Soon afterwards, Anu and Kobad shifted to Nagpur which has the second largest slum population in Maharashtra, and is also home to a significant number of Dalits (it was in Nagpur in October 1956 that B.R. Ambedkar accepted Buddhism). Kobad would be gone for long periods for party work and often Anu would be left alone. She first stayed in a barsati in the Lakshmi Nagar area. Kumud remembers visiting her there with her husband. When we saw where she stayed, we couldn't believe our eyes,' says Kumud. The roof leaked from many places. And it rained that night. 'Our helper who was with us crept under a table and slept there,' recalls Kumud.
By 1986, however, Anuradha had shifted to north Nagpur's Indora locality, the epicentre of Dalit politics. It is from here that an agitation broke out after the infamous Khairlanji case of 2006, the background being that four members of a Dalit family were lynched in Maharashtra's Bhandara district bordering Nagpur. In Indora, Anuradha rented two small rooms at the house of a postal department employee, Khushaal Chinchikhede. 'There was absolutely nothing in their house except two trunks of books and a mud pitcher,' he says. Anuradha also worked as part-time lecturer in Nagpur University. Later, Kobad would come to live there too. Both would be out till midnight. Anuradha used a rundown cycle to commute, and it was later at the insistence of other activists that Kobad bought a TVS Champ moped.
Anuradha was a fiercely independent person, and the couple had frequent fights on many issues. She would also be left fuming at Kobad's clumsiness while driving and later with his slow typing speed. A close associate remembers how she quarrelled with Kobad after she fell off the moped at a speed breaker as Kobad had not applied the brakes and did not even realise that she had toppled down! But these fights apart, the two had immense respect for each other. Whenever Kobad visited her, he would do most of the cleaning and washing to enable Anuradha to rest a bit.
Indora was notorious for its rowdies. 'No taxi or autorickshaw driver would dare venture inside Indora,' says Anil Borkar, who grew up in Indora. But Anuradha was unfazed. 'She would pass though the basti at midnight, all alone on a cycle,' remembers Borkar. He met Anuradha through a friend. 'She made me aware of so many things. It was like the whole world opened in front of me,' he says.
Because of Anuradha, Devanand Pantavne, a black belt in karate turned into a poet and the lead singer of a radical cultural troupe. Pantavne remembers her as a stickler for deadlines. 'She would get very angry if we took up a job and then didn't deliver on time,' he says. Another young man, Surendra Gadling was motivated by Anuradha to take up law. Today, he fights cases for various activists and alleged Naxals. 'She is my guiding light,' he says. It is not without reason. Anuradha led by example, living the life she wanted the basti boys to lead.
That life was tough though. One day, a friend recalls, Anuradha returned home late in the night totally exhausted. She was crying. That day, Anuradha had left home at 6.30 a.m. on her cycle to reach the university in time for her first lecture at 9 a.m., cycling part of the way and then taking a bus to the university which was 15 km away from her house. At 11.30 a.m., she had left for central Nagpur to attend a meeting on the reservation issue. At 4 p.m., she had to reach Kamptee, a handloom township, mostly inhabited by Muslim weavers, about 20 km from Nagpur. She had first made a detour to leave her cycle at home and had then taken a bus to Kamptee without even stopping for a glass of water. She returned late in the night and began to cry. She could not bear the plight of the poor weavers who were struggling hard to survive after the government stopped their quota of thread, which had enabled them to weave cloth. Many had not eaten for days, she said, and some women had to resort to prostitution to fend for themselves and their families.
In 1994, a Dalit woman, Manorama Kamble, who worked as a maid in an influential lawyer's house, was found dead. The lawyer's family claimed that she had accidently electrocuted herself. But the activists feared that she had been raped and then killed by the lawyer. Anuradha led an agitation, and it was due to her efforts that the case created ripples in the state assembly and in Parliament.
In Indora, one of Anuradha's trusted lieutenants was Biwaji Badke, a four-foot-tall Dalit activist. 'Every morning Badke would come to her house and share all the news with Anuradha over tea,' recall friends. Later, when he was diagnosed with throat cancer, Anuradha brought him to her house and nursed him for months. Another associate, Shoma Sen remembers her being very sensitive to the concerns of others. 'Her house in Indora was open to everyone. Every time someone would come and one more cup of water would be added to the tea that was constantly brewing on the stove,' she says.
Because of her, many others from well-to-do families were inspired to become activists. Says her old friend and associate of her activist days, Susan Abraham: When I became an activist it was always heartening to see someone from Anu's background working along with you.'
In the mid '90s, because of police pressure, it had become impossible to work 'overground'. Anuradha's name had prominently figured in two important programmes she had organised in the Vidarbha region. One was the Kamlapur Conference of 1984, held at the small hamlet deep inside the forests of Gadchiroli. There was a huge mobilisation of people, including various intellectuals and activists. But it was crushed by the police. In 1992, Anuradha organised a cultural programme of the revolutionary balladeer Gaddar in Nagpur. Despite court orders, the police prevented people from attending the programme. The police had also intended to prevent Gaddar from reaching the venue but he appeared in disguise. No sooner had he reached the venue than the police resorted to a lathi charge and did not let the programme happen.
It was in the mid '90s that both Kobad and Anu finally went completely underground.
From 1996-98, Anuradha was in Bastar. Kobad was elsewhere and the two got to see very little of each other. But right from day one, Anuradha set an example in Bastar. Maina, a member of the CPI-Maoist's Special Zone Committee in Dandakaranya, remembers her efforts to mingle with the local Gond tribals: 'Many people used to question us about her, saying didi (Anuradha) is not from this country, she does not know our language. Didi would smilingly approach them saying: “I know what you are asking; please teach me your language; I will learn everything from you.'”
Life in the jungle is very harsh. The guerillas are always on the move, from one village to another, carrying heavy kit bags. Even there, Anuradha wouldn't shy away from hardships; she did everything that other guerillas would do. A Naxal leader, who was in Bastar when she first came there, remembers her not sparing herself any of the regular military drill: running, crawling, push-ups, the works. Says Maina, 'She would slip and fall many times while walking in the slushy mud, but she would get up and laugh.'
In 1999, Anuradha was camping along with other guerillas in Chhattisgarh's Sarkengudem village when the police surrounded them. An encounter ensued. Lahar, a senior guerilla remembers Anuradha taking cover and aiming her gun at the 'enemy'. Later, she would always recollect that incident, urging the youth to learn the skills of guerilla warfare. But her brother Sunil remembers her speaking about the 'awkwardness of carrying a gun'.
The hard life of the jungle took its toll on her body— she suffered frequent bouts of malaria. During the same summer, after she had been walking for hours one day she lost consciousness. Her comrades revived her and made her drink glucose water. Apparently, she had suffered a sunstroke. Even then, after she recovered, she refused to hand over her kit bag to others, says Lahar.
When south Bastar was affected by severe drought in 1998-99, the tribals were forced to eat rice which, Maina says, 'had more stones than grain in it'. The same rice was offered to the guerillas as well, which they would eat with tamarind paste. 'Taking one fistful after another and then gulping water in between, she used to take a lot of time to finish her meal,' recalls Maina. She also developed ulcers in her stomach. 'She would relieve the pain by eating one or two biscuits with a glass of water,' she says.
Sometimes, Kobad came to Bastar and the two would have a reunion of sorts
. A senior guerilla remembers that Anuradha didn't know how to use a computer and save or open files on it. But since she had good speed on a manual typewriter, she would type furiously. Kobad knew how to use the computer but could not type as fast as Anuradha, and she would tease him about this. To lessen her load, Anuradha also decided to do away with the heavy blanket guerillas carry, opting instead for a thin bedsheet.
No matter what the Centre claims, the Naxals often fill the void created by the government in their areas of influence. In Basaguda in Chhattisgarh, an embankment needed to be built around a tank called Kota Chervu; some ten villages were counting on the water from this tank. The government had ignored the villagers' pleas for years. It was under Anuradha's guidance that people from 30 villages undertook this work Those who worked were given a kilo of rice a day. The government panicked and sanctioned 20 lakh rupees; it was refused. By 1998, more than a hundred tanks had been constructed by the Naxals in Dandakaranya.
Anuradha also took on the responsibility of crafting study modules to educate women. She regularly took classes on the problems faced by women guerillas, and wrote and translated Naxal propaganda material. She would prepare charts with photos of political leaders and explain world affairs to the locals who were illiterate. Sometimes, she would conduct classes on health issues. Aman, a senior member of the Maoists' Dandakaranya Special Zone Committee recalls how discussions with her would range from the Salwa Judum to films like Rang de Basanti.
But her health was in bad shape. By 2000, she had developed serious health issues. She would feel exhausted quickly and her knees gave way while her fingers would not bend. At the end of 2002, the diagnosis turned out to be shocking: Anu was suffering from the deadly systemic sclerosis that would ultimately lead to multiple organ failure. The news was broken to Kobad in an internet chatroom. Kobad could meet her only two months later, and he saw that in a little time, Anu had aged a lot. But undeterred by all this, Anuradha continued making secret trips to Mumbai. 'She would come, and I would apply oil in her hair and massage her body. I wanted to pamper her as much as I could,' says Kumud.
'The most amazing thing was that she would always know much more than us about films and other popular culture,' says Sunil. During the staging of one of his plays, Cotton 56, Polyester 84 (depicting the plight of textile mill workers) in Mumbai, Anuradha slipped in quietly, watched the play, and left as quietly as she had come. 'I only came to know later that she was there,' says Sunil. As Kobad says: 'She enjoyed plays, novels, good films, good food, whenever she got a chance. But she never craved after anything. I have seen her selflessness living sometimes in the most horrible conditions—in slum-like places. There would be never any complaints. She always adjusted. She would bear the worst sort of hardships as part of normal tasks. She would always spend the least on herself.'
At the ninth Congress of the CPI (Maoist) in 2007, Anuradha was made a member of the Central Committee. A picture of that time shows her wearing the uniform of the PLGA, a rifle slung across her shoulder. She is smiling in the picture, very conscious of the gun she is carrying. By this time, Kobad had also become a senior ideologue writing articles under the pen name Arvind.
It was on the basis of Anuradha's work that the Naxals prepared the first-ever caste policy paper within the Marxist movement in India. She also drafted papers on Marxism and feminism, of which the top Naxal leadership took note. During the time spent in Dandakaranya, Anuradha helped the guerillas overcome the limitations of collective work by making them understand what roles cooperatives could play in increasing agricultural production. In Bastar, Anuradha raised questions on the patriarchal ideas prevalent in the party. She had also been working with the women's cadre, to devise plans that would help them take greater leadership responsibilities.
Towards the end of March 2008, Anu had travelled to Jharkhand to conduct classes for the women's cadre. She spent about a week among these women, mostly tribal, and her lectures were taped for use elsewhere. At the end of the classes, she had become such a hit among the women that they refused to let her go, and she had to delay her departure by two days. As she prepared to leave, all the women whom she had taught followed her for a few kilometres inside the thick forest before she persuaded them to return. One Maoist guerilla who took those classes said that there were tears in everyone's eyes. From there, it seems, she travelled to Mumbai where she developed high fever. She went to a doctor who advised some tests. By evening the tests had reached the doctor, and on looking at them, the doctor started making frantic calls to the phone number the patient had scribbled in her nearly illegible handwriting. The number, he soon realised, did not exist. The reports indicated the presence of two deadly strains of malaria in Anuradha's bloodstream—she had to be admitted to a hospital without delay. Time was racing by and there was no trace of her.
By the time Anuradha contacted the doctor again, a few days had passed. The doctor wanted her placed under intensive care immediately. But it was too late. The next morning, on 12 April 2008, Anuradha Ghandy was dead. She had suffered multiple organ failure, her immune system already weakened by systemic sclerosis, which was responsible for, among other things, her bad handwriting.
Writing to me from Tihar jail, two years after Anu's death, Kobad recollects his thoughts: 'Two years is a long time, yet the fragrance lingers on. The sweet scent, like from an eternal blossom, intoxicates the mind with memories of her vivacious and loving spirit. Even here, in the High Risk ward of Tihar jail, the five sets of bars that incarcerate us cannot extinguish the aroma that Anu radiates in one's memories. The pain one suffers here seems so insignificant compared to what she must have faced on that fateful day.'
How did a girl like Anuradha, born into privilege, come to choose a life of struggle and hardship in the treacherous jungles of Bastar, a rifle by her side and a tarpaulin sheet for her bedding? The answer perhaps lies in the times she lived in. Or the kind of person she was. Or, maybe, a bit of both.
In Nagpur, a year after her death, I requested her former landlord in Indora, Chinchikhede to open the rooms once occupied by Anuradha. All that remained of the old days was a sticker of Bhagat Singh on the door. It was sunset and the sky had turned crimson. A comrade who accompanied me lay on the floor, a floor he was too familiar with. And he recited a poem by revolutionary poet Gorakh Pandey:
It's thousands of years old
their anger
thousands of years old
is their bitterness
I am only returning their scattered words
with rhyme and rhythm
and you fear that
I am spreading fire.
IX
THE URBAN AGENDA
The final objective of the revolution is the capture of the cities, the enemy's main bases, and this objective cannot be achieved without adequate work in the cities.
—Mao Tse-tung
If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are near.
—SunTzu
The sleuths of the Intelligence Bureau were waiting for him. The moment Anthony Shimray crossed the entry gate of the Patna railway station on the morning of 2 October 2010, he was nabbed and immediately whisked away. Shimray was under surveillance for quite some time. Though the insurgent group NSCN-IM [National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah)]—active in north-east India—had a ceasefire agreement with the Indian government, interrogating Shimray had become quite necessary for the intelligence agency. Apart from being the 'foreign minister' of the outfit (and the nephew of its general secretary, T. Muivah), Shimray was also its chief arms procurer, and he had recently travelled to Beijing, paying an advance of 800,000 dollars to a Chinese firm. He was based in Bangkok and had travelled to Kathmandu from where he slipped into the Indian territory to return to Nagaland. During sustained interrogation, Shimray finally opened up. He confessed that this amount was paid to book a huge consignment of arms that included sophisticated guns, rocket launchers, explosive devices and communication gadgets. He told
the Indian authorities that he was to make a payment of another 200,000 dollars to the Chinese firm before they would dispatch the consignment to India either through Bangladesh or Myanmar. According to Shimray, this was to reach India in three batches and the consignment was meant for Maoists and insurgent outfits in the north-east. Intelligence agencies believed that the first batch had already reached the Maoists.
This was confirmed on 3 December 2010, when a special unit of the Kolkata Police nabbed the state secretary of the CPI (Maoist) Kanchan alias Sudip Chongdar and his two other associates from a city suburb. Intelligence sources say that the arrests were made after Shimray provided important leads to the leader's whereabouts. The police now believe that some of the modern communication equipment seized from the Maoist leaders was a part of the first batch of the Chinese consignment. The Maoist leaders were planning their strategy to be a part of the agitation in the Rajarhat area where 7,000 acres of land had allegedly been forcibly acquired from farmers. The Maoists had earlier participated in similar agitations in Singur and Nandigram, where the protests had turned violent.
Participating in such agitations is a part of the urban agenda of the CPI (Maoist).
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