My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  We’re interrupted by some laughter and the sight of Nilesh, one of the young PLGA comrades, walking rapidly toward 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. 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 forty-five-year contract to extract 1.5 lakh tons of bamboo at a hugely subsidized rate. (Small beer compared to bauxite, but still.) The tribals were paid 10 paise for a bundle, which contained twenty 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 plowing 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 sixty 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 three hundred thousand 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-square-kilometer 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 organizing 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 five hundred to five thousand. It has nine departments: Krishi (agriculture), Vyapar-Udyog (trade and industry), Arthik (economic), Nyay (justice), Raksha (defense), 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 ten 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?”

  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 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 three hundred 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.

  Then, in the summer of 2005, fortune favored him. In April, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Chhattisgarh signed two memorandums of understanding to set up integrated steel plants (the terms of which are secret). One for Rs 7,000 crore ($1.5 billion) with Essar Steel in Bailadila, and the other for Rs 10,000 crore ($2.1 billion) 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 outmaneuvered the Maoists, decimated them. They had lost about 1,600 of their cadre and were in complete disarray.)

  The prime minister’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 c
hose 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 mélange 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 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, then the superintendent of police of 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 superintendent 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 centers 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 sixty thousand people moved into camps, some voluntarily, others out of terror. Of these, about three thousand were appointed special police officers on a salary of Rs 1,500 (thirty-two dollars).

  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 judgment 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 labor during the chili-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, realized 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 twenty-five 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 7 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 3 special police officers and a constable. On March 15, 2007, came the most audacious of them all: 120 PLGA guerrillas attacked the Rani Bodili Kanya Ashram, a girls’ hostel that had been converted into a barrack for eighty Chhattisgarh Police (and special police officers) while the girls still lived in it as human shields. The PLGA entered the compound, cordoned off the annex in which the girls lived, and attacked the barracks. Some 55 policemen and special police officers were killed. None of the girls was hurt. (The candid superintendent of police 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 organizations condemned the Maoists not just for their violence, but also for being antieducation and attacking schools. But in Dandakaranya, the Rani Bodili attack became a legend: songs, poems, and plays were written about it.

  The Maoist counteroffensive 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 three hundred or one thousand to carry out cordon and search operations in villages. Gradually, except for the special police officers 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 special police officers 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 thirty 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 smalltime 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 Center. It could not be allowed to fail. Not when all those memorandums of understanding 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 special police officers are called Koya Commandos now. It has deployed the Chhattisgarh Armed Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, the Central Industrial Security Force, Greyhounds, Scorpions, Cobras. And a policy that’s affectionately called WHAM— Winning Hearts and Minds.

  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 titled 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 fifty tribals was brought in a guarded convoy of government jeeps. After the meeting, t
he 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.

  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 twenty. “We won’t let the Tatas come there. People don’t want them.” Joori is not PLGA. She’s in the Chetna Natya Manch, 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 Chetna Natya Manch 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?