The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  The boy carried rucksacks filled with wires, explosives, and tarpaulin for the rainy season. His platoon roamed from village to village. They held meetings, sometimes solved local quarrels, and requisitioned rice from villagers, occasionally a chicken.

  He learned how to make a bomb and how to set off an improvised explosive device. He learned how to crawl on his belly in case there was a gun battle. His first lesson on firing a gun ended disastrously. He pulled the trigger and immediately lost hearing in his left ear.

  “Did they tell you who the enemy was?” I asked.

  “The police,” he said.

  “Did they tell you what you were fighting for?”

  “To get their guns,” he said.

  “Did they tell you what would happen once your side won the fight?”

  Form a “people’s government,” he was told. First, they would take over Chhattisgarh state, then the whole country. He had never been anywhere outside the forest.

  Manher soon got bored. He got tired. Every day he was made to walk so long and carry such heavy loads. One moonlit night, while on sentry duty, he ran away. He took two hand grenades, three rifles, and a muzzle-loading country weapon. The platoon commander slept with his gun, so he couldn’t take that. Nor, he told me ruefully, could he get his hands on the pile of money that the commander controlled—500,000 rupees, about $10,000, he guessed wildly. He did somehow procure the commander’s notebook, with entries of how much money his platoon took in and spent. He started walking.

  He buried two guns in the forest, kept a third, until he passed his village, where, in jubilation, he tossed it into a stream. Naturally, he couldn’t go back to his uncle’s house. His captors would find him and kill him. So he kept walking, clutching the hand grenades.

  “I never went with them out of choice,” he said of the rebels. “I didn’t like them. They said if I tried to leave, they would kill me.”

  By morning, Manher reached a police station in the nearest town, Narayanpur. He turned over the hand grenades and the commander’s notebook. Then he led the cops back to the jungle where he had stashed the two additional guns. They were all good, actionable pieces of intelligence. The cops patted him on the back and gave him a cot to sleep on in the police barracks. He was still there six months later, in 2010, when I met him. He wore an orange bandanna around his face, which he pulled down only when he was inside the police superintendent’s office. He never left the barracks. He couldn’t even go to the weekly market in town. Maoists were crawling all over the market. If they spotted him, he was dead.

  You would think that the cops would have been grateful for his cooperation. But no good deed went unpunished here, not for a poor, half-deaf orphan. As a reward for leaving the rebels and turning over their weapons, Manher received 20,000 rupees—about $400—or roughly one-sixth of the money to which he was entitled.

  The police superintendent, Rahul Bhagat, said his department claimed the rest in fees for his room and board in police barracks.

  The one time I met him, Manher said he was utterly bored in those barracks. He begged the cops to let him work. He offered to become an intelligence agent. They said he wasn’t old enough.

  The state-funded anti-Maoist militia was soon dissolved. Public interest litigation was filed in the Supreme Court of India by three citizens, including the historian Ramachandra Guha, arguing that the state should never have armed its own citizens. The court sided with the litigants, concluding that the Chhattisgarh government had violated the Constitution. The Maoists, meanwhile, pursued extrajudicial measures. In 2013, they assassinated the politician who founded the militia, an adivasi member of the state legislature named Mahendra Karma.

  Throughout the 2000s, the Maoists drew from a vast pool of young people who were among the least equipped to survive in the new economy, even as they had their noses pressed against it. In their villages, satellite dishes had been perched on top of mud huts, bringing national news and entertainment to the back of beyond. Migrants who went away every year to build shopping malls elsewhere discovered the country beyond theirs—and the riches that lay out of their reach.

  A journalist writing for the Indian newsweekly Outlook in 2011 looked at around 150 arrest reports to glean something about who the Maoist rebels were. Most of those arrested were under thirty-five; the largest bloc was adivasi. What surprised me most was that many more of them had gone to school than those who described themselves as illiterate. A majority, like Rakhi, said they chose to join the insurgency; only a few admitted to being coerced.

  Aspiration is not only for the likes of Anupam, who single-mindedly studies, and Mani, who leaves the country to scrub the floors in the city. It also spurs a woman like Rakhi to cut an entirely different path. Unlike their parents and grandparents, young people growing up in the wasteland know what else is out there. They know what they have been denied for generations. They too are taking their destinies into their own hands, except it’s fueled more by nihilism than by hope. And they become cannon fodder in a fight led by old-time ideologues singing revolutionary rhymes.

  In my mamu’s time, when the Maoists briefly flourished, India was a desperately poor country. The Maoists of noonday resurfaced during India’s golden age, at a time of unprecedented prosperity. West Bengal, where the Naxalites first emerged in my childhood, became one of the bloodiest theaters of the Maoist conflict, changing Rakhi’s life forever.

  On a bright Sunday in November 2008, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the erudite, elderly chief minister of the state, who often looked like he would rather be writing literary criticism than running one of India’s most impoverished states, was seated in the back of a white, state-owned Ambassador car.

  Bhattacharya’s Communist Party of India (Marxist)—sworn enemy of the guerrilla Maoist organization, which eschewed electoral politics—had ruled West Bengal state since 1977, winning election after election with a tight, often intimidating network of local party bosses. The party dominated everything in every village, deciding who got ration cards or a schoolteacher’s job. All the while, the state ranked among the worst in India on hunger, health, and unemployment. Water was scarce in the adivasi districts. Thousands migrated every year to work in more prosperous parts of the country, as maids and rickshaw pullers and diggers of ditches. They saw what they didn’t have.

  On this morning, as part of his quest to resurrect industry in his struggling state, Bhattacharya was on his way to a town called Salboni, to inaugurate a new factory by one of India’s biggest companies, known as JSW Bengal Steel. Salboni was a prime location for a steel plant. The land here was brimming with iron ore. The highway offered easy access to the port of Kolkata, from where it was a short journey by sea to Guangdong, China, where steel was in fabulously high demand.

  Bhattacharya came here to lay the ceremonial foundation stone for the steel plant. Standing before television cameras, he spoke of reviving Bengal and promised jobs for sons of the soil. Then he got back inside his Ambassador. Red lights blazing, he headed back to Calcutta.

  Police jeeps led the convoy. Sirens screamed.

  The convoy traveled barely twenty kilometers when—bang—there was an explosion. A homemade land mine had been laid for Bhattacharya: a milk jar, packed with ball bearings. Someone crouching in the paddy fields pulled the switch just as the chief minister’s convoy passed. It exploded.

  The casualties were minimal: six state police officers were injured, the chief minister unharmed. The impact, though, was spectacular. As the news spread, it set off a chain of events that could have sprung only from a Maoist tactical playbook.

  In the days that followed, police scoured neighboring villages for suspects. They hauled off young men and boys for questioning. This infuriated the villagers. For years they had been neglected, and now the cops came barging into their homes, picking up their boys. The drama built up, exactly according to the Maoist script. Years of pent-up rage burst. In one melee, as villagers battled with the authorities, a police officer’s ri
fle butt punctured an old widow in the eye, partially blinding her. The one-eyed widow became a symbol of the confrontation of peasants against the state.

  Lalgarh, as the region is known, became a battlefield.

  The Maoist leadership deftly manipulated the rage of Lalgarh. One afternoon, hundreds of adivasis descended on Dalhousie Square, once the heart of the British East India Trading Company in Calcutta—and now the seat of Bhattacharya’s administration. They were armed with bows and arrows. They were tattooed and angry and some of them were barefoot. It was an incongruous picture: the furious wilderness in the old imperial heart of Calcutta.

  Lalgarh itself turned into a fortress. Villagers poured out of their houses and blocked the roads leading to the area. They felled trees to keep cops out. One day in June 2009, in a village called Dharampur, they grabbed a local apparatchik of Bhattacharya’s political party, lynched him in the village square in broad daylight, and left his body to rot under the summer sun. Neither the cops nor the local government bureaucrats, nor even a hospital ambulance, came to Lalgarh to collect the corpse for days.7

  The anger of the villagers was aimed at many things. Their wells were dry, there were no irrigation canals, they barely eked out one harvest a year. Their roads were broken. Their children wanted jobs. They were suspicious of the Chinese-style tax-free industrial zones that the government was promoting in the area, including for the JSW steel plant.

  Lalgarh offered fertile ground for Maoist organizers. Here were armies of young men and women with a surplus of time and rage. For a while, the rebels controlled the area. They were led by a Politburo member who had spent years organizing for just such a moment. He went by the name Kishenji. He was from southern Andhra Pradesh, just like Gopanna Markam, the Maoist commander I had met earlier in Chhattisgarh. Kishenji had lived in Bengal long enough to speak fluent Bengali. He was something of a show-off. At the height of the Lalgarh insurgency, he liked to appear before television cameras, covering his long, gaunt face with a checkered cotton handkerchief and taunting state officials. One night, on prime-time news, he read aloud his cell phone number, inviting the Indian home minister, who was in charge of fighting the Maoists, to call him for talks. The home minister did not.

  Before the rebellion, Rakhi’s life is nothing remarkable. She is born to a relatively comfortable family in a village near Salboni, surrounded by a grove of luminescent gray-green sal from which the town got its name. Rakhi’s family is blessed to have a pond behind their mud-and-thatch house. When the rains come there is water. In the kitchen garden grow cabbage and papaya, radishes and chili peppers. They have chickens and so they have eggs, which is a luxury. “We always had rice to eat,” she recalls, which is her way of saying she was never hungry.

  The family’s good fortunes may have something to do with her father’s political acumen. Rakhi recalls that he made sure to pay off both the local Communist Party bosses and their political rivals.

  When Rakhi is a teenager, her father suffers a fatal stroke, which, in a country with no safety net, devastates the family. The funeral eats away their savings. An older sister has to be married off—and soon, Rakhi’s brother has to organize a celebration to mark the birth of his first son. More feasts. More expenses. The family is forced to pawn off some land. Rakhi can’t concentrate at school. She drops out. It is just before her Class 8 exams.

  There’s some confusion about what happens next. Rakhi’s mother, whom I visit one afternoon, tells me she had found a groom for her daughter when Rakhi was about sixteen, a boy from a nearby hamlet. This takes me by surprise. Rakhi hasn’t mentioned a husband. When I ask her about it later, she angrily denies it.

  I can’t say for sure whether Rakhi was married. Her mother seems to have no reason to lie. What I do know is that Rakhi is electrified by the agitation in Lalgarh—so much so that she runs away one night in the early days of the uprising. She hawks Maoist propaganda at first. She isn’t an adivasi herself, but she has grown up among them, she speaks their language, and she proves herself to be an able organizer. Never before has Rakhi felt so charged, so wanted.

  So when the leaders ask if she would like to learn how to fire a gun, she readily signs up. She learns how to shoot, how to burn down a house, how to lay a land mine, and how to beat up a class enemy with her bare hands. She rises quickly up the ranks. She learns to ride a motorcycle. She is given a mobile phone, as well as a gun—with orders to conserve bullets. She is appointed squad leader.

  Then begin the killings. Each leaves a vivid memory. The time of day, the season of the year, the name of the victim.

  She can chronicle them all.

  There is the man named Bhagwat, who is drinking in the courtyard of his house one night when she and her squad ride over and quietly slip over the fence. “Who’s there?” shouts Bhagwat’s wife in the darkness, only to scream when she sees Rakhi and her squad. Shaken from his drunken lull, Bhagwat dives into a pond. It is winter. So the water is frigid. Rakhi and her comrades circle the pond, firing at their prey, watching the bullets skip on the water like pebbles. It sounds to me like a Keystone Cops episode. She clucks her tongue as she tells me the story. So many bullets wasted, she recalls. Finally, one of the fighters jumps into the pond, pulls the drunkard out, and shoots him dead. The commotion wakes up the neighbors, who then pelt Rakhi and her squad with stones, so they have to fire in the air as they run. More bullets wasted, Rakhi says. She shakes her head, as though she was still keeping count.

  There is the man named Ashok, a village thug who would sleep in a different house every night and brag publicly that the Maoists could never kill him. Rakhi’s squad carry out a two-month-long reconnaissance. They discover that no matter where he sleeps, he relieves himself at 6:00 A.M. every morning at the same ditch. This turns out to be Ashok’s fatal habit. Rakhi orders one of her squad members to wait for him at his morning spot. He is shot dead as soon as he drops his pants.

  And then there is Neelmoni Murmu, an old woman who is seen serving water to the police, a heinous crime in the eyes of the Maoists. Rakhi marches into the courtyard of her house and slaps the old woman. This would be unthinkable in normal times—a young woman slapping an elderly woman! But the normal-time rules have broken down.

  “Tell us about the policeman who came to your house,” Rakhi demands, which makes Neelmoni Murmu throw herself on her husband. The old couple cling to each other so tightly Rakhi has to beat them both with a strip of bamboo to tear them apart. She drags the woman out onto the main road. “We’re going to kill you,” Rakhi warns. The woman is so terrified, she wets herself.

  Rakhi lets one of her comrades slash her throat. Next to her corpse, Rakhi writes in red ink, “Police informant.”

  The tales come out of her in a long stream of consciousness. I’m still not sure why she opens up like this. Perhaps she isn’t sure herself. After that first long conversation, every time I call her, she sounds angry at having told me anything at all.

  She is most enraged when she discovers that I have gone to see her mother. You come and go, she spits on the phone. My mother has to live there, with those people.

  In the end, it is a man who drives her out of the movement—a hotheaded member of her own squad who, she says, spreads lies about her among her colleagues. He lets it be known that she is squandering the party’s money. He defies her orders. “He broke me” is how she puts it.

  By then, she is also growing disillusioned. Villagers are killed indiscriminately. She gets tired of being on the run. And then one of her female comrades is sexually assaulted by a commander.

  And so, two years after she decided to join the rebellion, Rakhi decides to run away. She knows this is far more dangerous. If she goes home, the Maoists will kill her and her family. If she goes to the authorities, the cops could also kill her—or, she figures, they might let her live. She takes that risk.

  One night, on the pretext of fetching water, she leaves her encampment, slips out of the tracksuit that has become her guerrilla
uniform, changes into a salwar kameez, and hides in a hilltop temple until nightfall. She tosses her mobile phone into a stream, walks all night until she reaches a railway station, and boards a train to a neighboring district, where she is less likely to be recognized by locals. There she walks into the office of the police superintendent and surrenders. “I’m a Maoist,” she says.

  For the cops, she is extremely valuable. The police commander in charge of the counterinsurgency in this area tells me Rakhi has offered actionable intelligence. Soon after she surrenders, police enter a forest near her village, known as Bhallookbasha—literally, “bear’s lair”—and after a four-day gun battle, retrieve a laptop computer. Police say the laptop contains account ledgers that show how much money the Maoists have at their disposal: 12 crore Indian rupees, or around $2.5 million.

  When I first meet Rakhi, in the summer of 2010, she lives in a two-room apartment in a police compound with another ex-fighter who has surrendered and two cops who guard them around the clock.

  Rakhi spends her days mostly watching television. She eats well. She worries about getting fat. Mostly she worries about her future, which is as uncertain as ever. She knows she cannot stay in police custody forever. Nor can she go back to where she comes from.

  “We can never eat rice at home” is how Rakhi puts it. This is a literal translation of a Bengali expression that refers to a sense of being cast out, of not being able to share a meal with your people anymore and so, not belonging either.

  The police say she is entitled to vocational training, except that nearly three years later, when I check, she hasn’t received any. She says there is one lesson she has learned since leaving. “I want to live now,” she tells me. “I want to have a decent life, like you have. Before, I didn’t care if I lived or died. Before, I was at war, always at war.”

  To me, this says much more about how little she once had to lose.