This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Typically the profile of men who were susceptible to the ISIS deathtrap was like Majeed’s—young, educated and urban—either lower middle class or middle class. Contrary to popular assumptions, not one of them had studied at a madrassa, the traditional Islamic schools sometimes viewed as breeding grounds of orthodoxy and radicalism.

  But the RAW officer had an interesting poser. ‘We must ask ourselves why all these years, even though Afghanistan is much closer to us not a single Indian Muslim went to join the “jihad” there. Iraq and Syria are someone else’s war; so why are people going at all?’ All these years, the officer pointed out, the Indian Muslim had shown no linkages to the global ummah; home-grown jihadists had been more moulded by domestic grievances in India. The officer believed that in an increasingly polarized environment, with the internet opening the gates to a universe that could not be monitored, India had failed at building an effective counter-radicalization message. ‘Extremism, in my opinion, is a bigger threat than terrorism. Hindu and Muslim radicals are feeding off each other. We need to be intolerant about intolerance.’

  IV

  ‘If you don’t want the poor to be attracted to terrorism, if you don’t want young men to kill, then first of all, the government needs to deliver governance and basic rights to those who live in the most backward, undeveloped areas.’

  This was no platitude dished out by a vote-seeking, politically correct politician. Nor was it an attempt at punditry by an analyst or a journalist. The words were important—not just for the common sense they conveyed, cutting through a noisy fractious national debate with simple clarity, but because of who was speaking them. That they came from the young widow of a police officer who had just been assassinated by the Maoist rebels who took him hostage made them extraordinary.

  If she was angry or bitter—and she should have been—you couldn’t tell. Her hair was pulled back from her face as tightly as her grief was withheld from public display. Her face, free from make-up or any other adornment, save a tiny black bindi, was glistening in the light, almost like a halo.

  I met Sunita Induwar in January 2010, four months after her husband’s body was found in a ditch on the highway between Ranchi and Jamshedpur. His head had been severed from the body in a Talibanesque decapitation. A note written in red ink and nailed to a nearby tree declared that the recent killing of a comrade by security forces had now been avenged.

  But she made no mention of the grisly beheading that had compelled her ten-year-old to vow that just as soon as he was old enough he too would become a police officer and kill the men who had murdered his father.

  Instead, in a country which lived from headline to headline, abduction to abduction and massacre to massacre, she was focused on, somehow, stopping more bloodshed.

  ‘In these areas, there is no literacy, no education,’ she said, her tone, steely and firm, yet soft. ‘Terrorists are able to lure young men by gifting guns and making other promises.’ Francis Induwar, still only in his thirties, was an intelligence officer who was kidnapped when he went to meet an informant.

  But his wife was not asking for the army to be unleashed against the Maoists or even for unequivocal condemnation by public intellectuals. Her loss was personal but her comments were gentler than those of the home minister at the time, P. Chidambaram, who had called for civil society to answer for their sympathy for left-wing extremists, charging it with ‘tying down the hands of the security forces’.

  ■

  The homespun movement of armed rebellion led by India’s Maoists, also known as Naxalites (after the first left-wing uprising in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal in 1967), was described by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 as the country’s ‘single biggest internal security threat’.

  Controlling what is known as India’s red corridor and vowing to overthrow the state, their fiefdom ran all the way from Nepal down to southern India and from the east to the country’s central regions. More than 200 districts in several states of India were impacted by Maoist groups whose literature claimed that ‘the seizure of state power should be the goal of all our activity’. Indian intelligence officials argued that Naxalites were financed and armed by China but the Maoists who operated from remote tribal districts and forest areas positioned their terrorism as a home-grown class war and an ‘armed struggle’ seeking to rectify social and economic inequities. Successive governments—despite many demands from within to the contrary—had declined to use the military against Maoist insurgents, distinguishing their violence from that of the secessionist threat in areas like Jammu and Kashmir or the Northeast, where the army had been deployed for decades. Such distinctions aside, the Maoist insurgency was no less dangerous than any of the other violence that the state had to contend with. As the terrorists menaced rail tracks and primary schools, and even entire police stations, the red corridor became more dangerous for a police or paramilitary soldier than duty in Kashmir. In 2014, rebels in the red zone were killing more men in uniform than in all the other insurgency areas together. Terrorism in the red corridor remained India’s most unaddressed and dangerous fault line, as it challenged the very legitimacy of Indian democracy. And it was tougher to pin on an external threat.

  ‘Even yojanas [government schemes] don’t reach the people they are meant for. Let’s say a hundred rupees is allocated for a programme, only ten rupees from it will reach the citizen,’ Sunita said, flagging rampant corruption, leakages and inefficiencies in the system. ‘If there was access to education, if the public distribution system for rations worked, if the deprived were looked after, we could stop this.’ She was proud of her teenage son’s decision to become a police officer but she understood that the challenge ran deeper. She knew that what had happened to her husband would happen again. And again.

  Locked into battles of ideology and politics, India’s Maoist conflict was already its longest war within. And yet, in the absence of any policy consensus for decades, it was a battle we were set to lose. Public responses were usually of three kinds. There were those who romanticized the Naxals as do-gooders whose armed struggle had given a voice to the poor; they condemned their violence but saw the state as the oppressor and the Naxals as the generals of an army of the victimized pushed into battle by inequities of class.

  On the other side were those with the hard-nosed view that you could only talk about ‘development’ after you had reclaimed large swathes of land dominated by Maoists. Chidambaram, for example, told me that he was in favour of air support for operations against the insurgents, a demand he said was echoed by the security forces and five different chief ministers. But reflecting the dangerous divide within, he confessed to a ‘limited mandate’ as home minister in being able to prevail upon his own government to grant this. He said he had made a pitch to the Cabinet Committee on Security, where his proposals were shot down by party colleagues A. K. Antony and Pranab Mukherjee. ‘I have tried to convince them,’ he told me in comments that would erupt into a huge political storm, ‘I will go back to try and revisit that mandate. I have already spoken to the prime minister.’

  And then there was the third approach—one of sheer casualness and ineptitude—best embodied by politicians like Shivraj Patil, Chidambaram’s predecessor. To my utter incredulity he once said to me, ‘Do you know how many people die in road accidents every year?’ to underline his bizarre claim that traffic accidents were more fatal than killings by armed insurgents—so why worry. Frighteningly, it was while addressing a conference of India’s top police officers that Patil as home minister argued that the Maoist threat was exaggerated and asked that no ‘fear psychosis’ be created. At the same conference, his boss, the prime minister, had just described left-wing violence as India’s biggest internal security threat. The dissonance trivialized the gravity of the issue.

  Sunita Induwar’s cogent articulation of the Maoist challenge cut through the chaos of these contradictions. It was the perfect middle ground that could have brought the extremes closer to th
e centre.

  ■

  The genesis of the armed uprising among the peasantry can be traced back to pre-independence India. The British strategy was to solidify control by winning over the high caste, local elites. Landlords and revenue collectors were co-opted to be allies and mediators. A new tax policy gave the zamindars full control over land and wrested away the right of the peasant to the soil he tilled. With no ownership rights over what was cultivated, poor farmers were reduced to being bonded labour. Historian Sumit Sarkar has a subaltern narrative of who drove the revolt against the colonialists. Writing about the need for a ‘history from below’ he argued that Pax Britannica was challenged in a series of revolts by people ‘predominantly lower class in social composition’. The most militant uprisings even then were by tribal communities who in the opinion of anthropologist and historian K. Suresh Singh, ‘revolted more often and far more violently than any other community’.

  In a prelude to the contemporary fault line that runs through modern India’s forest areas inhabited by tribals and often ‘controlled’ by Maoists, the Adivasis of the late nineteenth century fought attempts by the imperialists to channel the forest wealth for themselves. Today, there are tribal movements against mining behemoths like POSCO and Vedanta. And just as the Dongria Kondh community in eastern Orissa successfully convinced the highest court of India that corporations could not mine the Niyamgiri Hills—considered the seat of God by their clan—without the consent of the local population, so too in the 1890s did Birsa Munda, a firebrand tribal revolutionary lead his people against ‘intruders’ in what would come to be the separate state of Jharkhand. As effigies of the British Raj were burnt, his protest did not even pretend to be non-violent. His slogans included the vow that ‘guns and bullets would turn to water’. Munda became a legend among his people, kept alive through folk songs passed down the generations.

  Through the length of British rule, peasant and tribal movements took the shape of violent mutinies, against not just the foreigners but also the Indian land-grabbers and rentiers who had dented their economic rights. Finally, it was in independent India, in 1967, that their restiveness got christened ‘Naxal’ after the hilly area where Charu Mazumdar called for an armed struggle along the lines of Mao Zedong’s communist revolution.

  Today, of course, though Maoist and Naxal are words used interchangeably in popular parlance, the China reference has little contemporary resonance; Beijing itself has abandoned revolution for ‘market socialism’.

  But the Maoist threat remains chillingly real. Forty thousand square kilometres of territory and 2,000 police stations in 223 districts are affected by the ultras either partially or substantially. And the state’s efforts at combating this threat have only been partially successful. It has also continued to repeat mistakes that were made elsewhere when it came to tackling terrorism. The creation of a private militia—the Salwa Judum—mirrored the error of using counter insurgents (Ikhwanis) to fight militants in the Kashmir Valley. In both cases, the result was similar: a slew of extra-constitutional killings and a deepening of the alienation among the local people. In 2005, in response to the brutality of Maoist violence, Congress leader Mahendra Karma formed the Salwa Judum—which means ‘peace march’ or ‘purification hunt’ in Gondi. It began with an innocuous procession led by Karma, but supported by the BJP as well, against the Maoists’ diktat prohibiting tribals from collecting tendu leaves. It soon evolved into a vigilante group, sponsored by the state to forcibly flush out tribals from Maoist controlled areas and force them into other states or special camps. It was not unusual for the militia to recruit teenage boys as young as fifteen and sixteen. The vigilantes were called Koya commandos or Special Police Officers and paid a paltry Rs 2,000 a month. They conducted violent raids, pushed out tribals to relief camps, did combing operations and fought alongside the security forces. Soon they began plundering and looting Adivasi villages, misusing the arms they were permitted to carry. There were complaints of rape and murder. Before 2011 when the Supreme Court shut it down as illegal, several thousand tribals had been displaced by the Salwa Judum from their homes and shoved into camps they did not want to stay in. In 2013, almost the entire leadership of the Congress in the state of Chhattisgarh was wiped out after Maoists attacked their motorcade, blew up two cars and opened fire. In the convoy was Mahendra Karma, the founder of the Salwa Judum. In May 2015, his son Chhavendra Karma started a new anti-Maoist militia. Is this Salwa Judum Part 2, he was asked.

  ‘Yes, you can say that,’ he replied.

  It was astonishing that it was left to the victims of Naxal violence to drive home the gravity of the challenge. Sumer Singh, a paramilitary officer, lost his younger brother to a massacre in Dantewada in 2010. He told me that people like his brother became statistics that were forgotten the day they died. ‘Yeh bhi kisi ke bache hain. Who thinks about the family, the five children who are left behind without a father?’ he said angrily. In a startling admission he said that when the jawans were sent deep into the forests to fight the Naxals they often did not even have basic knowledge of the topography. They were, literally, cannon fodder.

  ‘Hamne sub kuch kho diya hai ab ham chahte hain ki kisi tarah iss ka ant ho (We have lost everything. We just want this [Naxalism] to end somehow),’ he told me, breaking down in tears. ‘If there is illegal mining, if tribals are being denied ownership of their resources, if the state is not governing as it should and that is what is pushing people into violence, why should we, the soldiers, pay the price for that? That is the state’s responsibility; not ours.’

  And yet Naxal violence, like so many other aspects of terrorism in India, remains dangerously politicized and is not treated with the seriousness it deserves.

  Playing politics with terror, no matter of what kind— home-grown, external or Maoist—is exceptionally dangerous. Former RAW chief Vikram Sood warned, ‘There is a lot of politics in the insurgency. But no state can afford to have this much politics in counter-insurgency.’

  Four

  * * *

  IN THE NAME OF GOD

  I

  CHARRED AND BLOODIED beyond recognition, the body showed signs of a final struggle—mouth open and one hand outstretched in an unanswered plea for help or maybe mercy. The head lolled sideways on the tarred road and the legs were brutally parted. For the man or men who had done this, murder was not enough. Rape was the preamble to the final murderous assault.

  The truth, in this instance, was too graphic to be telecast. But on that March evening in 2002, we kept the camera rolling for the sake of documenting the horror; at the time we weren’t aware that sexual violence would become the near invisible leitmotif of the Gujarat riots.

  Before the small milk van in which the woman was travelling was overturned and set alight, it had been carrying a group of forty villagers trying to escape a rampaging mob. We rushed to the spot when we got news of the massacre but we were too late. There was no one there but the woman, whose name we would never know, lying on the road. By the side of her body the aluminium handles of overturned milk cans gleamed through the orange of the flames that were consuming the van.

  Later, at the local police station, we would meet someone else who had been in that vehicle. She had managed to escape. Only just. Sultani was a waif-like young woman of eighteen, her voice a whisper, her eyes drained of all emotion, her head draped in a thin muslin dupatta that she clung tightly to, as if it were her only remaining shield of protection. When the armed mob descended upon the van, pushing it over and setting it on fire, its occupants had clambered out and run in every direction, many of them towards the nearby river. Sultani fell behind with her three-year-old son Faizan. The rioters tore her clothes off and one by one they raped her. What she remembered vividly was the sound of her baby crying, unable to comprehend the specifics, but instinctively aware that something terrible was being done to his mother. Sultani fell unconscious and her rapists took her for dead. It was the only reason she was still alive.

&n
bsp; Two months later, when I met her for the first time, she had decided to try and file a criminal complaint against the rapists. I watched aghast as this traumatized young woman was made to recount her story to a group of constables—all of them male. Even the presence of a television camera made no difference to the pot-bellied men as they gawked and sniggered at her. The police argued that they had already received multiple complaints about the ‘tempo incident’ and to register a separate FIR for rape would not be possible. ‘After all, if a shopping centre is burnt down,’ offered the deputy inspector, smiling contemptuously, ‘we won’t take down hundreds of different FIRs from individual shopowners. The incident is one; the mob is one. Only a single FIR needs to be filed.’ Across the state, this method of clubbing cases together would effectively render rape almost invisible. And this, despite the fact that numerous women who had been brutally violated, who had lost everything—their homes, their families—were bravely coming forward to tell their stories.

  Before she made it to a relief camp, one woman walked 300 kilometres over twenty-four days, her two children with her, sometimes hiding in the fields, at other moments pretending to support the marauders by chanting ‘Jai Bajrang Dal’ to get safe passage past them. Another wrestled with a mother’s dilemma: her twelve-year-old son was the only witness to the rape and murder of his elder sister. She wasn’t willing to put him through the trauma of testifying. When we met Ayub Pathan and his mother Hasina she told us that her child had slipped into an abyss of silence from which she could not pull him out. He had barely spoken in weeks; not since the day he had had to recount the horror of what he had seen when hiding from the rioters, along with his four cousins, all younger than him. When the mob came for his family, the kids ducked for cover behind tall grass from where they saw Ayub’s sister, Afsana, and ten other family members being shoved around and then stripped to their skin before being sexually assaulted and pushed into the village canal, one by one. Hasina had made ten failed attempts to register an official case with the police. The cops demanded an eye-witness account—in this case that could only come from her traumatized, pre-adolescent child—and that was something she just could not do. This was the moral quandary for aid workers and activists—in many instances children were the only living witnesses who could testify to the truth.