But such occurrences are rare. Most encounters end in bloodshed. In the past eighteen months, says Eiatu, 77 guns—mostly AK-47 and INSAS rifles—have been snatched after such actions in Gadchiroli district alone.
Now, since the government is keen to flush out Maoists, it is inevitable that such encounters have increased. Sometimes, in their attempt to get at Maoists, the police forces end up further alienating the people.
A month before 75 CRPF men were mowed down by Maoists in Dantewada, two things arrived in Gadchiroli's Pavarvel village, bordering Chhattisgarh. The first was a baby boy born to an Adivasi woman, Indu Bai. He died within an hour of his birth. The mother followed a day later. In Pavarvel and all other neighbouring villages, pregnancies are handled by elderly women. For everything else there is Devi puja since there is not even a primary health centre. There is no electricity but the villagers claim that a gram panchayat official comes every year to collect electricity tax. Water comes from a ramshackle bore-pump.
The other arrival was that of a police party. It had not come to apprehend Naxalites who the villagers say arrive at any hour every now and then, demand food, and slip back into the jungle. Pavarvel itself is in the thick of the forest. There is hardly any road, and if you don't have a local guide with you, it will probably take you weeks to figure out your location. In the forests full of mahua and other trees, there are memorials erected by the Naxalites in memory of their fallen comrades.
So, yes, the police arrived not for Naxals but to teach Bajirao Potawe, a simple tribal, a lesson. They went straight to his house and beat him up. With their boots and lathis,' Potawe says. 'They said bad things to my mother and sister, called me a bastard and said how dare my family accuse them of rape,' he recalls. Then they made him run errands like fetching water to cook a meal of dal and rice which they took away with them. Of course, Potawe hasn't been able to eat such meals for a long time. In fact, he has been living with his wife without a marriage ceremony. The ceremony demands a feast for the villagers, and until the villagers in turn collect some rice and give it to the family, the ceremony cannot happen. Now that is difficult since rice is a luxury for Potawe's neighbours as well.
The victim of the rape which the police party referred to was a 13-year-old girl, the sister-in-law of Bajirao Potawe's brother, Kaju Potawe. The girl, who lives in the neighbouring village of Tudmel, had come to his sister's house for treatment of her illness through Devi puja. She had stayed back, working as a labourer at a school construction site nearby.
It was on the evening of 4 March 2009, that a party of Maharashtra Police's C-60 Commando group came to Pavarvel, led by a notorious commander Munna Thakur. The C-60 is a special anti-Naxal force mostly of policemen from the Adivasi regions (the police party ambushed in Laheri was also from this force). Reports suggest that the group saw a man running with a tribal water-flask made out of dried pumpkin. The police fired at him but he got away. It was the misfortune of the Potawe family that the man ran away towards the forest behind their house. In a minute, the police party entered their house and beat Kaju Potawe, who had just returned from the jungle after collecting wild berries. 'They kept asking me about Naxal whereabouts. When I said I didn't know they beat me more,' he says.
It was then that the police party saw Kaju's sister-in-law, the teenage girl. 'They dragged her by her hair and accused her of being a Naxal,' recalls Kaju. Later they asked another villager Dayaram Jangi and his family to vacate their house. Dayaram Jangi had also let the teacher of a nearby government school stay with him for free. He was also asked to leave. The girl was kept in Jangi's house along with a few men of the village who the police suspected of being Naxals. The next morning, the girl was taken to a nearby field, blindfolded, her hands tied, and raped several times.
A fact-finding team which visited her after the incident was told by the girl that the police did 'badmaash kaam' with her. She told them that the first person who raped her was Munna Thakur. 'He said I must have heard his name as he pushed himself over me,' the girl told the team. The girl said she fainted several times during her ordeal.
At about 10 a.m., a helicopter landed in Pavarvel to take the girl and other suspected men to Gadchiroli town. In an area where even a bullock cart is not available to take a sick person to the hospital, the state machinery spared a helicopter to ferry a teenage girl accused of being a Naxal. But nothing could be proven against her and she had to be released. As a damage-control exercise, Munna Thakur was transferred later to Nagpur.
But, after this incident, just how does the government expect the people of Pavarvel village to inform them about Naxal whereabouts? That too when this is not the only time when the police committed atrocities in this village. In 2006, 17-year-old Ramsay Jangi was picked up by C-60 commandos and beaten up severely. When his cousin Mathru Jangi went pleading that he was innocent, the police assured him that he would be freed after first-aid. In the night, the villagers saw Munna Thakur. They heard him shouting at his men, instructing them to 'finish off the work A moment later, the villagers heard several gunshots. The police had shot dead Ramsay Jangi. The body was taken to Dhanora taluka. After ten days, the police came back and asked Ramsay's father Manik Jhangi to come and collect his son's body. But nobody went, fearing arrest. The police disposed of the body.
Manik Jhangi has still kept the empty cartridges of the bullets that killed his son. 'My son's body must have rotted,' he whispers. 'No, they inject something inside the body to keep it fresh,' says a boy with some education. 'But he is gone, gone forever,' Manik Jhangi cries silently, his tears mixing with sweat. 'We fear going into the jungle now because if the police finds us they will kill us,' says another man.
The stark fact that the villagers live with is that these are not isolated incidents. Across Maoist-affected areas, the security forces have many a time ended up killing innocent tribals caught in the endless cycle of violence between the State and the Maoists. Sometimes these killings are intentional, just to show some results. And sometimes, innocent people just get caught in between.
In January 2009, 17 tribal youths were killed in Singaram village in Golappali area of Chhattisgarh's Dantewada. The police termed it a 'major breakthrough', but it was soon clear that the youths were taken to the forest behind the village by Special Police Officers (civilians employed by the police, who roam around with vigilante groups such as the Salwa Judum) and then shot dead in cold blood. The survivors of the attack later testified that the villagers were working in the fields when over 200 armed people stormed into Singaram and three other villages, accusing villagers of shielding Maoists. Some of them are believed to have paid whatever little money they had to avoid getting shot. But in the end, 17 youths lost their lives, including four women.
In September 2010, Border Security Force (BSF) personnel, accompanied by men from the Chhattisgarh police rounded up 40 Adivasis in their villages in the state's Ranker district. They were stripped naked, beaten up, and, according to their testimonies, five of them were reportedly raped with sticks. According to an Amnesty International report, 17 people from the two villages were also detained—blindfolded, split into batches and taken to the BSF camp in closed trucks. As per the report, at least two of those detained—Dhansu Khemra and Sarita Tulavi—were 16-year-old girls while another four were women and girls between 16 and 20. The report further states that during their detention, the BSF personnel beat the detainees in an attempt to force them to confess that they were Maoists involved in an ambush on security personnel on 29 August. The interrogators gave electric shocks to at least ten detainees and sexually assaulted two female detainees.
On 9 October 2010, soldiers of the Chhattisgarh police's Special Task Force, who were pursuing a woman Maoist, ended up shooting two innocent villagers in Lendigidipa village in Mahasamund area. One of them happened to be a deaf and dumb labourer. The family of the victim later said that one of the soldiers immediately realised his mistake and muttered: 'Hai Durga maiyya, pehli baar bekasur aadmi ko m
aar diya.'28 (Oh Mother Durga, for the first time I have killed an innocent man.)
The, Maoists, of course, kill their enemy with equal ruthlessness. In villages across Dandakaranya and in other areas of influence, villagers suspected of being police informers are often killed brutally by slitting their throats. In Lalgarh, hundreds of CPM workers have been killed either by slitting their throats or by just putting a bullet in their heads. In Jharkhand, a policeman, Francis Induwar was kidnapped by Maoists, and after the government refused to negotiate, he was beheaded.
But why is it that the Maoists end up killing people in such a gruesome fashion? A senior Maoist leader cites a story popular during the Chinese revolution as an explanation. A bonded labourer who is ill-treated by his landlord feels that the latter has no heart. So, when the peasants attack the landlord's house, the labourer says that he would like to kill his master himself and check whether he has a heart underneath his ribcage. It also serves a psychological purpose, say the Maoists. When a tribal guerilla kills the 'class enemy' in this fashion, it gives him immense satisfaction. His pent-up anger caused by suffering humiliation and exploitation, generation after generation, makes him act like this.
27In an interview to The Times of India's Supriya Sharma.
28Supriya Sharma, The Times of India, 12 October 2010.
VIII
THE REBEL
Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
—Che Guevara
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibres connect us with our fellow men.
—Herman Melville
She had the best handwriting among her group. On a humid Bombay night, she would sit cross-legged on the floor at somebody's house and write political slogans on old newspapers. Yes, the world had to be changed, the world order had to be changed—she was so sure about it. So, ignoring the sweat gathering on her brow, she would create posters in her neat handwriting, in English, Hindi and Marathi. Then she and her friends would sneak out in the middle of the night. Someone would carry a pot of glue made of flour. At some intersection, or in some lane, the group would stick the posters on walls and electric poles.
It was a job fraught with danger in the early '70s. The police were on the lookout for adventurous youth—the Naxalbari types—who would talk of revolution and the plight of the poor. But the group didn't care. Tucking her pallu in at her waist, Anuradha Shanbag would address curious onlookers and talk to them about issues they hadn't even thought of. She would make them aware of what was happening around the world, and they would then realise what a wretched life they lived in the slums and chawls of Bombay while politicians and business tycoons slept peacefully, fanned by crisp currency notes and lulled to sleep by the buzz of air conditioners.
Though petite in appearance, Anu, as Anuradha was fondly called by her friends, was the most active and vivacious among them. She was very attractive as well and had many admirers. She was the natural leader of the group that consisted mostly of college students like herself. Among her admirers was a tall, lanky bespectacled man, who had returned from London, after serving a two-month sentence in a prison there. Kobad Ghandy had gone to London to pursue chartered accountancy, but had instead found himself one day in the thick of a violent attack on an anti-racism meeting. The meeting, held by left-leaning students and activists, to protest against the racism faced by Indians in the UK was attacked by a white fascist gang. The police had encouraged them and ultimately arrested three of the protestors including Kobad and a pregnant white woman. Inside the police station, Kobad was further beaten up.
After his release, Kobad happened to see a picture in a newspaper of Naxal rebels marching in single file through a vast field in Singhbhum in east India. He decided to return to India, wearing an overcoat that had 24 secret pockets, all stuffed with Maoist literature. He returned to Bombay (as it was then known), hoping to establish contact with Naxal rebels. In Bombay Kobad first got in touch with J.P. Dixit, his Hindi professor at St Xavier's college where he had studied. Dixit had been arrested briefly on charges of being a Naxalite. But Dixit was unable to help since he had no contact with the Naxal rebels. It was then that Kobad came in contact with PROYOM (Progressive Youth Movement), a student organisation inspired by the Naxal movement. PROYOM ran an 'alternative university', essentially a series of lectures that offered an alternate view (Marxist) of the subjects taught in colleges. The organisation was also quite active in the slums and other areas inhabited by the poor of Bombay. This is where Kobad met Anuradha for the first time.
Young people like Anuradha were inspired by the headiness of those times. A year before, Charu Mazumdar had died in Kolkata, and Naxal rebels were being hunted like mad dogs. Anuradha and Kobad came from different family backgrounds. Anuradha was born to Ganesh and Kumud Shanbag, both of them activists, who chose to marry in the office of the Communist Party of India (CPI). As a young boy, Ganesh Shanbag had run away from his home in Coorg to join Subhash Chandra Bose's army, and later, as a lawyer, he would fight the cases of communists arrested in the Telangana struggle. While his briefcase would be full of petitions filed on behalf of the arrested comrades, Kumud would be busy knitting and collecting sweaters to be sent for soldiers fighting the war with China. Kobad's father Adi Ghandy was the finance director of the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo while his mother Nargis played bridge and golf and was a regular at the elite Willingdon club. The family stayed in a 4000-square-feet Worli seaface house.
Even as a child, Kobad felt deeply for the poor, and a family friend describes an incident to illustrate this. Adi Ghandy's gold watch disappeared one day. Later, Kobad revealed that he had gifted it to a servant who, he said, needed it more than his father.
Anuradha's brother Sunil Shanbag, who is a progressive playwright, recalls her being good at studies as well as extra-curricular activities like dancing. But she was extremely aware of what was happening around her. Says Sunil: 'When I was in boarding school, she would send me letters, writing about issues like the nationalisation of banks. And she was only twelve then.' But beyond this awareness, Anuradha was like any other girl when she joined Bombay's prestigious Elphinstone college in 1972. 'She would come home and straighten her hair with the help of a warm iron as girls would do in those days,' recalls her mother. But in between straightening her hair, she also went on to do her MA in sociology and later an M.Phil.
Both Kobad and Anu took an instant liking to each other. Around that time, Kobad's parents had retired and shifted to Mahabaleshwar, a small hill station about 100 km from Pune. Kobad and his brother stayed on in Bombay in the Worli mansion. Kobad's brother was into making ice cream, and loved to experiment with new flavours. Kobad, Anuradha and their whole group would often assemble at the Worli house for discussions. Kobad's brother would seek the group's opinion on his experiments. Anuradha simply loved his ice cream. But he improved the quality to such an extent that, eventually, the cost of making it exceeded its selling price and he went bankrupt.
It is not clear whether Anu inspired Kobad more or the other way round but soon, as a friend puts it, both had turned into 'staunch activists'. In fact, Kobad organised the youth of Mayanagar slum near his house, and they stopped paying for water to the slumlord who was linked to the Congress and had connections in the municipality and the police. By the mid '70s, the two were at the centre of the Dalit Panther movement that organised groups to retaliate against any caste oppression. During those months, there were regular clashes with the militant Shiv Sena.
Kobad also took a liking to a song in Namak Haraam, a Hindi film set in the backdrop of the workers' movement in Bombay's textile mills: Nadiya se dariya, dariya se sagar … He took this film on VHS tapes to show it across various slums in the city. Around this time, Kobad and Anuradha fell in love, and Kumud vividly remembers the day Kobad came visiting their house. 'My husband was here on this chair,' she points out, 'and Kobad came and fell on his knees and said: “Can I marry y
our daughter?”'
The two got married on 5 November 1977 at Adi Ghandy's retreat in Mahabaleshwar. The Emergency had just been lifted, the Janata Party had come to power and all political prisoners including most Naxalite leaders were released. The two were very busy and only got a week off to celebrate their marriage. Anuradha's family drove down the day before. Kobad had gone earlier to help his parents with the marriage preparations.
On the morning of their marriage, Adi Ghandy drove down to neighbouring Satara to fetch the registrar of marriages. He wouldn't agree to come, and relented only after money and two bottles of whisky were passed on to him. For the wedding feast, Nargis Ghandy had prepared the choicest Parsi delicacies. The two families went on many outings together during the next two days. Anu and Kobad stayed on in Mahabaleshwar for anomer five days after the wedding, often taking long walks in the forest adjoining the house. It was the last time that they could enjoy such simple pleasures of life.
In Bombay, both Anu and Kobad became the shining lights of the civil liberties movement. Anuradha played a very important role in the formation of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR).
Meanwhile, by 1980, the Naxal squads had entered Gadchiroli. Some of the senior Naxal leaders who were active during the Telangana struggle came in contact with Kobad and Anuradha and their group in Mumbai. These leaders finally arranged a meeting between Kondapalli Seetharamaiah and Kobad during a conference of the Radical Students Union in 1981 in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. After the session was inaugurated, KS sent a messenger to Kobad. But Kobad was not to be found there. Apparently, he had slipped out briefly with a friend. Varavara Rao remembers approaching Anuradha, enquiring about Kobad. In a memoir written after her death, W describes those moments: 'Her (Anu's) anxiety was quite visible that Kobad was not present at a time when a great opportunity came in search for them. There were no cell phones at that time. Her lips were quivering, her face reddened and her eyes were filled with tears … She apologised several times. Meanwhile Kobad turned up. She pounced on him with anger like a child. Tears rolled down her face … she shouted at him, revealing her love, friendship and intimacy towards him.' Varavara Rao says the meeting between KS and Kobad paved the way for the foundation of the People's War Group in Maharashtra.
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