TRANQUEBAR PRESS
HELLO, BASTAR
Rahul Pandita is a senior special correspondent with the Open magazine. He is the co-author of the critically acclaimed book on insurgency: The Absent State. He has extensively reported from conflict zones ranging from Bastar to Baghdad.
HELLO, BASTAR
The Untold Story of India’s
Maoist Movement
Rahul Pandita
TRANQUEBAR PRESS
An imprint of westland ltd
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47, Brij Mohan Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002
First published in TRANQUEBAR by westland ltd 2011
Copyright © Rahul Pandita 2011
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-93-80658-34-6
Typeset in Aldine401 BT by SURYA, New Delhi
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.
To Anu, and her imagined ‘biscuits’
Contents
Acknowledgements
Author's Note
I. Give Me Red
II. History's Harvest
III. The Return of Spring Thunder
IV. Hello, Bastar
V. Gunpowder in Bhojpur
VI. Andhra to Abujhmaad
VII. The Guerillas, the Republic
VIII. The Rebel
IX. The Urban Agenda
Postscript: The Death of a Balloon Seller
Afterword: Comrade Anuradha Ghandy and the
Idea of India—by Kobad Ghandy
Index
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt gratitude, first of all, in Hyderabad, to Varavara Rao and Hemalata for putting up with me on so many early mornings and feeding me with the most delicious servings of curd-rice. Also to Ravindran, C. Prabhakar, and to Tirumala—for her courage.
To Comrade T. And, yes, I still await your manuscript.
In Nagpur, to Shoma Sen, Anil Borkar, and Surendra Gadling.
To Gurmeet, for his Hemingway's old man kind of charm.
In Dandakaranya, to those who know who they are.
To those who cannot be named in places like Warangal, Karimnagar, Adilabad, Khammam, Vizag, Gadchiroli, Bhamragarh, Bhadrachalam.
To Arundhati Roy, for the most insightful conversations over coffee and TV news humour.
To Patrick French, for his friendship and his belief in what I saw in Bastar.
To Hartosh Singh Bal, more of a brother than political editor.
To Anubha Bhonsle, for the imagery of Irom and Aai, and the wisdom of bread.
To Saurabh Kumar, for a motorcycle journey undertaken long ago.
To Pragya Tiwari, for the 'Unndres' in us.
To Neelesh Misra, harbinger of drama and dreams. And to Shilpa Rao, for music and muffins.
To the whole Kasauli gang, especially Preetie and Rajesh Dogar.
To my editor and guide Renuka Chatterjee, for succumbing to the idea of revolution.
To my parents, Shanta and P.N. Pandita, and to the storytelling techniques of my darling niece Sheranya.
And, to Pinky, for home, hearth, and happiness.
Author's Note
For the convenience of readers, the terms 'Naxal' and 'Maoist' are used interchangeably throughout this book. This is common practice in the media and even the police. In fact, the Maoists too use both terms to define themselves. But the fact is that the current Maoist movement is bigger than the original Naxal movement in terms of its reach and strength. The Maoists have moved leaps ahead of their predecessors who were a part of the Naxalbari movement from where the word 'Naxalite' was coined. In that sense, the current 'Naxalites' are more 'Maoist' than Naxal.
I
GIVE ME RED
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
—Karl Marx
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
—Jose Saramago
The spasms had been troubling him again. In fact, amoebic dysentery had been his constant companion, a result of a harsh life of more than three decades. And an enlarged prostate too. He was more comfortable with the pain these afflictions caused than the feel of the cold metal of a gun in his hands whenever he had had to hold it. But that was on very rare occasions, deep inside the forest along the Eastern Ghats: memorial meetings for fallen comrades, ceremonial parades or military drills. Presently, though, he was hundreds of miles away from the jungles of central India.
He was in Delhi.
The Molarband Extension colony of south Delhi's Badarpur area was a different kind of jungle. Early in the morning, thousands of men swarmed through the narrow, sewage-ridden roads, locust-like, on their ramshackle bicycles. They worked in factories as fitters or cutters or as daily wage labourers at construction sites or as private security guards. Life was tough. In recent times, it had become more difficult to survive, with the prices of food and daily necessities going through the roof. Many men stayed alone, leaving their families behind in small towns or villages. Fathers waiting for a little money to come by for a cataract operation. Widowed mothers. Unmarried sisters. Impoverished wives hoping to save enough for the education of children. Out of their meagre incomes, the men struggled to send as much money as possible to their families.
For years, the poor workers took solace from an old film song: Dal roti khao, prabhu fee gunn gao (Have dal-roti, sing paeans to the Almighty). But now with dal costing almost Rs 100 a kilo, the poor didn't know what to eat and in the cruel city, who to sing paeans to.
The city ran on a very complex arithmetic. It was a city drunk on power, a city from where a handful of people decided the fate of over a billion others, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, as messages painted on highways by the Border Roads Organisation would remind one. These few people were India's political leaders. Their abode was the Parliament in the heart of New Delhi, a place referred to as 'pigsty' by the man and his comrades.
On Sundays, the city's middle class would come out in hordes, in their small and big cars, enjoy ice cream at India Gate and then watch a movie at one of the multiplexes. This would cost a family of four at least Rs 1500, more than what 74 million households or 37.2 per cent of India's population earned in two months. The city was a paradox. People would come out to rally for the rights of pet animals, and others would brand their underage maidservants with a hot iron. It was a city where the malnutrition rate was 35 per cent,1 far worse than sub-Sahara. In the same city, surveys2 revealed that 40 per cent of schoolkids were overweight. For the Commonwealth Games, the homes of the poor were being dismantled. Leviathan billboards were being put up to eclipse slums so that foreign athletes would only be able to see glitzy shopping malls and departmental stores selling soy milk and broccoli.
There were two things Delhi didn't want: monkeys and poor people. Thousands of beggars were being bundled into municipal vans and there were negotiations with other states to take their beggars back. A few years earlier, the capital city had tried, in a similar manner, sending its monkeys to the wilderness of other states. And now, for the Games, hundreds of thousands of people would be displaced in all. In 2001, the sealing of small-scale factories in residential areas had rendered thousands of workers jobless. It was the ensuing unrest that the comrades wanted
to take up as a cause, and motivate young labourers and workers to channel their anger into something 'meaningful'. To be close to such workers and win them over, the man had been living in the Molarband Extension colony.
Over the past few weeks, the man had also been getting treated for his ailments at a city hospital. He was using a voter identity card, bearing the name of Dilip Patel, for all official purposes. His contacts in the city had made these arrangements.
For purposes of communication, he shunned modern devices such as the mobile phone. Most of the communication was done through a human courier. He had one trusted courier who had been with him for about five years.
Oblivious of what his trusted lieutenant had been up to, the man went about doing his work. On 20 September 2009, he arrived at the Bhikaji Cama office complex, next to Delhi's diplomatic enclave.
Unknown to him, a few men sat in a car, waiting for him.
It was a Sunday, and the regular crowd of office executives who otherwise would be out at this hour for a quick smoke or lunch was missing. The handicapped man who sold soft drinks and cigarettes on his special cycle had no customers to attend to—he passed his time reading a Hindi newspaper. The passport office where thousands of ambitious youth would come every day to try their luck at foreign shores was also shut.
Inside the car, a deputy superintendent of the Special Intelligence Branch of the Andhra Pradesh Police was getting restless. It was hot inside the car and, as he wiped the sweat from his brow, he looked at the man sandwiched between him and his colleague. 'Are you sure he will come?' the officer asked him. The man nodded quickly. He looked at his watch and then looked outside. He was the only one who could identify the man they waited for, the man he had served as courier for years.
At about one p.m., the tall, thin-moustached man appeared and stopped at the bus stop next to the complex. A jute bag was slung across his shoulder. The courier now signalled. In a minute or two, the operation was over. The man was bundled inside the car and taken to the Special Cell Branch of the Delhi Police, near Delhi's famous cultural hub, India Habitat Centre.
Two days later, the police made an announcement. They had arrested Kobad Ghandy, they said, one of the seniormost leaders of the Maoist movement in India. The leader of a large mass of men and women, which had recently been declared India's gravest internal security threat by none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself. The men and women known more popularly as the Naxalites. Or simply Naxals.
A day later as he was being produced in court, Kobad Ghandy raised slogans as feverishly as he could while struggling to overcome the exhaustion of sustained interrogation. 'Bhagat Singh zindabad' and 'Anuradha Ghandy amar rahe'. The onlookers who were used to seeing ordinary criminals or terrorists being produced in the court were surprised at these slogans. After all, never before had they heard someone in the court premises or even elsewhere shout praises in favour of India's most popular revolutionary.
And, Anuradha Ghandy … who was Anuradha Ghandy?
(Note: This scenario is based on inputs from intelligence sources. However, there still is confusion on whether the courier actually led the police to Kobad Ghandy. A day after his disappearance, the courier is believed to have contacted a Maoist sympathiser in Punjab, who used to work with Kobad, and informed him that Kobad had turned incommunicado.)
On 6 April 2010, in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, a group of soldiers belonging to the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was returning after an area-domination exercise. In the early hours of that morning, they were ambushed by a collective squad of Maoists who divided themselves into smaller groups and encircled the CRPF men. Some of the soldiers fought back but they were no match for the Maoists. In no time, 75 CRPF men and a local policeman accompanying them lay dead. Within hours, the images of the encounter, first shot by a local television channel, were flashed across national television.
It was perhaps the deadliest attack so far in any insurgency that India had faced ever since she became independent. In two decades of militancy in Kashmir, aided and abetted by a neighbouring country, never had so many soldiers died in a single attack Kashmir and India's north-east no longer matched the Maoist insurgency in its ferocity and ability to grab headlines.
Till a few years ago, Maoists were off the news radar. Kashmir was what sold well. But now, India's heartland had become the new Kashmir. It was a very complex situation. Within a few years, the Maoist insurgency had moved from strength to strength and was now spread across almost half of India: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh. The Maoist leaders were everywhere. In West Bengal's Lalgarh, one of the seniormost Maoist leaders, Mallojula Koteshwara Rao alias Kishenji had almost turned into a mythical figure. Appearing every now and then on television, his back towards the camera and an AK–56 assault rifle slung upside down on his shoulder, in his demeanour he was more like a retired professor than a dreaded rebel. He spoke in a feeble voice. But Kishenji was anything but ordinary. He had personally supervised an armed rebellion led by tribals against the state of West Bengal for months now, at one point of time turning the entire Lalgarh area in West Midnapore district into a 'liberated zone'—an area where the Maoists ran a virtual government with no state authority in sight. The local police stations were taken over by Red rebels who ruthlessly killed cadres of the ruling CPM government.
Troops had been deployed but still the armed insurgency continued, and scores of people were killed every day. In one such deadly attack, 24 soldiers of the Eastern Frontier Rifles were killed by a group of Maoists led by a woman commander. Across India's heartland, a war was on. Though the home ministry kept on denying it, the fact remained that a massive military operation had been mounted across the Maoist-affected areas, involving about 100,000 troops of the CRPF and other paramilitary forces. But it was proving to be of little help. The Maoists carried on their operations with impunity. In Chhattisgarh, they had carved out a guerilla zone which the local police referred to as 'Pakistan'. In Maharashtra's Gadchiroli, their writ ran large. In some districts in Orissa, the police would not dare venture out in uniform. In Jharkhand, the Maoists collected taxes, meting out severe punishment to those who did not follow their diktat. In the Naxal-dominated areas, there was no sign of state authority. No forest official, no policeman, no district collector ever visited there.
In Chhattisgarh, the guerilla zone of the Maoists was called the Maad division. For outsiders, it was Abujhmaad. This area had remained out of national consciousness for decades now. In fact, it was never in the thoughts of those chosen by the people to take India to newer heights. The name of this area itself signified what it meant to India: Abujh in Hindi means something that cannot be figured out. It was only after the Maoist insurgency had started hitting the headlines that people heard about Abujhmaad for the first time.
In the womb of the land now referred to as India's Red Corridor lay hidden mineral resources worth thousands of billions of dollars. And this was also the land where India's poorest of the poor lived. And now, it was where perhaps India's bloodiest battle would be fought.
The government had sent in its forces. But they had not been able to do much. What could they possibly do? Inside the villages how were they supposed to distinguish between a Maoist and a tribal villager? In a number of cases, they didn't bother to do so. So innocent tribals were picked up, brutally tortured, accused of being Maoists and then put in jail. Or just shot dead after being branded as Maoists. Instead of solving the problem it lent further fuel to the insurgency, more manpower to the Maoists.
On national television, the Maoist insurgency was being discussed threadbare. Is it a socio-economic problem or a mere law and order problem? Can it be resolved militarily? Are we ready for the costs? How far are the Maoists from our cities—from seizing power from the State? Is development the only solution to the Maoist problem? Or should military action and development go hand in hand? In television studios, a horde of politician
s, retired military, paramilitary and police officers and civil rights activists sweated it out almost daily since every day some incident would occur. A CRPF group ambushed. A police van blown up in an IED blast. A politician killed. A train derailed. Alleged Maoists killed—most of whom later turned out to be innocent tribals. Tribal women raped by Special Police Officers. A Maoist camp dismantled.
Till a few years ago, India's homeland security was in the hands of Shivraj Patil, a Congress loyalist who was known for his devotion to a godman and his penchant for changing his clothes frequently. After intense pressure in the wake of intelligence failure leading to the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, Patil was now being replaced by another senior politician who had steadily risen through the Congress ranks. From being the Tamil interpreter of the English speeches of Indira Gandhi, the suave lawyer from Tamil Nadu, who was better known for his stints as the country's finance minister was now in charge of the home ministry. And sure enough, Palaniappan Chidambaram made enough news from day one to show that he meant business.
He said that the Naxals were 'simply bandits'. He snubbed those who called for development in this area instead of sending in military forces, branding them Maoist sympathisers. In a Parliament address he called them people 'who write 33-page articles', a reference to writer-activist Arundhati Roy who had spent a few days with the Maoist guerillas and written a long essay in Outlook magazine. It would seem that instead of fighting Maoists, the home minister's whole energy and that of his aides was directed at hurling diatribes at members of the civil society. Those who went as a part of fact-finding missions to Naxal areas would be targeted and branded as Maoists. That was not all. The government issued a decree that those found to be aiding the Maoists would be dealt with severely and charged under the anti-terror law UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act). It was like the cowboy doctrine propagated by the former American President George Bush after the 11 September 2001 attack: Either you are with us or against us.
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