for talks and negotiations as a way out of being restricted in limited areas or expanding in sociologically homogeneous areas (forest areas, or among adivasis only) – thereby reinforcing the armed struggle model. It is the confidence and continued legitimacy of the state and its policies among the upper middle classes that allows it to ignore the Maoists as a legitimate force even when Digvijay paints them as not so dangerous, well integrated in business as usual, collecting taxes from local traders, contractors and businesses and so on.

Generalising the struggle or perpetuating power?

The key question for the Maoists is this: how can they transcend the traditional armed struggle model and go ahead with their political goals, intensifying the class struggle and so on? Are the janatam sarkar and the revolutionary peasant committees headed towards an alternative political power or are they only excellent but interim ways of organizing production and consumption at the local level only?

Thus it seems clear that if the Maoists are not able to expand their struggle in new areas, new classes and precipitate a larger crisis for the Indian state, the traditional armed struggle model would invariably set limits on it. Talks and dialogue in themselves are neither good nor bad: what is important is the larger dynamic of the struggle, of the ability to generalize the struggle and precipitate a wider crisis for the state – something much more pertinent given that the present government does not really derive legitimacy from the masses in Dantewada or Lalgarh but from the urban middle classes. From what one can see, Maoists seem to be pinning much hope on the initiatives by the intelligentsia and urban civil society groups, rather than mobilizing masses in urban areas, drawing thereby a line of generalization to the ‘base struggle’ in Dantewada, Lalgarh and elsewhere.

In Nepal, even after the Maoists spread to almost 70 per cent of the country, they still could not figure out how to expand to urban areas, particularly among the middle classes. It was only after they entered into the Nov 2005 12-point agreement with the seven political parties that they started expanding in urban areas – but that was only after they suspended their people’s war. So the question: how does one expand the people’s war among urban workers and the middle class? While Indian Maoists have more or less rightly critiqued the Nepali Maoists, they do not seem to have answers to such questions, to the real problems that the path of protracted people’s war encounters. The choice is between generalizing the struggle or eventually getting suckered in the flows of capital and state power.

After all, if the Maoists are not dynamically expanding in new areas, among new classes and winning new allies (for example the nationality movements and anti-caste struggles), there is always a chance that their present revolutionary base areas would get enmeshed in the larger circulation of quantities and masses which is global capitalism today – liberated zones can start wilting from within. Of course this might sound a bit too pessimistic today when the movement exudes a lot of revolutionary energy if not dynamism. Hence we can put it this way: Maoists today seem poised between either generalizing the struggle, advancing the class struggle to new heights, or lapsing into dominant, constituted, ossified (local) power, albeit rendering the dominant system progressive and humane in the process. Without an advancing class struggle, civil society initiatives, if taken a bit too seriously, for all their good intentions, cannot but push Maoists towards the latter, now also buttressed by liberal-left voices within the ruling party.

The liberal-left or civil society opposition to Operation Green Hunt and towards talks and dialogue is a double-edged sword as it tends to piggy-ride on the Maoist movement to establish its own agenda vis-à-vis the dominant neoliberal Chidambaram lobby – best exemplified in the catch-all expression ‘peace with justice’. Thus for example the choice offered between Operation Green Hunt or the (liberal-left) socio-economic approach, through effective implementation of PESA/Forest Rights Act and so on, is a false choice. While the possibility of a physical liquidation of the Andhra model remains, a new threat of democratic liquidation too can become a possibility. Unless Maoists are able to break their dalliance with civil society and advance their struggle to newer classes and urban areas, they might badly succumb.

Invisible hand

Lastly, let us come back to the attempted liberal-left appropriation of Maoists, against the hawkish pro-corporate faction, particularly in Singh’s article. While this is ‘ruling class contradiction’, we must not however fail to point out that, from a revolutionary standpoint, there is a truth contained in Singh’s assertion that Maoists are violent and do threaten the state but are not against business as usual, not against corporate interests. Indeed, Maoist politics is marked by the juxtaposition of a highly revolutionary, antagonistic relationship towards the state and its apparatus, including its political process of legitimization (boycott elections), with a highly ambiguous relationship to private trade and business at the local level. This is of course the difficult question of state versus capital, of state versus commodity production – where state is easily located and identified while capital and commodity production are diffuse, decentred and cannot be a target for revolutionary action. It is easier to confront the state and target it as a structure of oppression than be able to see how the market, private trade and exchange ‘spontaneously’ produces inequalities of power and wealth. The invisible hand of the market is sometimes far more instrumental in forestalling revolutions than the visible hand of the state.

Surely, the Maoists need to get a grasp of this problem, which has historically existed right since the days of Lenin when after capture of state power the Bolsheviks swung between War Communism (banning private trade and money) and the New Economic Policy (allowing a quantum of private trade and free market) in 1919-21. The Cultural Revolution in turn showed us that the old state and old classes might go but the existing conditions of production, in particular the wage system and the operation of the law of value (the capitalist market) in turn ‘spontaneously’ generates a new bourgeoisie, well… as Mao pointed out, from within the Communist Party.

Undoubtedly, Maoist practice particularly the experience of the janatam sarkars must be one way or another encountering this problem and must have tried to address it. The Maoists of course cannot shy away from actively relating to the trade and business (including looting banks) in areas under their control. However, to view it as only a local practical exigency (we all need money, don’t we?) and not relating it to the course of the overall revolutionary process can prove dangerous

Arundhati Roy: Walking with the Comrades

Outlook

Dateline Dantewada: Roy with the Maoists

ESSAY

Walking With The Comrades

Gandhians with a Gun? Arundhati Roy plunges into the sea of Gondi people to find some answers...

ARUNDHATI ROY

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”

Namashkar Guruji. I wondered whether the Meeter and Greeter would be expecting a man. And whether I should get myself a moustache.

There are many ways to describe Dantewada. It’s an oxymoron. It’s a border town smack in the heart of India. It’s the epicentre of a war. It’s an upside down, inside out town.

Red Shadow: Centenary celebrations of the adivasi uprising in Bastar; Sten gun at hand

In Dantewada, the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.

Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call ‘Pakistan’. There the villages are empty, but the forest is full of people. Children who ought to be in school run wild. In the lovely forest villages, the concrete school buildings have either been blown up and lie in a heap, or they are full of policemen. The deadly war that is unfolding in the jungle is a war that the Government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister (and CEO of the war), says it does not exist, that it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised for it. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.

If ghosts are the lingering spirits of someone, or something, that has ceased to exist, then perhaps the new four-lane highway crashing through the forest is the opposite of a ghost. Perhaps it is the harbinger of what is still to come.

In Dantewada, the police wear plain clothes, the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail; the prisoners are free.

The antagonists in the forest are disparate and unequal in almost every way. On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerrilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion. The Maoists and the paramilitary are old adversaries and have fought older avatars of each other several times before: Telangana in the ’50s; West Bengal, Bihar, Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in the late ’60s and ’70s; and then again in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra from the ’80s all the way through to the present. They are familiar with each other’s tactics, and have studied each other’s combat manuals closely. Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or their previous avatars) had been not just defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal—homeland to millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.

It’s easier on the liberal conscience to believe that the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State. It’s convenient to forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries. (That’s a truism of course. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist.) The Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds have all rebelled several times, against the British, against zamindars and moneylenders. The rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands killed, but the people were never conquered. Even after Independence, tribal people were at the heart of the first uprising that could be described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West Bengal (where the word Naxalite—now used interchangeably with ‘Maoist’—originates). Since then, Naxalite politics has been inextricably entwined with tribal uprisings, which says as much about the tribals as it does about the Naxalites.

Staying Put: People of Kudur village protest the Bodhghat dam: ‘It does not belong to the capitalists, Bastar is OUrs’y

This legacy of rebellion has left behind a furious people who have been deliberately isolated and marginalised by the Indian government. The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.

Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight of hand, the government began to use their own penury against them. Each time it needed to displace a large population—for dams, irrigation projects, mines—it talked of “bringing tribals into the mainstream” or of giving them “the fruits of modern development”. Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone), refugees of India’s ‘progress’, the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it’s time to worry.

The most recent expression of concern has come from home minister P. Chidambaram who says he doesn’t want tribal people living in “museum cultures”. The well-being of tribal people didn’t seem to be such a priority during his career as a corporate lawyer, representing the interests of several major mining companies. So it might be an idea to enquire into the basis for his new anxiety.

The Day of the Bhumkal: Face to face with "India's greatest Security Threat".

Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.

Therefore, this war.

When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?

The day before I left, my mother called, sounding sleepy. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, with a mother’s weird instinct, “what this country needs is revolution.”

An article on the internet says that Israel’s Mossad is training 30 high-ranking Indian police officers in the techniques of targeted assassinations, to render the Maoist organisation “headless”. There’s talk in the press about the new hardware that has been bought from Israel: laser range-finders, thermal imaging equipment and unmanned drones, so popular with the US army. Perfect weapons to use against the poor.

The drive from Raipur to Dantewada takes about 10 hours through areas known to be ‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. ‘Infest/infestation’ implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways, the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.

To protect the highway, security forces have ‘secured’ a narrow bandwidth of forest on either side. Further in, it’s the raj of the ‘Dada log’. The Brothers. The Comrades.

On the outskirts of Raipur, a massive billboard advertises Vedanta (the company our home minister once worked with) Cancer Hospital. In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways, mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It’s called CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. It allows mining companies to be like the legendary actor and former chief minister NTR, who liked to play all the parts in Telugu mythologicals—the good guys and the bad guys, all at once, in the same movie. This CSR masks the outrageous economics that underpins the mining sector in India. For example, according to the recent Lokayukta report for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined by a private company, the government gets a royalty of Rs 27 and the mining company makes Rs 5,000. In the bauxite and aluminium sector, the figures are even worse. We’re talking about daylight robbery to the tune of billions of dollars. Enough to buy elections, governments, judges, newspapers, TV channels, NGOs and aid agencies. What’s the occasional cancer hospital here or there?

I don’t remember seeing Vedanta’s name on the long list of MoUs signed by the Chhattisgarh government. But I’m twisted enough to suspect that if there’s a cancer hospital, there must be a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere.

Tribal people in central India have a history of resistance predating Mao. The rebellions were crushed, but the people were never conquered.

We pass Kanker, famous for its Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College run by Brigadier B.K. Ponwar, Rumpelstiltskin of this war, charged with the task of turning corrupt, sloppy policemen (straw) into jungle commandos (gold). “Fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla”, the motto of the warfare training school, is painted on the rocks. The men are taught to run, slither, jump on and off air-borne helicopters, ride horses (for some reason), eat snakes and live off the jungle. The brigadier takes great pride in training street dogs to fight ‘terrorists’. Eight hundred policemen graduate from the warfare training school every six weeks. Twenty similar schools are being planned all over India. The police force is gradually being turned into an army. (In Kashmir, it’s the other way around. The army is being turned into a bloated, administrative police force.) Upside down. Inside out. Either way, the Enemy is the People.

It’s late. Jagdalpur is asleep, except for the many hoardings of Rahul Gandhi asking people to join the Youth Congress. He’s been to Bastar twice in recent months but hasn’t said anything much about the war. It’s probably too messy for the People’s Prince to meddle in at this point. His media managers must have put their foot down. The fact that the Salwa Judum—the dreaded, government-sponsored vigilante group responsible for rapes, killings, for burning down villages and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes—is led by Mahendra Karma, a Congress MLA, does not get much play in the carefully orchestrated publicity around Rahul Gandhi.

I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No HindiOutlook, no bananas. “Are you the one who’s going in?” he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I did not know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said, “Outlook nahin mila (couldn’t find Outlook).”

“And the bananas?”

“I ate them,” he said, “I got hungry.”

He really was a security threat.

His backpack said Charlie Brown—Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.

I’m surrounded by strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal—all Maoists. Are they going to die? What for? To turn this into a mine?

We walked to the bus stand, only a few minutes away from the temple. It was already crowded. Things happened quickly. There were two men on motorbikes. There was no conversation—just a glance of acknowledgment, a shifting of body weight, the revving of engines. I had no idea where we were going. We passed the house of the Superintendent of Police (SP), which I recognised from my last visit. He was a candid man, the SP: “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”

In no time at all we were riding out of town. No tail. It was a long ride, three hours by my watch. It ended abruptly in the middle of nowhere, on an empty road with forest on either side. Mangtu got off. I did too. The bikes left, and I picked up my backpack and followed the small internal security threat into the forest. It was a beautiful day. The forest floor was a carpet of gold.

In a while we emerged on the white, sandy banks of a broad flat river. It was obviously monsoon-fed, so now it was more or less a sand flat, at the centre a stream, ankle deep, easy to wade across. Across was ‘Pakistan’. “Out there, ma’am,” the candid SP had said to me, “my boys shoot to kill.” I remembered that as we began to cross. I saw us in a policeman’s rifle-sights—tiny figures in a landscape, easy to pick off. But Mangtu seemed quite unconcerned, and I took my cue from him.

Waiting for us on the other bank, in a lime-green shirt that said Horlicks!, was Chandu. A slightly older security threat. Maybe twenty. He had a lovely smile, a cycle, a jerry can with boiled water and many packets of glucose biscuits for me, from the Party. We caught our breath and began to walk again. The cycle, it turned out, was a red herring. The route was almost entirely non-cycleable. We climbed steep hills and clambered down rocky paths along some pretty precarious ledges. When he couldn’t wheel it, Chandu lifted the cycle and carried it over his head as though it weighed nothing. I began to wonder about his bemused village boy air. I discovered (much later) that he could handle every kind of weapon, “except for an LMG”, he informed me cheerfully.

CSR. It allows corporates to play good guys and bad guys all at once. If Vedanta has a cancer hospital somewhere, a bauxite mountain can’t be far.

Three beautiful, sozzled men with flowers in their turbans walked with us for about half an hour, before our paths diverged. At sunset, their shoulder bags began to crow. They had roosters in them, which they had taken to market but hadn’t managed to sell.

Chandu seems to be able to see in the dark. I have to use my torch. The crickets start up and soon there’s an orchestra, a dome of sound over us. I long to look up at the night sky, but I dare not. I have to keep my eyes on the ground. One step at a time. Concentrate.

I hear dogs. But I can’t tell how far away they are. The terrain flattens out. I steal a look at the sky. It makes me ecstatic. I hope we’re going to stop soon. “Soon,” Chandu says. It turns out to be more than an hour. I see silhouettes of enormous trees. We arrive.

The village seems spacious, the houses far away from each other. The house we enter is beautiful. There’s a fire, some people sitting around. More people outside, in the dark. I can’t tell how many. I can just about make them out. A murmur goes around. Lal Salaam Kaamraid(Red Salute, Comrade). Lal Salaam, I say. I’m beyond tired. The lady of the house calls me inside and gives me chicken curry cooked in green beans and some red rice. Fabulous. Her baby is asleep next to me, her silver anklets gleam in the firelight.

After dinner, I unzip my sleeping bag. It’s a strange intrusive sound, the big zip. Someone puts on the radio. BBC Hindi service. The Church of England has withdrawn its funds from Vedanta’s Niyamgiri project, citing environmental degradation and rights violations of the Dongria Kondh tribe. I can hear cowbells, snuffling, shuffling, cattle-farting. All’s well with the world. My eyes close.

We’re up at five. On the move by six. In another couple of hours, we cross another river. We walk through some beautiful villages. Every village has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind. By 11, the sun is high, and walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch. Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A beautiful young girl flirts with him. He looks a little shy, maybe because I’m around. Lunch is raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red chilli powder. We’re going to wait for the sun to lose some of its vehemence before we start walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is clean and necessary. No clutter. A black hen parades up and down the low mud wall. A bamboo grid stabilises the rafters of the thatched roof and doubles as a storage rack. There’s a grass broom, two drums, a woven reed basket, a broken umbrella and a whole stack of flattened, empty, corrugated cardboard boxes. Something catches my eye. I need my spectacles. Here’s what’s printed on the cardboard: Ideal Power 90 High Energy Emulsion Explosive (Class-2) SD CAT ZZ.

We start walking again at about two. In the village we are going to meet a Didi (Sister, Comrade) who knows what the next step of the journey will be. Chandu doesn’t. There is an economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to know everything. But when we reach the village, Didi isn’t there. There is no news of her. For the first time, I see a little cloud of worry settling over Chandu. A big one settles over me. I don’t know what the systems of communication are, but what if they’ve gone wrong?

Spare Beauty: Pots, rifles, jhillies... Everything in these villages is clean and necessary

We’re parked outside a deserted school building, a little way out of the village. Why are all the government village schools built like concrete bastions, with steel shutters for windows and sliding folding steel doors? Why not like the village houses, with mud and thatch? Because they double up as barracks and bunkers. “In the villages in Abujhmad,” Chandu says, “schools are like this....” He scratches a building plan with a twig in the earth. Three octagons attached to each other like a honeycomb. “So they can fire in all directions.” He draws arrows to illustrate his point, like a cricket graphic—a batsman’s wagon wheel. There are no teachers in any of the schools, Chandu says. They’ve all run away. Or have you chased them away? No, we only chase police. But why should teachers come here, to the jungle, when they get their salaries sitting at home? Good point.

He informs me that this is a ‘new area’. The Party has entered only recently.

Rahul’s been to Bastar twice in recent months, but has said nothing on the war. Perhaps it’s too messy for the People’s Prince at this point.

About 20 young people arrive, girls and boys. In their teens and early 20s. Chandu explains that this is the village-level militia, the lowest rung of the Maoists’ military hierarchy. I have never seen anyone like them before. They are dressed in saris and lungis, some in frayed olive-green fatigues. The boys wear jewellery, headgear. Every one of them has a muzzle-loading rifle, what’s called a bharmaar. Some also have knives, axes, a bow and arrow. One boy carries a crude mortar fashioned out of a heavy three-foot GI pipe. It’s filled with gunpowder and shrapnel and ready to be fired. It makes a big noise, but can only be used once. Still, it scares the police, they say, and giggle. War doesn’t seem to be uppermost on their minds. Perhaps because their area is outside the home range of the Salwa Judum. They have just finished a day’s work, helping to build fencing around some village houses to keep the goats out of the fields. They’re full of fun and curiosity. The girls are confident and easy with the boys. I have a sensor for this sort of thing, and I am impressed. Their job, Chandu says, is to patrol and protect a group of four or five villages and to help in the fields, clean wells or repair houses—doing whatever’s needed.

Still no Didi. What to do? Nothing. Wait. Help out with some chopping and peeling.

After dinner, without much talk, everybody falls in line. Clearly, we are moving. Everything moves with us, the rice, vegetables, pots and pans. We leave the school compound and walk single file into the forest. In less than half an hour, we arrive in a glade where we are going to sleep. There’s absolutely no noise. Within minutes everyone has spread their blue plastic sheets, the ubiquitous ‘jhilli’ (without which there will be no Revolution). Chandu and Mangtu share one and spread one out for me. They find me the best place, by the best grey rock. Chandu says he has sent a message to Didi. If she gets it, she will be here first thing in the morning. If she gets it.

It’s the most beautiful room I have slept in, in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel. I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal. They’re all Maoists for sure. Are they all going to die? Is the jungle warfare training school for them? And the helicopter gunships, the thermal imaging and the laser range-finders?

Why must they die? What for? To turn all of this into a mine? I remember my visit to the open cast iron-ore mines in Keonjhar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound. Red dust fills your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the air is red, the people are red, their lungs and hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble through their villages, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to Paradip port from where it will go to China. There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden cities that spring up overnight. Into a ‘growth rate’ that leaves economists breathless. Into weapons to make war.

Everyone’s asleep except for the sentries who take one-and-a-half-hour shifts. Finally, I can look at the stars. When I was a child growing up on the banks of the Meenachal river, I used to think the sound of crickets—which always started up at twilight—was the sound of stars revving up, getting ready to shine. I’m surprised at how much I love being here. There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be. Who should I be tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars? Maybe Didi will come tomorrow.

They arrive in the early afternoon. I can see them from a distance. About 15 of them, all in olive-green uniforms, running towards us. Even from a distance, from the way they run, I can tell they are the heavy hitters. The People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA). For whom the thermal imaging and laser-guided rifles. For whom the jungle warfare training school.

In April ’05, the Chhattisgarh government signed two MoUs for steel plants. The same month, the PM called Maoists the ‘gravest security threat’.

They carry serious rifles, INSAS, SLR, two have AK-47s. The leader of the squad is Comrade Madhav who has been with the Party since he was nine. He’s from Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. He’s upset and extremely apologetic. There was a major miscommunication, he says again and again, which usually never happens. I was supposed to have arrived at the main camp on the very first night. Someone dropped the baton in the jungle-relay. The motorcycle drop was to have been at an entirely different place. “We made you wait, we made you walk so much. We ran all the way when the message came that you were here.” I said it was okay, that I had come prepared, to wait and walk and listen. He wants to leave immediately, because people in the camp were waiting, and worried.

It’s a few hours’ walk to the camp. It’s getting dark when we arrive. There are several layers of sentries and concentric circles of patrolling. There must be a hundred comrades lined up in two rows. Everyone has a weapon. And a smile. They begin to sing: Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam, aane vaale saathiyon ko lal lal salaam (red salute to the comrades who have arrived). It is sung sweetly, as though it was a folk song about a river, or a forest blossom. With the song, the greeting, the handshake, and the clenched fist. Everyone greets everyone, murmuring Lalslaam, mlalslaa mlalslaam....

I remember my visit to the iron ore mines in Keonjhar. Once it had forest. Now the land’s like a raw, red wound. Red water, red air, red people.

Other than a large blue jhilli spread out on the floor, about 15 feet square, there are no signs of a ‘camp’. This one has a jhilli roof as well. It’s my room for the night. I was either being rewarded for my days of walking, or being pampered in advance for what lay ahead. Or both. Either way it was the last time in the entire trip that I was going to have a roof over my head. Over dinner I meet Comrade Narmada, in charge of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan (KAMS), who has a price on her head; Comrade Saroja of the PLGA who is only as tall as her SLR; Comrade Maase (which means Black Girl in Gondi), who has a price on her head too; Comrade Rupi, the tech wizard; Comrade Raju, who’s in charge of the division I’d been walking through; and Comrade Venu (or Murali or Sonu or Sushil, whatever you would like to call him), clearly the seniormost of them all. Maybe central committee, maybe even politburo. I’m not told, I don’t ask. Between us we speak Gondi, Halbi, Telugu, Punjabi and Malayalam. Only Maase speaks English. (So we all communicate in Hindi!) Comrade Maase is tall and quiet and seems to have to swim through a layer of pain to enter the conversation. But from the way she hugs me, I can tell she’s a reader. And that she misses having books in the jungle. She will tell me her story only later. When she trusts me with her grief.

Bad news arrives, as it does in this jungle. A runner, with ‘biscuits’. Handwritten notes on sheets of paper, folded and stapled into little squares. There’s a bag full of them. Like chips. News from everywhere. The police have killed five people in Ongnaar village, four from the militia and one ordinary villager: Santhu Pottai (25), Phoolo Vadde (22), Kande Pottai (22), Ramoli Vadde (20), Dalsai Koram (22). They could have been the children in my star-spangled dormitory of last night.

Then good news arrives. A small contingent of people with a plump young man. He’s in fatigues too, but they look brand new. Everybody admires them and comments on the fit. He looks shy and pleased. He’s a doctor who has come to live and work with the comrades in the forest. The last time a doctor visited Dandakaranya was many years ago.

Performing Arts: Members of the Chetna Natya Manch, the cultural wing of the party, waiting in the wings

On the radio there’s news about the home minister’s meeting with chief ministers of states ‘affected by Left-Wing Extremism’. The chief ministers of Jharkhand and Bihar are being demure and have not attended. Everybody sitting around the radio laughs. Around the time of elections, they say, right through the campaign, and then maybe a month or two after the government is formed, mainstream politicians all say things like “Naxals are our children”. You can set your watch to the schedule of when they will change their minds, and grow fangs.

I am introduced to Comrade Kamla. I am told that I must on no account go even five feet away from my jhilli without waking her. Because everybody gets disoriented in the dark and could get seriously lost. (I don’t wake her. I sleep like a log.) In the morning Kamla presents me with a yellow polythene packet with one corner snipped off. Once it used to contain Abis Gold Refined Soya Oil. Now it was my Loo Mug. Nothing’s wasted on the Road to the Revolution.

(Even now I think of Comrade Kamla all the time, every day. She’s 17. She wears a homemade pistol on her hip. And boy, what a smile. But if the police come across her, they’ll kill her. They might rape her first. No questions will be asked. Because she’s an Internal Security Threat.)

After breakfast, Comrade Venu (Sushil, Sonu, Murali) is waiting for me, sitting cross-legged on the jhilli, looking for all the world like a frail village schoolteacher. I’m going to get a history lesson. Or, more accurately, a lecture on the history of the last 30 years in the Dandakaranya forest, which has culminated in the war that’s swirling through it today. For sure, it’s a partisan’s version. But then, what history isn’t? In any case, the secret history must be made public if it is to be contested, argued with, instead of merely being lied about, which is what is happening now.

Around the time of elections, mainstream netas say things like Naxals are our children. You can set your watch to when they’ll grow fangs.

Comrade Venu has a calm, reassuring manner and a gentle voice that will, in the days to come, surface in a context that will completely unnerve me. This morning he talks for several hours, almost continuously. He’s like a little store manager who has a giant bunch of keys with which to open up a maze of lockers full of stories, songs and insights.

Comrade Venu was in one of the seven armed squads who crossed the Godavari from Andhra Pradesh and entered the Dandakaranya forest (DK, in Partyspeak) in June 1980, 30 years ago. He is one of the original forty-niners. They belonged to People’s War Group (PWG), a faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(ML), the original Naxalites. PWG was formally announced as a separate, independent party in April that year, under Kondapalli Seetharamiah. PWG had decided to build a standing army, for which it would need a base. DK was to be that base, and those first squads were sent in to reconnoitre the area and begin the process of building guerrilla zones. The debate about whether communist parties ought to have a standing army, and whether or not a ‘people’s army’ is a contradiction in terms, is an old one. PWG’s decision to build an army came from its experience in Andhra Pradesh, where its ‘Land to the Tiller’ campaign led to a direct clash with the landlords, and resulted in the kind of police repression that the party found impossible to withstand without a trained fighting force of its own.

(By 2004, PWG had merged with the other CPI(ML) factions, Party Unity (PU) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC)—which functions for the most part out of Bihar and Jharkhand. To become what it is now, the Communist Party of India-Maoist.)

Dandakaranya is part of what the British, in their White Man’s way, called Gondwana, land of the Gonds. Today the state boundaries of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra slice through the forest. Breaking up a troublesome people into separate administrative units is an old trick. But these Maoists and Maoist Gonds don’t pay much attention to things like state boundaries. They have different maps in their heads, and like other creatures of the forest, they have their own paths. For them, roads are not meant for walking on. They’re meant only to be crossed, or as is increasingly becoming the case, ambushed. Though the Gonds (divided between the Koya and Dorla tribes) are by far the biggest majority, there are small settlements of other tribal communities too. The non-adivasi communities, traders and settlers, live on the edges of the forest, near the roads and markets.

The PWG were not the first evangelicals to arrive in Dandakaranya. Baba Amte, the well-known Gandhian, had opened his ashram and leprosy hospital in Warora in 1975. The Ramakrishna Mission had begun opening village schools in the remote forests of Abujhmad. In north Bastar, Baba Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to “bring tribals back into the Hindu fold”, which involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism’s great gift—caste. The first converts, the village chiefs and big landlords—people like Mahendra Karma, founder of the Salwa Judum—were conferred the status of Dwij, twice-born, Brahmins. (Of course, this was a bit of a scam, because nobody can become a Brahmin. If they could, we’d be a nation of Brahmins by now.) But this counterfeit Hinduism is considered good enough for tribal people, just like the counterfeit brands of everything else—biscuits, soap, matches, oil—that are sold in village markets. As part of the Hindutva drive, the names of villages were changed in land records, as a result of which most have two names now, people’s names and government names. Innar village, for example, became Chinnari. On voters’ lists, tribal names were changed to Hindu names. (Massa Karma became Mahendra Karma.) Those who did not come forward to join the Hindu fold were declared ‘Katwas’ (by which they meant untouchables) who later became the natural constituency for the Maoists.

These Maoists and Maoist Gonds don’t pay attention to things like state boundaries. They have different maps in their heads, their own paths.

The PWG first began work in south Bastar and Gadchiroli. Comrade Venu describes those first months in some detail: how the villagers were suspicious of them, and wouldn’t let them into their homes. No one would offer them food or water. The police spread rumours that they were thieves. The women hid their jewellery in the ashes of their wood stoves. There was an enormous amount of repression. In November 1980, in Gadchiroli, the police opened fire at a village meeting and killed an entire squad. That was DK’s first ‘encounter’ killing. It was a traumatic setback, and the comrades retreated across the Godavari and returned to Adilabad but in 1981 they returned. They began to organise tribal people to demand a rise in the price they were being paid for tendu leaves (which are used to make beedis). At the time, traders paid three paise for a bundle of about 50 leaves. It was a formidable job to organise people entirely unfamiliar with this kind of politics, to lead them on strike. Eventually the strike was successful and the price was doubled, to six paise a bundle. But the real success for the party was to have been able to demonstrate the value of unity and a new way of conducting a political negotiation. Today, after several strikes and agitations, the price of a bundle of tendu leaves is Re 1. (It seems a little improbable at these rates, but the turnover of the tendu business runs into hundreds of crores of rupees.) Every season, the government floats tenders and gives contractors permission to extract a fixed volume of tendu leaves—usually between 1,500 and 5,000 standard bags known as manak boras. Each manak bora contains about 1,000 bundles. (Of course, there’s no way of ensuring that the contractors don’t extract more than they’re meant to.) By the time the tendu enters the market, it is sold in kilos. The slippery arithmetic and the sly system of measurement that converts bundles into manak boras into kilos is controlled by the contractors, and leaves plenty of room for manipulation of the worst kind. The most conservative estimate puts their profit per standard bag at about Rs 1,100. (That’s after paying the party a commission of Rs 120 per bag.) Even by that gauge, a small contractor (1,500 bags) makes about Rs 16 lakh a season and a big one (5,000 bags) upto Rs 55 lakh. A more realistic estimate would be several times this amount. Meanwhile, the Gravest Internal Security Threat makes just enough to stay alive until the next season.

Gathered Storm: Dance troupes of various Janatana Sarkars perform on Bhumkal Day

We’re interrupted by some laughter and the sight of Nilesh, one of the young PLGA comrades, walking rapidly towards the cooking area, slapping himself. When he comes closer, I see that he’s carrying a leafy nest of angry red ants that have crawled all over him and are biting him on his arms and neck. Nilesh is laughing too. “Have you ever eaten ant chutney?” Comrade Venu asks me. I know red ants well, from my childhood in Kerala, I’ve been bitten by them, but I’ve never eaten them. (The chapoli turns out to be nice. Sour. Lots of folic acid.)

Nilesh is from Bijapur, which is at the heart of Salwa Judum operations. Nilesh’s younger brother joined the Judum on one of its looting and burning sprees and was made a Special Police Officer (SPO). He lives in the Basaguda camp with his mother. His father refused to go and stayed behind in the village. In effect, it’s a family blood feud. Later on, when I had an opportunity to talk to him, I asked Nilesh why his brother had done that. “He was very young,” Nilesh said, “he got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people and burn houses. He went crazy, did terrible things. Now he is stuck. He can never come back to the village. He will not be forgiven. He knows that.”

We return to the history lesson. The party’s next big struggle, Comrade Venu says, was against the Ballarpur Paper Mills. The government had given the Thapars a 45-year contract to extract 1.5 lakh tonnes of bamboo at a hugely subsidised rate. (Small beer compared to bauxite, but still.) The tribals were paid 10 paise for a bundle which contained 20 culms of bamboo. (I won’t yield to the vulgar temptation of comparing that with the profits the Thapars were making.) A long agitation, a strike, followed by negotiations with officials of the paper mill in the presence of the people, tripled the price to 30 paise per bundle. For the tribal people, these were huge achievements. Other political parties had made promises, but showed no signs of keeping them. People began to approach the PWG asking if they could join up.

But the politics of tendu, bamboo and other forest produce was seasonal. The perennial problem, the real bane of people’s lives, was the biggest landlord of all, the Forest Department. Every morning, forest officials, even the most junior of them, would appear in villages like a bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their fields, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit, grazing their cattle, from living. They brought elephants to overrun fields and scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, from the forest department’s point of view, these were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional activity, and the department was only implementing the Rule of Law. (Their sexual exploitation of women was just an added perk in a hardship posting.)

Emboldened by the people’s participation in these struggles, the party decided to confront the forest department. It encouraged people to take over forest land and cultivate it. The forest department retaliated by burning new villages that came up in forest areas. In 1986, it announced a National Park in Bijapur, which meant the eviction of 60 villages. More than half of them had already been moved out, and construction of national park infrastructure had begun when the party moved in. It demolished the construction and stopped the eviction of the remaining villages. It prevented the forest department from entering the area. On a few occasions, officials were captured, tied to trees and beaten by villagers. It was cathartic revenge for generations of exploitation. Eventually, the forest department fled. Between 1986 and 2000, the party redistributed 3,00,000 acres of forest land. Today, Comrade Venu says, there are no landless peasants in Dandakaranya.

For today’s generation of young people, the forest department is a distant memory, the stuff of stories mothers tell their children, about a mythological past of bondage and humiliation. For the older generation, freedom from the forest department meant genuine freedom. They could touch it, taste it. It meant far more than India’s Independence ever did. They began to rally to the party that had struggled with them.

The seven-squad team had come a long way. Its influence now ranged across a 60,000 sq km stretch of forest, thousands of villages and millions of people.

But the departure of the forest department heralded the arrival of the police. That set off a cycle of bloodshed. Fake ‘encounters’ by the police, ambushes by the PWG. With the redistribution of land came other responsibilities: irrigation, agricultural productivity and the problem of an expanding population arbitrarily clearing forest land. A decision was taken to separate ‘mass work’ and ‘military work’.

Today, Dandakaranya is administered by an elaborate structure of Janatana Sarkars (people’s governments). The organising principles came from the Chinese revolution and the Vietnam war. Each Janatana Sarkar is elected by a cluster of villages whose combined population can range from 500 to 5,000. It has nine departments: Krishi (agriculture), Vyapar-Udyog (trade and industry) Arthik (economic), Nyay (justice), Raksha (defence), Hospital (health), Jan Sampark (public relations), School-Riti Rivaj (education and culture), and Jungle. A group of Janatana Sarkars come under an Area Committee. Three area committees make up a Division. There are 10 divisions in Dandakaranya.

“We have a Save the Jungle department now,” Comrade Venu says. “You must have read the government report that says forest has increased in Naxal areas?”

You’ve to be born a Brahmin, you can’t become one. But counterfeit Hinduism is good enough for tribals, like the counterfeit brands here.

Ironically, Comrade Venu says, the first people to benefit from the party’s campaign against the forest department were the mukhias (village chiefs)—the Dwij brigade. They used their manpower and their resources to grab as much land as they could while the going was good. But then people began to approach the party with their “internal contradictions”, as Comrade Venu put it quaintly. The party began to turn its attention to issues of equity, class and injustice within tribal society. The big landlords sensed trouble on the horizon. As the party’s influence expanded, theirs had begun to wane. Increasingly, people were taking their problems to the party instead of to the mukhias. Old forms of exploitation began to be challenged. On the day of the first rain, people were traditionally supposed to till the mukhia’s land instead of their own. That stopped. They no longer offered them the first day’s picking of mahua or other forest produce. Obviously, something needed to be done.

Enter Mahendra Karma, one of the biggest landlords in the region and at the time a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1990, he rallied a group of mukhias and landlords and started a campaign called the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (public awakening campaign). Their way of ‘awakening’ the ‘public’ was to form a hunting party of about 300 men to comb the forest, killing people, burning houses and molesting women. The then Madhya Pradesh government—Chhattisgarh had not yet been created—provided police back-up. In Maharashtra, something similar called ‘Democratic Front’ began its assault. People’s War responded to all of this in true People’s War style, by killing a few of the most notorious landlords. In a few months, the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the ‘white terror’—Comrade Venu’s term for it—faded. In 1998, Mahendra Karma, who had by now joined the Congress party, tried to revive the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan. This time it fizzled out even faster than before.

Armed Strugglers: A village militia, the ‘base force’ of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army

Then, in the summer of 2005, fortune favoured him. In April, the BJP government in Chhattisgarh signed two MoUs to set up integrated steel plants (the terms of which are secret). One for Rs 7,000 crore with Essar Steel in Bailadila, and the other for Rs 10,000 crore with Tata Steel in Lohandiguda. That same month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made his famous statement about the Maoists being the “Gravest Internal Security Threat” to India. (It was an odd thing to say at the time, because actually the opposite was true. The Congress government in Andhra Pradesh had just outmanoeuvred the Maoists, decimated them. They had lost about 1,600 of their cadre and were in complete disarray.) The PM’s statement sent the share value of mining companies soaring. It also sent a signal to the media that the Maoists were fair game for anyone who chose to go after them. In June 2005, Mahendra Karma called a secret meeting of mukhias in Kutroo village and announced the Salwa Judum (the Purification Hunt). A lovely melange of tribal earthiness and Dwij/Nazi sentiment.

Unlike the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.

Along with a steel mug of black tea, as a special treat, someone hands me a pair of earphones and switches on a little MP3 player. It’s a scratchy recording of Mr Manhar, the then SP Bijapur, briefing a junior officer over the wireless about the rewards and incentives the state and central governments are offering to ‘jagrit’ (awakened) villages, and to people who agree to move into camps. He then gives clear instructions that villages that refuse to surrender should be burnt and journalists who want to ‘cover’ Naxalites should be shot on sight. (I’d read about this in the papers long ago. When the story broke, as punishment—it’s not clear to whom—the SP was transferred to the State Human Rights Commission.)

The first village the Salwa Judum burnt (on June 18, 2005) was Ambeli. Between June and December 2005, it burned, killed, raped and looted its way through hundreds of villages of south Dantewada. The centre of its operations were the districts of Bijapur and Bhairamgarh, near Bailadila, where Essar Steel’s new plant was proposed. Not coincidentally, these were also Maoist strongholds, where the Janatana Sarkars had done a great deal of work, especially in building water-harvesting structures. The Janatana Sarkars became the special target of the Salwa Judum’s attacks. Hundreds of people were killed in the most brutal ways. About 60,000 people moved into camps, some voluntarily, others out of terror. Of these, about 3,000 were appointed SPOs on a salary of Rs 1,500.

For these paltry crumbs, young people, like Nilesh’s brother, have sentenced themselves to a life-sentence in a barbed wire enclosure. Cruel as they have been, they could end up being the worst victims of this horrible war. No Supreme Court judgement ordering the Salwa Judum to be dismantled can change their fate.

The remaining hundreds of thousands of people went off the government radar. (But the development funds for these 644 villages did not. What happens to that little goldmine?) Many of them made their way to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa where they usually migrated to work as contract labour during the chilli-picking season. But tens of thousands fled into the forest, where they still remain, living without shelter, coming back to their fields and homes only in the daytime.

In the slipstream of the Salwa Judum, a swarm of police stations and camps appeared. The idea was to provide carpet security for a ‘creeping reoccupation’ of Maoist-controlled territory. The assumption was that the Maoists would not dare to attack such a large concentration of security forces. The Maoists, for their part, realised that if they did not break that carpet security, it would amount to abandoning people whose trust they had earned, and with whom they had lived and worked for 25 years. They struck back in a series of attacks on the heart of the security grid.

On January 26, 2006, the PLGA attacked the Gangalaur police camp and killed seven people. On July 17, 2006, the Salwa Judum camp at Erabor was attacked, 20 people were killed and 150 injured. (You might have read about it: “Maoists attacked the relief camp set up by the state government to provide shelter to the villagers who had fled from their villages because of terror unleashed by the Naxalites.”) On December 13, 2006, they attacked the Basaguda ‘relief’ camp and killed three SPOs and a constable. On March 15, 2007, came the most audacious of them all. One hundred and twenty PLGA guerrillas attacked the Rani Bodili Kanya Ashram, a girls’ hostel that had been converted into a barrack for 80 Chhattisgarh Police (and SPOs) while the girls still lived in it as human shields. The PLGA entered the compound, cordoned off the annexe in which the girls lived, and attacked the barracks. Some 55 policemen and SPOs were killed. None of the girls was hurt. (The candid SP of Dantewada had shown me his PowerPoint presentation with horrifying photographs of the burned, disembowelled bodies of the policemen amidst the ruins of the blown-up school building. They were so macabre, it was impossible not to look away. He looked pleased at my reaction.)

The attack on Rani Bodili caused an uproar in the country. Human rights organisations condemned the Maoists not just for their violence, but also for being anti-education and attacking schools. But in Dandakaranya, the Rani Bodili attack became a legend: songs, poems and plays were written about it.

We shouldn’t judge Charu Mazumdar too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug.

The Maoist counter-offensive did break the carpet security and gave people breathing space. The police and the Salwa Judum retreated into their camps, from which they now emerge—usually in the dead of night—only in packs of 300 or 1,000 to carry out cordon and search operations in villages. Gradually, except for the SPOs and their families, the rest of the people in the Salwa Judum camps began to return to their villages. The Maoists welcomed them back and announced that even SPOs could return if they genuinely, and publicly, regretted their actions. Young people began to flock to the PLGA. (The PLGA had been formally constituted in December 2000. Over the last 30 years, its armed squads had very gradually expanded into sections, sections had grown into platoons, and platoons into companies. But after the Salwa Judum’s depredations, the PLGA was rapidly able to declare battalion strength.)

The Salwa Judum had not just failed, it had backfired badly.

As we now know, it was not just a local operation by a small-time hood. Regardless of the doublespeak in the press, the Salwa Judum was a joint operation by the state government of Chhattisgarh and the Congress party which was in power at the Centre. It could not be allowed to fail. Not when all those MoUs were still waiting, like wilting hopefuls on the marriage market. The government was under tremendous pressure to come up with a new plan. They came up with Operation Green Hunt. The Salwa Judum SPOs are called Koya Commandos now. It has deployed the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Greyhounds, Scorpions, Cobras. And a policy that’s affectionately called WHAM—Winning Hearts and Minds.

Lohandiguda was never a Naxal area. The comrades moved in when graffiti saying ‘Naxali aao, hamein bachao’ began appearing on walls.

Significant wars are often fought in unlikely places. Free Market Capitalism defeated Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. Here in the forests of Dantewada, a battle rages for the soul of India. Plenty has been said about the deepening crisis in Indian democracy and the collusion between big corporations, major political parties and the security establishment. If anybody wants to do a quick spot check, Dantewada is the place to go.

A draft report on State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task of Land Reform (Volume 1) said that Tata Steel and Essar Steel were the first financiers of the Salwa Judum. Because it was a government report, it created a flurry when it was reported in the press. (That fact has subsequently been dropped from the final report. Was it a genuine error, or did someone receive a gentle, integrated steel tap on the shoulder?)

On October 12, 2009, the mandatory public hearing for Tata’s steel plant, meant to be held in Lohandiguda where local people could come, actually took place in a small hall inside the Collectorate in Jagdalpur, many miles away, cordoned off with massive security. A hired audience of 50 tribals was brought in a guarded convoy of government jeeps. After the meeting, the district collector congratulated ‘the people of Lohandiguda’ for their cooperation. The local newspapers reported the lie, even though they knew better. (The advertisements rolled in.) Despite villagers’ objections, land acquisition for the project has begun.

The Maoists are not the only ones who seek to depose the Indian State. It’s already been deposed several times by Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism.

In true colonial fashion, they send Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, the Sikhs to Kashmir, and the Tamilians to Assam.

Lohandiguda, a five-hour drive from Dantewada, never used to be a Naxalite area. But it is now. Comrade Joori, who sat next to me while I ate the ant chutney, works in the area. She said they decided to move in after graffiti had begun to appear on the walls of village houses, saying, Naxali aao, hamein bachao (Naxals come and save us)! A few months ago, Vimal Meshram, president of the village panchayat, was shot dead in the market. “He was Tata’s man,” Joori says. “He was forcing people to give up their land and accept compensation. It’s good that he’s been finished. We lost a comrade too. They shot him. D’you want more chapoli?” She’s only 20. “We won’t let the Tatas come there. People don’t want them.” Joori is not PLGA. She’s in the Chetna Natya Manch (CNM), the cultural wing of the party. She sings. She writes songs. She’s from Abujhmad. (She’s married to Comrade Madhav. She fell in love with his singing when he visited her village with a CNM troupe.)

I feel I ought to say something at this point. About the futility of violence, about the unacceptability of summary executions. But what should I suggest they do? Go to court? Do a dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi? A rally? A relay hunger strike? It sounds ridiculous. The promoters of the New Economic Policy—who find it so easy to say “There Is No Alternative”—should be asked to suggest an alternative Resistance Policy. A specific one, to these specific people, in this specific forest. Here. Now. Which party should they vote for? Which democratic institution in this country should they approach? Which door did the Narmada Bachao Andolan not knock on during the years and years it fought against Big Dams on the Narmada?

It’s dark. There’s a lot of activity in the camp, but I can’t see anything. Just points of light moving around. It’s hard to tell whether they are stars or fireflies or Maoists on the move. Little Mangtu appears from nowhere. I found out that he’s part of the first batch of the Young Communists Mobile School, who are being taught to read and write and tutored in basic Communist principles. (“Indoctrination of young minds!” our corporate media howls. The TV advertisements that brainwash children before they can even think are not seen as a form of indoctrination.) The young Communists are not allowed to carry guns or wear uniforms. But they trail the PLGA squads, with stars in their eyes, like groupies of a rock band.

Mangtu has adopted me with a gently proprietorial air. He has filled my water bottle and says I should pack my bag. A whistle blows. The blue jhilli tent is dismantled and folded up in five minutes flat. Another whistle and all hundred comrades fall in line. Five rows. Comrade Raju is the Director of Ops. There’s a roll call. I’m in the line too, shouting out my number when Comrade Kamla who is in front of me, prompts me. (We count to twenty and then start from one, because that’s as far as most Gonds count. Twenty is enough for them. Maybe it should be enough for us too.) Chandu is in fatigues now, and carries a sten gun. In a low voice, Comrade Raju is briefing the group. It’s all in Gondi, I don’t understand a thing, but I keep hearing the word RV. Later Raju tells me it stands for Rendezvous! It’s a Gondi word now. “We make RV points so that in case we come under fire and people have to scatter, they know where to regroup.” He cannot possibly know the kind of panic this induces in me. Not because I’m scared of being fired on, but because I’m scared of being lost. I’m a directional dyslexic, capable of getting lost between my bedroom and my bathroom. What will I do in 60,000 square kilometres of forest? Come hell or high water, I’m going to be holding on to Comrade Raju’s pallu.

Dandakaranya was full of people who had many names, fluid identities. It was balm to me, the idea. Not to be stuck with yourself, be someone else.

Before we start walking, Comrade Venu comes up to me: “Okaythen comrade. I’ll take your leave.” I’m taken aback. He looks like a little mosquito in a woollen cap and chappals, surrounded by his guards, three women, three men. Heavily armed. “We are very grateful to you comrade, for coming all the way here,” he says. Once again the handshake, the clenched fist. “Lal Salaam Comrade.” He disappears into the forest, the Keeper of the Keys. And in a moment, it’s as though he was never here. I’m a little bereft. But I have hours of recordings to listen to. And as the days turn into weeks, I will meet many people who paint colour and detail into the grid he drew for me. We begin to walk in the opposite direction. Comrade Raju, smelling of Iodex from a mile off, says with a happy smile, “My knees are gone. I can only walk if I have had a fistful of painkillers.”

Comrade Raju speaks perfect Hindi and has a deadpan way of telling the funniest stories. He worked as an advocate in Raipur for 18 years. Both he and his wife Malti were party members and part of its city network. At the end of 2007, one of the key people in the Raipur network was arrested, tortured and eventually turned informer. He was driven around Raipur in a closed police vehicle and made to point out his former colleagues. Comrade Malti was one of them. On January 22, 2008, she was arrested along with several others. The charge against her is that she mailed CDs containing video evidence of Salwa Judum atrocities to several members of Parliament. Her case rarely comes up for hearing because the police know their case is flimsy. But the new Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) allows the police to hold her without bail for several years. “Now the government has deployed several battalions of Chhattisgarh police to protect the poor members of Parliament from their own mail,” Comrade Raju says. He did not get caught because he was in Dandakaranya at the time, attending a meeting. He’s been here ever since. His two schoolgoing children, who were left alone at home, were interrogated extensively by the police. Finally, their home was packed up and they went to live with an uncle. Comrade Raju received news of them for the first time only a few weeks ago. What gives him this strength, this ability to hold on to his acid humour? What keeps them all going, despite all they have endured? Their faith and hope—and love—for the Party. I encounter it again and again, in the deepest, most personal ways.

This army is more Gandhian than any Gandhian, even in sabotage. Before burning a police vehicle, it’s stripped down, the parts cannibalised.

We’re moving in single file now. Myself and one hundred “senselessly violent”, bloodthirsty insurgents. I looked around at the camp before we left. There are no signs that almost a hundred people had camped here, except for some ash where the fires had been. I cannot believe this army. As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist. But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt, for example, it is stripped down and every part cannibalised. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. (The new instructions from the high command are that captured vehicles should be buried and not cremated. So they can be resurrected when needed.) Should I write a play, I wonder—Gandhi Get Your Gun? Or will I be lynched?

We’re walking in pitch darkness and dead silence. I’m the only one using a torch, pointed down so that all I can see in its circle of light are Comrade Kamla’s bare heels in her scuffed, black chappals, showing me exactly where to put my feet. She is carrying 10 times more weight than I am. Her backpack, her rifle, a huge bag of provisions on her head, one of the large cooking pots and two shoulder bags full of vegetables. The bag on her head is perfectly balanced, and she can scramble down slopes and slippery rock pathways without so much as touching it. She is a miracle. It turns out to be a long walk. I’m grateful to the history lesson because apart from everything else it gave my feet a rest for a whole day. It’s the most beautiful thing, walking in the forest at night.

And I’ll be doing it night after night.

We’re going to a celebration of the centenary of the 1910 Bhumkal rebellion in which the Koyas rose up against the British. Bhumkal means earthquake. Comrade Raju 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 DK divisions. We are privileged because Comrade Leng, the Master of Ceremonies, is walking with us. In Gondi, Leng means ‘the voice’. Comrade Leng is a tall, middle-aged man from Andhra Pradesh, a colleague of the legendary and beloved singer-poet Gadar, who founded the radical cultural organisation Jan Natya Manch (JNM) in 1972. Eventually, JNM became a formal part of the PWG and in Andhra Pradesh could draw audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. Comrade Leng joined in 1977 and became a famous singer in his own right. He lived in Andhra through the worst repression, the era of ‘encounter’ killings in which friends died almost every day. He himself was picked up one night from his hospital bed, by a woman Superintendent of Police masquerading as a doctor. He was taken to the forest outside Warangal to be ‘encountered’. But luckily, Gadar got the news and managed to raise an alarm. When the PW decided to start a cultural organisation in DK in 1998, Comrade Leng was sent to head the Chetna Natya Manch. And here he is now, walking with me, for some reason wearing an olive-green shirt and purple pyjamas with pink bunnies on them. “There are 10,000 members in cnm now,” he 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.” The first time I spoke to him, he sounded very grave, very single-minded. But days later, sitting around a fire, still in those pyjamas, he tells us about a very successful, mainstream Telugu film director (a friend of his) who always plays a Naxalite in his own films. “I asked him,” Comrade Leng said in his lovely Telugu-accented Hindi, “why do you think Naxalites are always like this?”—and he did a deft caricature of a crouched, high-stepping, hunted-looking man emerging from the forest with an AK-47, and left us screaming with laughter.

Happiness is taken seriously in Dandakaranya. People walk for miles, for days, to sing and dance together. This is their defiance.

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. We arrive at the grounds quite late in the evening. A temporary monument, of bamboo scaffolding wrapped in red cloth, has been erected. On top, above the hammer and sickle of the Maoist Party, is the bow and arrow of the Janatana Sarkar, wrapped in silver foil. Appropriate, the hierarchy. The stage is huge, also temporary, on a sturdy scaffolding covered by a thick layer of mud plaster. Already, there are small fires scattered around the ground, people have begun to arrive and are cooking their evening meal. They’re only silhouettes in the dark. We thread our way through them (lalsalaam, lalsalaam, lalsalaam) and keep going for about 15 minutes until we re-enter the forest.

At our new campsite, we have to fall-in again. Another roll call. And then instructions about sentry positions and ‘firing arcs’—decisions about who will cover which area in the event of a police attack. RV points are fixed again.

Boy, What A Smile: Comrade Kamla, 17, wearing a pistol on her hip. Also, a miracle.

An advance party has arrived and cooked dinner already. For dessert, Kamla brings me a wild guava that she has plucked on the walk and squirrelled away for me.

From dawn, there is the sense of more and more people gathering for the day’s celebration. There’s a buzz of excitement building up. People who haven’t seen each other in a long time meet again. We can hear the sound of mikes being tested. Flags, banners, posters, buntings are going up. A poster with the pictures of the five people who were killed in Ongnaar the day we arrived has appeared.

I’m drinking tea with Comrade Narmada, Comrade Maase and Comrade Rupi. Comrade Narmada talks about the many years she worked in Gadchiroli before becoming the DK head of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan. Rupi and Maase have been urban activists in Andhra Pradesh and tell me about the long years of struggle by women within the party, not just for their rights, but also to make the party see that equality between men and women is seen as 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 way to go. (The party’s central committee and politburo have no women yet.)

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 them 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 recognise 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 3 million tonnes of bauxite that a company called Vedanta has its eye on.

Bingo. Ten on ten for my instincts.

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’s 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 evolved into the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan and now has 90,000 enrolled members. It could well be the largest women’s organisation 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?) 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 land which belongs to the Janatana Sarkar. On that land, they sow seed, grow vegetables and build check dams. A half-victory, not a whole one.

In most jan adalats, at least the collective is physically present to make a decision. It’s not made by judges who’ve lost touch with ordinary life.

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 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 KAMS. Many young women who witnessed the savagery then joined the PLGA and now women 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 KAMS. After burning the village, the Naga battalion caught Lukki and Sukki and one other girl, gang-raped 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.”

Rest Station: A Maoist ‘camp’. When they move, all that will remain is the ash from the kitchen fire.

Ajitha has a bob-cut too. The Judum came to Korseel, her village, and killed three people by drowning them in a nallah. 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 is a beautiful girl with a long plait, tells me she watched the Judum burn 30 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 1,200 rifles and 2,00,000 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 Rs 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 Polekaya village in south 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 organising the March 8 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:

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 which 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, ‘Nahin bhai, hamne gai ko hathode se nahin mara (No brother, we did not kill the cows with a hammer).’ 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 are running a campaign, after all. When the Salwa Judum started, the first day they attacked a village called Ambeli, burned it down and then all of them—SPOs, the Naga battalion, police—moved towards Kotrapal...you must have heard about Kotrapal? It’s a famous village, it has been burnt 22 times for refusing to surrender. When the Judum reached Kotrapal, our militia was waiting for it. They had prepared an ambush. Two SPOs died. We captured seven, the rest ran away. The next day the newspapers reported that the Naxalites had massacred poor adivasis. Some said we had killed hundreds. Even a respectable magazine like Frontline said we had killed 18 innocent adivasis. Even K. Balagopal, the human rights activist, who is usually meticulous about facts, even he said this. We sent a clarification. Nobody published it. Later, in his book, Balagopal acknowledged his mistake.... But who noticed?”

Remembering The Martyrs: Pictures of slain comrades displayed on Bhumkal Day

I asked what happened to the seven 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 of the SPOs were sentenced to death. Five 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 of trusting this person)’, or ‘Iska risk hum lenge (We are prepared to take the risk of trusting this person)’. The press always reports about informers who are killed. Never about the many who are let off. 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”.

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, presuming 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-holders 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 to be 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 by people 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.)

‘Maoist-infested’. These are not careless words. Infest or infestation implies pests. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out.

A CNM troupe performs a play about the Bhumkal uprising. The evil white colonisers 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 unrecognisable. 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 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.

A few more speeches. Then the drumming and the dancing begins. 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. But 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 civilisation 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 fetishises 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. When he said that only “an annihilation campaign” could produce “the new man who will defy death and be free from all thought of self-interest”—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?

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 was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. 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.

The Damned: Villagers from the submergence area of the proposed Bodhghat dam

China’s Path has changed. China has become an imperial power now, preying on other countries, other people’s resources. 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 immobilise us in the present?

How strange that the contemporary tsars of the Indian establishment now say what Charu Mazumdar said: China’s Path is Our Path.

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 heart-breaking 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, re-arm 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 30 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, Dalits, Tribals and, most of all, against the poor who dare to question their lot instead of accepting the crumbs that are flung at them. It’s hard not to see that the Indian State is an essentially upper-caste Hindu State (regardless of the party 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 beautiful, 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 30 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 between five and six (when the standard for Indian women is 11.) There’s TB caused by more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young children are suffering 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 amenorrhea—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.

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 wale 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 Rupi 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 Jan 2010 have not yet been produced in Court.
• Huge contingents of police have arrived in South Bastar. Indiscriminate attacks are on.
• On Nov 8, 2009, in Kachlaram Village, Bijapur Jila, Dirko Madka (60) and Kovasi Suklu (68) were killed
• On Nov 24, Madavi Baman (15) was killed in Pangodi village
• On Dec 3, Madavi Budram from Korenjad also killed
• On Dec 11, Gumiapal village, Darba Division, 7 people killed (names yet to come)
• On Dec 15, Kotrapal village, Veko Sombar and Madavi Matti (both with KAMS) killed
• On Dec 30, Vechapal village Poonem Pandu and Poonem Motu (father and son) killed
• On Jan 2010 (date unknown), head of the Janatana Sarkar in Kaika village, Gangalaur, killed
• On Jan 9, 4 people killed in Surpangooden village, Jagargonda Area
• On Jan 10, 3 people killed in Pullem Pulladi village (no names yet)
• On Jan 25, 7 people killed in Takilod village, Indravati Area
• On Feb 10 (Bhumkal Day), Kumli raped and killed in Dumnaar Village, Abujhmad. She was from a village called Paiver
• 2,000 troops of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) are camped in the Rajnandgaon forests
• 5,000 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: ‘Vaarta 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 practice 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.

Bob-Cut Brigade: In Bastar, women with a bob-cut haircut can get you killed

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 10 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, onions, 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’s 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.

Gram Swaraj with a Gun...it’s not an alternative yet. But it’s created the possibility for an alternative. Not for Alaska or New Delhi, but for itself.

I met three sisters—Sukhiari, Sukdai and Sukkali—not young, perhaps in their 40s, from Narayanpur district. They have been in KAMS for 12 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.”

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 organises 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 (Naxalvaad means our family). When we hear of an attack, it is like our family has been hurt,” Sukhiari says.

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 January 8, 2007, the day that 740 policemen laid a cordon around it because they had information that Comrade Niti was there. (She was, but she 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 Narayanpur.

Booby-traps has become a Gondi word. Everyone smiles when they hear it. They know other words too: Cordon and Search, Advance, Retreat.

I met Chamri, mother of Comrade Dilip who was shot on July 6, 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, 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. 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, 300, 400, sometimes 1,000 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’ 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 a village, they loot and steal and burn houses. They come with dogs. The dogs catch those who try and 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.

Dressed To The Nines: Adivasi boys in colourful traditional gear for Bhumkal day celebrations

In this tranquil-looking forest, life seems completely militarised 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. I’m told there’s a mukhbir mohalla (informers’ colony) in Narayanpur where at least 4,000 mukhbirs stay. The men can’t go to market anymore. 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 been instructed not to let people buy medicines except in very small quantities. Low-price rations from the Public Distribution System (PDS), 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 11 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. 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.”

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 21, 10 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 ask her if she likes watching movies. “Nahin didi. Sirf ambush video (No didi. Only ambush videos).” 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. I confirm that 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 burned 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 a 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 10 people belonging to the Kora tribe in retaliation for giving police information that led to the death of six Maoists. Of course, we know that the media report may or may not be true. But, if it is, this one’s unforgivable. Comrade 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 criminalised violence, or into ugly wars of identity between castes and communities and religious groups. By institutionalising 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, beautiful 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 are on their way to an anti-dam meeting in Kudur village. They’re overground and unarmed. A local rally for the valley. I jump ship and join them.

The government has Koya Commandos, the CAF, CRPF, ITBP, CISF, Cobras, Scorpions. And a policy called wham: Winning Hearts and Minds.

The Bodhghat dam will submerge the entire area that we have been walking in for days. All that forest, all that history, all those stories. More than 100 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 have 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 (NBA) 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.

The Long March: Maoists on the move in Bastar, single file as always

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.

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 chiraunji, 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 71 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 onto his computer. We listen to a recording of Iqbal Bano singing Faiz Ahmad 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. Strange, the alliances that get made.

The home minister’s been issuing veiled threats to those who “erroneously offer intellectual and material support to Maoists”. Does sharing music qualify?

Does the government think that by rendering CPI (Maoist) headless, it’ll end the violence? It’ll only spread and they’ll have no one to talk to.

At dawn, I say goodbye to Comrade Madhav and Joori, to young Mangtu and all the others. Comrade Chandu has gone to organise the bikes, and will come with me 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.