[News] India - Walking with the Comrades

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Walking with the Comrades

By Arundhati Roy

Sunday, 21 Mar, 2010 | 12:47 AM PST |
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/22-walking-with-the-comrades-aj-07

Last month, quietly, unannounced, Arundhati Roy 
decided to visit the forbidding and forbidden 
precincts of Central India’s Dandakaranya 
Forests, home to a melange of tribespeople many 
of whom have taken up arms to protect their 
people against state-backed marauders and 
exploiters. She recorded in considerable detail 
the first face-to-face journalistic “encounter” 
with armed guerillas, their families and 
comrades, for which she combed the forests for 
weeks at personal risk. This essay was published 
on Friday in Delhi’s Outlook magazine. Arundhati 
Roy made the pictures in this 20,000 word essay available exclusively to Dawn.

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door 
in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment 
with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. 
I’d been waiting for months to hear from them.

I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in 
Dantewara, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given 
times on two given days. That was to take care of 
bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport 
strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: 
"Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. 
Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and 
bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji."

Namashkar Guruji. I wondered whether the Meeter 
and Greeter would be expecting a man. And whether 
I should get myself a moustache.

There are many ways to describe Dantewara. It’s 
an oxymoron. It’s a border town smack in the 
heart of India. It’s the epicenter of a war. It’s 
an upside down, inside out town.

In Dantewara the police wear plain clothes and 
the rebels wear uniforms. The jail-superintendant 
is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred 
of them escaped from the old town jail two years 
ago). Women who have been raped are in police 
custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.

Across the Indravati river, in the area 
controlled by the Maoists, is the place the 
police call ‘Pakistan’. There the villages are 
empty, but the forest is full of people. Children 
who ought to be in school, run wild. In the 
lovely forest villages, the concrete school 
buildings have either been blown up and lie in a 
heap, or they’re full of policemen. The deadly 
war that’s unfolding in the jungle, is a war that 
the Government of India is both proud and shy of.

Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well 
as denied. P. Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister 
(and CEO of the war) says it does not exist, that 
it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds 
have been allocated to it and tens of thousands 
of troops are being mobilized for it. Though the 
theatre of war is in the jungles of Central 
India, it will have serious consequences for us all.

If ghosts are the lingering spirits of someone, 
or something that has ceased to exist, then 
perhaps the new four-lane highway crashing 
through the forest is the opposite of a ghost. 
Perhaps it is the harbinger of what is still to come.

The antagonists in the forest are disparate and 
unequal in almost every way. On one side is a 
massive paramilitary force armed with the money, 
the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower.

On the other, ordinary villagers armed with 
traditional weapons, backed by a superbly 
organized, hugely motivated Maoist guerilla 
fighting force with an extraordinary and violent 
history of armed rebellion. The Maoists and the 
paramilitary are old adversaries and have fought 
older avatars of each other several times before: 
Telengana in the ’50s, West Bengal, Bihar, 
Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in the late ’60s and 
’70s, and then again in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and 
Maharashtra from the ’80s all the way through to the present.

They are familiar with each other’s tactics, and 
have studied each other’s combat manuals closely. 
Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or 
their previous avatars) had been not just 
defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. 
Each time they have re-emerged, more organized, 
more determined and more influential than ever. 
Today once again the insurrection has spread 
through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, 
Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal­ homeland to 
millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.

It’s easier on the liberal conscience to believe 
that the war in the forests is a war between the 
Government of India and the Maoists, who call 
elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have 
openly declared their intention to overthrow the 
Indian State. It’s convenient to forget that 
tribal people in Central India have a history of 
resistance that pre-dates Mao by centuries. 
(That’s a truism of course. If they didn’t, they 
wouldn’t exist.) The Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the 
Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds have all 
rebelled several times, against the British, 
against zamindars and moneylenders. The 
rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands 
killed, but the people were never conquered. Even 
after Independence, tribal people were at the 
heart of the first uprising that could be 
described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West 
Bengal (where the word Naxalite­now used 
interchangeably with ‘Maoist’ ­originates). Since 
then Naxalite politics has been inextricably 
entwined with tribal uprisings, which says as 
much about the tribals as it does about Naxalites.

This legacy of rebellion has left behind a 
furious people who have been deliberately 
isolated and marginalized by the Indian 
Government. The Indian Constitution, the moral 
underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by 
Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for 
tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial 
policy and made the State custodian of tribal 
homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal 
population into squatters on their own land. It 
denied them their traditional rights to forest 
produce, it criminalized a whole way of life. In 
exchange for the right to vote it snatched away 
their right to livelihood and dignity.

Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a 
downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight 
of hand, the Government began to use their own 
penury against them. Each time it needed to 
displace a large population­for dams, irrigation 
projects, mines­ it talked of "bringing tribals 
into the mainstream" or of giving them "the 
fruits of modern development". Of the tens of 
millions of internally displaced people (more 
than 30 million by big dams alone), refugees of 
India’s ‘progress’, the great majority are tribal 
people. When the Government begins to talk of 
tribal welfare, it’s time to worry.

The most recent expression of concern has come 
from the Home Minister P. Chidambaram who says he 
doesn’t want tribal people living in ‘museum 
cultures’. The well -being of tribal people 
didn’t seem to be such a priority during his 
career as a corporate lawyer, representing the 
interests of several major mining companies. So 
it might be an idea to enquire into the basis for his new anxiety.

Over the past five years or so, the Governments 
of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West 
Bengal have signed hundreds of MOUs with 
corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, 
all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron 
factories, power plants, aluminum refineries, 
dams and mines. In order for the MOUs to 
translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.

Therefore, this war.

When a country that calls itself a democracy 
openly declares war within its borders, what does 
that war look like? Does the resistance stand a 
chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they 
just violent nihilists foisting an out-dated 
ideology on tribal people, goading them into a 
hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they 
learned from their past experience? Is armed 
struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the 
Sandwich Theory­of ‘ordinary’ tribals being 
caught in the crossfire between the State and the 
Maoists­an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and 
‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is 
being made out? Do their interests converge? Have 
they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?

The day before I left, my mother called sounding 
sleepy. "I’ve been thinking," she said, with a 
mother’s weird instinct, "what this country needs is revolution."

An article on the internet says that Israel’s 
Mossad is training 30 high-ranking Indian police 
officers in the techniques of targeted 
assassinations, to render the Maoist organization 
"headless". There’s talk in the press about the 
new hardware that has been bought from Israel: 
Laser range finders, thermal imaging equipment 
and unmanned drones so popular with the US army. 
Perfect weapons to use against the poor.

The drive from Raipur to Dantewara takes about 
ten hours through areas known to be 
‘Maoist-infested.’ These are not careless words. 
‘Infest/infestation’ implies disease/pests. 
Diseases must be cured. Pests must be 
exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these 
creeping, innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.

To protect the highway security forces have 
‘secured’ a narrow bandwidth of forest on either 
side. Further in, it’s the raj of the ‘Dada log.’ The Brothers. The Comrades.

On the outskirts of Raipur, a massive billboard 
advertises Vedanta (the company our Home Minister 
once worked with) Cancer hospital. In Orissa, 
where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing 
a University. In these creeping, innocuous ways 
mining corporations enter our imaginations: the 
Gentle Giants who Really Care. It’s called CSR, 
Corporate Social Responsibility. It allows mining 
companies to be like the legendary actor and 
former Chief Minister, NTR who liked to play all 
the parts in Telugu mythologicals­the good guys 
and the bad guys, all at once, in the same movie. 
This CSR masks the outrageous economics that 
underpins the mining sector in India. For 
example, according to the recent Lokayukta Report 
for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined 
by a private company the Government gets a 
royalty of Rs 27 and the mining company makes Rs 
5000. In the bauxite and aluminum sector the 
figures are even worse. We’re talking about 
daylight robbery to the tune of billions of 
dollars. Enough to buy elections, governments, 
judges, newspapers, TV channels, NGOs and aid 
agencies. What’s the occasional cancer hospital here or there?

I don’t remember seeing Vedanta’s name on the 
long list of MOUs signed by the Chhattisgarh 
government. But I’m twisted enough to suspect 
that if there’s a cancer hospital, there must be 
a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere.

We pass Kanker, famous for its Counter Terrorism 
& Jungle Warfare Training School run by Brigadier 
B K Ponwar, Rumpelstiltskin of this war, charged 
with the task of turning corrupt, sloppy 
policemen (straw) into jungle commandos (gold). 
"Fight a guerilla like a guerilla", the motto of 
the warfare training school, is painted on the rocks.

The men are taught to run, slither, jump on and 
off air-borne helicopters, ride horses (for some 
reason), eat snakes and live off the jungle. The 
Brigadier takes great pride in training street 
dogs to fight ‘terrorists.’ Eight hundred 
policemen graduate from the Warfare Training 
School every six weeks. Twenty similar schools 
are being planned all over India. The police 
force is gradually being turned into an army. (In 
Kashmir it’s the other way around. The army is 
being turned into a bloated, administrative, 
police force.) Upside down. Inside out. Either way, the Enemy is the People.

It’s late. Jagdalpur is asleep, except for the 
many hoardings of Rahul Gandhi asking people to 
join the Youth Congress. He’s been to Bastar 
twice in recent months but hasn’t said anything 
much about the war. It’s probably too messy for 
the Peoples’ Prince to meddle in at this point. 
His media managers must have put their foot down. 
The fact that the Salwa Judum (Purification 
Hunt)­the dreaded, government sponsored vigilante 
group responsible for rapes, killings, burning 
down villages and driving hundreds of thousands 
of people from their homes­ is led by Mahendra 
Karma, a Congress MLA, doesn’t get much play in 
the carefully orchestrated publicity around Rahul Gandhi.

I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in 
time for my appointment (first day, first show). 
I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery 
red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone 
was watching me and having a laugh. Within 
minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap 
and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish 
on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. 
"Are you the one who’s going in?" he asked me. No 
Namashkar Guruji. I didn’t know what to say. He 
took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed 
it to me. It said "Outlook nahi mila." (Couldn’t find Outlook)

"And the bananas?"

"I ate them", he said, "I got hungry."

He really was a security threat.

His backpack said Charlie Brown ­ Not your 
ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. 
I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I 
was about to enter, was full of people who had 
many names and fluid identities. It was like balm 
to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with 
yourself, to become someone else for a while.

We walked to the bus stand, only a few minutes 
away from the temple. It was already crowded. 
Things happened quickly. There were two men on 
motorbikes. There was no conversation­just a 
glance of acknowledgment, a shifting of body 
weight, the revving of engines. I had no idea 
where we were going. We passed the house of the 
Superintendent of Police (SP), which I recognized 
from my last visit. He was a candid man, the SP: 
"See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t 
be solved by us police or military. The problem 
with these tribals is they don’t understand 
greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope 
for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and 
instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out."

In no time at all we were riding out of town. No 
tail. It was a long ride, three hours by my 
watch. It ended abruptly in the middle of 
nowhere, on an empty road with forest on either 
side. Mangtu got off. I did too. The bikes left, 
and I picked up my backpack and followed the 
small internal security threat into the forest. 
It was a beautiful day. The forest floor was a carpet of gold.

In a while we emerged on the white, sandy banks 
of a broad flat river. It was obviously monsoon 
fed, so now it was more or less a sand flat, at 
the center a stream, ankle deep, easy to wade 
across. Across was ‘Pakistan’. "Out there, ma’am" 
the candid SP had said to me, "my boys shoot to 
kill." I remembered that as we began to cross. I 
saw us in a policeman’s rifle-sights­tiny figures 
in a landscape, easy to pick off. But Mangtu 
seemed quite unconcerned, and I took my cue from him.

Waiting for us on the other bank, in a lime green 
shirt that said Horlicks! was Chandu. A slightly 
older security threat. Maybe twenty. He had a 
lovely smile, a cycle, a jerry can with boiled 
water and many packets of glucose biscuits for 
me, from the Party. We caught our breath and 
began to walk again. The cycle, it turned out, 
was a red herring. The route was almost entirely 
non-cycle-able. We climbed steep hills and 
clambered down rocky paths along some pretty 
precarious ledges. When he couldn’t wheel it, 
Chandu lifted the cycle and carried it over his 
head as though it weighed nothing. I began to 
wonder about his bemused village boy air. I 
discovered (much later) that he could handle 
every kind of weapon, "except for an LMG", he informed me cheerfully.

Three beautiful, sozzled men with flowers in 
their turbans walked with us for about half an 
hour, before our paths diverged. At sunset, their 
shoulder bags began to crow. They had roosters in 
them, which they had taken to market but hadn’t managed to sell.

Chandu seems to be able to see in the dark. I 
have to use my torch. The crickets start up and 
soon there’s an orchestra, a dome of sound over 
us. I long to look up at the night sky, but I 
dare not. I have to keep my eyes on the ground. 
One step at a time. Concentrate.

I hear dogs. But I can’t tell how far away they 
are. The terrain flattens out. I steal a look at 
the sky. It makes me ecstatic. I hope we’re going 
to stop soon. "Soon." Chandu says. It turns out 
to be more than an hour. I see silhouettes of enormous trees. We arrive.

The village seems spacious, the houses far away 
from each other. The house we enter is beautiful. 
There’s a fire, some people sitting around. More 
people outside, in the dark. I can’t tell how 
many. I can just about make them out. A murmur 
goes around. Lal Salaam Kaamraid. (Red Salute, 
Comrade) Lal Salaam, I say. I’m beyond tired. The 
lady of the house calls me inside and gives me 
chicken curry cooked in green beans and some red 
rice. Fabulous. Her baby is asleep next to me, 
her silver anklets gleam in the firelight.

After dinner I unzip my sleeping bag. It’s a 
strange intrusive sound, the big zip. Someone 
puts on the radio. BBC Hindi service. The Church 
of England has withdrawn its funds from Vedanta’s 
Niyamgiri project, citing environmental 
degradation and rights’ violations of the Dongria 
Kondh tribe. I can hear cowbells, snuffling, 
shuffling, cattle-farting. All’s well with the world. My eyes close.

We’re up at five. On the move by six. In another 
couple of hours, we cross another river. We walk 
through some beautiful villages. Every village 
has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, 
like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, 
Bastar tamarind. By eleven the sun is high, and 
walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch.

Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A 
beautiful young girl flirts with him. He looks a 
little shy, maybe because I’m around. Lunch is 
raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red 
chilly powder. We’re going to wait for the sun to 
lose some of its vehemence before we start 
walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There 
is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is 
clean and necessary. No clutter. A black hen 
parades up and down the low mud wall. A bamboo 
grid stabilizes the rafters of the thatched roof 
and doubles as a storage rack. There’s a grass 
broom, two drums, a woven reed basket, a broken 
umbrella and a whole stack of flattened, empty, 
corrugated cardboard boxes. Something catches my 
eye. I need my spectacles. Here’s what’s printed 
on the cardboard: Ideal Power 90 High Energy 
Emulsion Explosive (Class-2) SD CAT ZZ.

We start walking again at about two. In the 
village we are going to we will meet a Didi 
(Sister, Comrade) who knows what the next step of 
the journey will be. Chandu doesn’t. There is an 
economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to 
know everything. But when we reach the village, 
Didi isn’t there. There’s no news of her. For the 
first time I see a little cloud of worry settling 
over Chandu. A big one settles over me. I don’t 
know what the systems of communication are, but what if they’ve gone wrong?

We’re parked outside a deserted school building, 
a little way out of the village. Why are all the 
government village schools built like concrete 
bastions, with steel shutters for windows and 
sliding folding steel doors? Why not like the 
village houses, with mud and thatch? Because they 
double up as barracks and bunkers. "In the 
villages in Abhujmad", Chandu says, "schools are 
like this
" He scratches a building plan with a 
twig in the earth. Three octagons attached to 
each other like a honeycomb. "So they can fire in 
all directions." He draws arrows to illustrate 
his point, like a cricket graphic­ a batsman’s 
wagon wheel. There are no teachers in any of the 
schools, Chandu says. They’ve all run away. Or 
have you chased them away? No, we only chase 
police. But why should teachers come here, to the 
jungle, when they get their salaries sitting at home? Good point.

He informs me that this is a ‘new area’. The Party has entered only recently.

About twenty young people arrive, girls and boys. 
In their teens and early twenties. Chandu 
explains that this is the village level militia, 
the lowest rung of the Maoists’ military 
hierarchy. I have never seen anyone like them 
before. They are dressed in saris and lungis, 
some in frayed olive green fatigues. The boys 
wear jewelry, headgear. Every one of them has a 
muzzle-loading rifle, what’s called a bharmaar. 
Some also have knives, axes, a bow and arrow.

One boy carries a crude mortar fashioned out of a 
heavy three-foot GI pipe. It’s filled with 
gunpowder and shrapnel and ready to be fired. It 
makes a big noise, but can only be used once. 
Still, it scares the police, they say, and giggle.

War doesn’t seem to be uppermost on their minds. 
Perhaps because their area is outside the home 
range of the Salwa Judum. They have just finished 
a days’ work, helping to build fencing around 
some village houses to keep the goats out of the 
fields. They’re full of fun and curiosity. The 
girls are confident and easy with the boys. I 
have a sensor for this sort of thing, and I am 
impressed. Their job, Chandu says, is to patrol 
and protect a group of four or five villages and 
to help in the fields, clean wells or repair houses­doing whatever’s needed.

Still no Didi. What to do? Nothing. Wait. Help 
out with some chopping and peeling.

After dinner, without much talk, everybody falls 
in line. Clearly we’re moving. Everything moves 
with us, the rice, vegetables, pots and pans. We 
leave the school compound and walk single file 
into the forest. In less than half an hour we 
arrive in a glade where we are going to sleep. 
There’s absolutely no noise. Within minutes 
everyone has spread their blue plastic sheets, 
the ubiquitous ‘jhilli’, (without which there 
will be no Revolution). Chandu and Mangtu share 
one and spread one out for me. They find me the 
best place, by the best grey rock. Chandu says he 
has sent a message to Didi. If she gets it she 
will be here first thing in the morning. If she gets it.

It’s the most beautiful room I have slept in in a 
long time. My private suite in a thousand-star 
hotel. I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful 
children with their curious arsenal. They’re all 
Maoists for sure. Are they all going to die? Is 
the Jungle Warfare Training School for them? And 
the helicopter gunships, the thermal imaging and the laser range finders?

Why must they die? What for? To turn all of this 
into a mine? I remember my visit to the opencast 
iron-ore mines in Keonjhar, Orissa. There was 
forest there once. And children like these. Now 
the land is like a raw, red wound. Red dust fills 
your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the 
air is red, the people are red, their lungs and 
hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble 
through their villages, bumper to bumper, 
thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to 
Paradip port from where it will go to China. 
There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden 
cities that spring up overnight. Into a ‘growth 
rate’ that leaves economists breathless. Into weapons to make war.

Everyone’s asleep except for the sentries who 
take one-and-a-half hour shifts. Finally I can 
look at the stars. When I was a child growing up 
on the banks of the Meenachal river, I used to 
think the sound of crickets ­which always started 
up at twilight­was the sound of stars revving up, 
getting ready to shine. I’m surprised at how much 
I love being here. There is nowhere else in the 
world that I would rather be. Who should I be 
tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars? Maybe Didi will come tomorrow.

They arrive in the early afternoon. I can see 
them from a distance. About fifteen of them, all 
in olive green uniforms, running towards us. Even 
from a distance, from the way they run, I can 
tell they are the heavy hitters. The Peoples 
Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA). For whom the 
thermal imaging and laser guided rifles. For whom 
the Jungle Warfare Training School.

They carry serious rifles, INSAS, SLR, two have 
AK 47s. The leader of the squad is Comrade Madhav 
who has been with the Party since he was nine. 
He’s from Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. He’s upset 
and extremely apologetic. There was a major 
miscommunication, he says again and again, which 
usually never happens. I was supposed to have 
arrived at the main camp on the very first night. 
Someone dropped the baton in the jungle-relay. 
The motorcycle drop was to have been at an 
entirely different place. "We made you wait, we 
made you walk so much. We ran all the way when 
the message came that you were here." I said it 
was ok, that I had come prepared, to wait and 
walk and listen. He wants to leave immediately, 
because people in the camp were waiting, and worried.

It’s a few hours walk to the camp. It’s getting 
dark when we arrive. There are several layers of 
sentries and concentric circles of patrolling. 
There must be a hundred comrades lined up in two 
rows. Everyone has a weapon. And a smile. They 
begin to sing: Lal lal salaam, lal lal salaam, 
aane vaaley saathiyon ko lal lal salaam. (Red 
salute to the comrades who have arrived.) It was 
sung sweetly, as though it was a folk song about 
a river, or a forest blossom. With the song, the 
greeting, the handshake and the clenched fist. 
Everyone greets everyone, murmuring Lalslaam, mlalslaa mlalslaam


Other than a large blue jhilli spread out on the 
floor, about fifteen feet square, there are no 
signs of a ‘camp’. This one has a jhilli roof as 
well. It’s my room for the night. I was either 
being rewarded for my days of walking, or being 
pampered in advance for what lay ahead. Or both. 
Either way it was the last time in the entire 
trip that I was going to have a roof over my 
head. Over dinner I meet Comrade Narmada, in 
charge of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan 
(KAMS), who has a price on her head, Comrade 
Saroja of the PLGA who is only as tall as her 
SLR, Comrade Maase (which means Black Girl in 
Gondi) who has a price on her head too, Comrade 
Roopi, the tech wizard, Comrade Raju who’s in 
charge of the Division I’d been walking through, 
and Comrade Venu (or Murali or Sonu or Sushil, 
whatever you would like to call him), clearly the 
senior most of them all. Maybe Central Committee, 
maybe even Polit Bureau. I’m not told, I don’t 
ask. Between us we speak Gondi, Halbi, Telugu, 
Punjabi and Malayalam. Only Maase speaks English. 
(So we all communicate in Hindi!) Comrade Maase 
is tall and quiet and seems to have to swim 
through a layer of pain to enter the 
conversation. But from the way she hugs me I can 
tell she’s a reader. And that she misses having 
books in the jungle. She will tell me her story 
only later. When she trusts me with her grief.

Bad news arrives, as it does in this jungle. A 
runner, with ‘biscuits’. Handwritten notes on 
sheets of paper, folded and stapled into little 
squares. There’s a bag full of them. Like chips. 
News from everywhere. The police have killed five 
people in Ongnaar village, four from the militia 
and one ordinary villager: Santhu Pottai (25), 
Phoolo Vadde (22), Kande Potai (22), Ramoli Vadde 
(20), Dalsai Koram (22). They could have been the 
children in my star-spangled dormitory of last night.

Then good news arrives. A small contingent of 
people with a plump young man. He’s in fatigues 
too, but they look brand new. Everybody admires 
them and comments on the fit. He looks shy and 
pleased. He’s a doctor who has come to live and 
work with the comrades in the forest. The last 
time a doctor visited Dandakaranya was many years ago.

On the radio there’s news about the Home 
Minister’s meeting with Chief Ministers’ of 
states affected by ‘Left Wing Extremism’ to 
discuss the war. The Chief Ministers of Jharkhand 
and Bihar are being demure and have not attended. 
Everybody sitting around the radio laughs. Around 
the time of elections, they say, right through 
the campaign, and then maybe a month or two after 
the government is formed, mainstream politicians 
all say things like ‘Naxals are our children.’ 
You can set your watch to the schedule of when 
they will change their minds, and grow fangs.

I am introduced to Comrade Kamla. I am told that 
I must on no account go even five feet away from 
my jhilli without waking her. Because everybody 
gets disoriented in the dark and could get 
seriously lost. (I don’t wake her. I sleep like a 
log.) In the morning Kamla presents me with a 
yellow polythene packet with one corner snipped 
off. Once it used to contain Abis Gold Refined 
Soya Oil. Now it was my Loo Mug. Nothing’s wasted 
on the Road to the Revolution.

(Even now I think of Comrade Kamla all the time, 
every day. She’s 17. She wears a homemade pistol 
on her hip. And boy, what a smile. But if the 
police come across her, they will kill her. They 
might rape her first. No questions will be asked. 
Because she’s an Internal Security Threat.)

After breakfast Comrade Venu (Sushil, Sonu, 
Murali) is waiting for me, sitting cross-legged 
on the jhilli, looking for all the world like a 
frail, village schoolteacher. I’m going to get a 
history lesson. Or, more accurately a lecture on 
the history of the last thirty years in the 
Dandakaranya forest, which has culminated in the 
war that’s swirling through it today. For sure, 
it’s a partisan’s version. But then, what history 
isn’t? In any case, the secret history must be 
made public if it is to be contested, argued 
with, instead of merely being lied about, which is what is happening now.

Comrade Venu has a calm reassuring, manner and a 
gentle voice that will, in the days to come, 
surface in a context that will completely unnerve 
me. This morning he talks for several hours, 
almost continuously. He’s like a little store 
manager who has a giant bunch of keys with which 
to open up a maze of lockers full of stories, songs and insights.

Comrade Venu was in one of the seven armed squads 
who crossed the Godavari from Andhra Pradesh and 
entered the Dandakaranya Forest (DK, in 
Partyspeak) in June 1980, thirty years ago. He’s 
is one of the original forty-niners. They 
belonged to Peoples War Group (PWG), a faction of 
the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) 
CPI (ML), the original Naxalites. PWG was 
formally announced as separate, independent party 
in April that year, under Kondapalli 
Seetharamiah. PWG had decided to build a standing 
army, for which it would need a base. DK was to 
be that base, and those first squads were sent in 
to reconnoiter the area and begin the process of 
building guerilla zones. The debate about whether 
communist parties ought to have a standing army, 
and whether or not a ‘peoples army’ is a 
contradiction in terms, is an old one. PWGs 
decision to build an army came from its 
experience in Andhra Pradesh, where its ‘Land to 
the Tiller’ campaign led to a direct clash with 
the landlords, and resulted in the kind of police 
repression that the Party found impossible to 
withstand without a trained fighting force of its own.

(By 2004 PWG had merged with the other CPI (ML) 
factions, Party Unity (PU) and the Maoist 
Communist Centre (MCC)­which functions for the 
most part out of Bihar and Jharkhand. To become 
what it is now, the Communist Party of India (Maoist)).

Dandakaranya is part of what the British, in 
their White Man’s way, called Gondwana, land of 
the Gonds. Today the state boundaries of Madhya 
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and 
Maharashtra slice through the forest. Breaking up 
a troublesome people into separate administrative 
units is an old trick. But these Maoists and 
Maoist Gonds don’t pay much attention to things 
like state boundaries. They have different maps 
in their heads, and like other creatures of the 
forest, they have their own paths. For them, 
roads are not meant for walking on. They’re meant 
only to be crossed, or as is increasingly 
becoming the case, ambushed. Though the Gonds 
(divided between the Koya and Dorla tribes) are 
by far the biggest majority, there are small 
settlements of other tribal communities too. The 
non-adivasi communities, traders and settlers, 
live on the edges of the forest, near the roads and markets.

The PWG were not the first evangelicals to arrive 
in Dandakaranya. Baba Amte, the well-known 
Gandhian had opened his ashram and leprosy 
hospital in Warora in 1975. The Ramakrishna 
mission had begun opening village schools in the 
remote forests of Abhujmad. In North Bastar, Baba 
Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to 
‘bring tribals back into the Hindu fold’, which 
involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, 
induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism’s 
great gift­caste. The first converts, the village 
chiefs and big landlords­ people like Mahendra 
Karma, founder of the Salwa Judum­were conferred 
the status of Dwij, twice born, Brahmins. (Of 
course this was a bit of a scam, because nobody 
can become a Brahmin. If they could, we’d be a 
nation of Brahmins by now.) But this counterfeit 
Hinduism is considered good enough for tribal 
people, just like the counterfeit brands of 
everything else­biscuits, soap, matches, oil­that 
are sold in village markets. As part of the 
Hindutva drive the names of villages were changed 
in land records, as a result of which most have 
two names now, peoples’ names and government 
names. Innar village for example, became 
Chinnari. On voters lists tribal names were 
changed to Hindu names. (Massa Karma became 
Mahendra Karma.) Those who did not come forward 
to join the Hindu fold were declared ‘Katwas’ (by 
which they meant Untouchables) who later became 
the natural constituency for the Maoists.

The PWG first began work in South Bastar and 
Gadchiroli. Comrade Venu describes those first 
months in some detail: How the villagers were 
suspicious of them, and wouldn’t let them into 
their homes. No one would offer them food or 
water. The police spread rumours that they were 
thieves. The women hid their jewellery in the 
ashes of their wood stoves. There was an enormous 
amount of repression. In November 1980, in 
Gadchiroli the police opened fire at a village 
meeting and killed an entire squad. That was DKs 
first ‘encounter’ killing. It was a traumatic set 
back, and the comrades retreated across the Godavari and returned to Adilabad.

But in 1981 they returned. They began to organize 
tribal people to demand a rise in the price they 
were being paid for Tendu leaves (which are used 
to make beedis). At the time, traders paid 3 
paisa for a bundle of about 50 leaves. It was a 
formidable job to organize people entirely 
unfamiliar with this kind of politics, to lead them on strike.

Eventually the strike was successful and the 
price was doubled, to 6 paisa a bundle. But the 
real success for the Party was to have been able 
to demonstrate the value of unity and a new way 
of conducting a political negotiation. Today, 
after several strikes and agitations, the price 
of a bundle of Tendu leaves is Rs 1. (It seems a 
little improbable at these rates, but the 
turnover of the Tendu business runs into hundreds 
of crores of rupees.) Every season the Government 
floats tenders and gives contractors permission 
to extract a fixed volume of Tendu leaves ­ 
usually between 1500 and 5000 standard bags known 
as manak boras. Each manak bora contains about 1000 bundles.

(Of course there’s no way of ensuring that the 
contractors don’t extract more than they’re meant 
to.) By the time the Tendu enters the market it 
is sold in kilos. The slippery arithmetic and the 
sly system of measurement that converts bundles 
into manak boras into kilos is controlled by the 
contractors, and leaves plenty of room for 
manipulation of the worst kind. The most 
conservative estimate puts their profit per 
standard bag at about Rs 1100. (That’s after 
paying the Party a commission of Rs 120 per bag.) 
Even by that gauge, a small contractor (1500 
bags) makes about Rs 16 lakh a season and a big 
one (5000 bags) upto Rs 55 lakh.

A more realistic estimate would be several times 
this amount. Meanwhile the Gravest Internal 
Security Threat makes just enough to stay alive until the next season.

We’re interrupted by some laughter and the sight 
of Nilesh, one of the young PLGA comrades, 
walking rapidly towards the cooking area, 
slapping himself. When he comes closer I see that 
he’s carrying a leafy nest of angry red ants that 
have crawled all over him and are biting him on 
his arms and neck. Nilesh is laughing too. "Have 
you ever eaten ant chutney?" Comrade Venu asks 
me. I know red ants well, from my childhood in 
Kerala, I’ve been bitten by them, but I’ve never 
eaten them. (The chutney turns out to be nice. Sour. Lots of folic acid.)

Nilesh is from Bijapur, which is at the heart of 
Salwa Judum operations. Nilesh’s younger brother 
joined the Judum on one of its looting and 
burning sprees and was made a Special Police 
Officer (SPO). He lives in the Basaguda camp with 
his mother. His father refused to go and stayed 
behind in the village. In effect, it’s a family blood feud.

Later on when I had an opportunity to talk to him 
I asked Nilesh why his brother had done that. "He 
was very young," Nilesh said, "He got an 
opportunity to run wild and hurt people and burn 
houses. He went crazy, did terrible things. Now 
he is stuck. He can never come back to the 
village. He will not be forgiven. He knows that."

We return to the history lesson. The Party’s next 
big struggle, Comrade Venu says, was against the 
Ballarpur Paper Mills. The Government had given 
the Thapars a 45-year contract to extract 1.5 
lakh tonnes of bamboo at a hugely subsidized 
rate. (Small beer compared to bauxite, but 
still). The tribals were paid 10 paisa for a 
bundle which contained 20 culms of bamboo. (I 
won’t yield to the vulgar temptation of comparing 
that with the profits the Thapars were making.) A 
long agitation, a strike, followed by 
negotiations with officials of the Paper Mill in 
the presence of the people, tripled the price to 
30 paisa per bundle. For the tribal people these 
were huge achievements. Other political parties 
had made promises, but showed no signs of keeping 
them. People began to approach the PWG asking whether they could join up.

But the politics of Tendu, bamboo and other 
forest produce was seasonal. The perennial 
problem, the real bane of peoples’ lives was the 
biggest landlord of all, the Forest Department. 
Every morning forest officials, even the most 
junior of them, would appear in villages like a 
bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their 
fields, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, 
picking fruit, grazing their cattle, from living. 
They brought elephants to overrun fields and 
scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as 
they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, 
humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, 
from the Forest Department’s point of view, these 
were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional 
activity, and the Department was only 
implementing the Rule of Law. (Their sexual 
exploitation of women was just an added perk in a hardship posting)

Emboldened by the peoples’ participation in these 
struggles, the Party decided to confront the 
Forest Department. It encouraged people to take 
over forest land and cultivate it. The Forest 
Department retaliated by burning new villages 
that came up in forest areas. In 1986 it 
announced a National Park in Bijapur, which meant 
the eviction of 60 villages. More than half of 
them had already been moved out and construction 
of National Park infrastructure had begun when 
the Party moved in. It demolished the 
construction and stopped the eviction of the 
remaining villages. It prevented the Forest 
Department from entering the area. On a few 
occasions, officials were captured, tied to trees 
and beaten by villagers. It was cathartic revenge 
for generations of exploitation. Eventually the 
Forest Department fled. Between 1986 and 2000, 
the Party re-distributed 300,000 acres of 
forestland. Today, Comrade Venu says, there are 
no landless peasants in Dandakaranya.

For today’s generation of young people, the 
Forest Department is a distant memory, the stuff 
of stories mothers tell their children, about a 
mythological past of bondage and humiliation. For 
the older generation, freedom from the Forest 
Department meant genuine freedom. They could 
touch it, taste it. It meant far more than 
India’s Independence ever did. They began to 
rally to the Party that had struggled with them.

The seven-squad team had come a long way. It’s 
influence now ranged across a 60,000 sq kilometer 
stretch of forest, thousands of villages and millions of people.

But the departure of the Forest Department 
heralded the arrival of the police. That set off 
a cycle of bloodshed. Fake ‘encounters’ by the 
police, ambushes by the PWG. With the 
re-distribution of land came other 
responsibilities: irrigation, agricultural 
productivity, and the problem of an expanding 
population arbitrarily clearing forestland. A 
decision was taken to separate ‘mass work’ and ‘military work’.

Today, Dandakaranya is administered by an 
elaborate structure of Jantana Sarkars (peoples 
governments). The organizing principles came from 
the Chinese revolution and the Vietnam war. Each 
Jantana Sarkar is elected by a cluster of 
villages whose combined population can range from 
500 to 5000. It has nine departments: Krishi 
(agriculture), Vyapar-Udyog (trade and industry) 
Arthik (economic), Nyay (justice), Raksha 
(defense), Hospital (health), Jan Sampark (public 
relations), School-Riti Rivaj (education and 
culture), and Jungle. A group of Janatana 
Sarkars, come under an Area Committee. Three Area 
Committees make up a Division. There are ten Divisions in Dandakaranya.

"We have a Save the Jungle department now." 
Comrade Venu says, "you must have read the 
Government Report that says forest has increased in Naxal areas?"

Ironically, Comrade Venu says, the first people 
to benefit from the Party’s campaign against the 
Forest Department were the Mukhiyas (village 
chiefs)­the Dwij brigade. They used their 
manpower and their resources to grab as much land 
as they could, while the going was good. But then 
people began to approach the Party with their 
"internal contradictions," as Comrade Venu puts 
it quaintly. The Party began to turn its 
attention to issues of equity, class and 
injustice within tribal society. The big 
landlords sensed trouble on the horizon. As the 
Party’s influence expanded, theirs had begun to 
wane. Increasingly people were taking their 
problems to the Party instead of to the Mukhiyas. 
Old forms of exploitation began to be challenged. 
On the day of the first rain, people were 
traditionally supposed to till the Mukhiyas land 
instead of their own. That stopped. They no 
longer offered them the first days picking of 
mahua or other forest produce. Obviously, something needed to be done.

Enter Mahendra Karma, one of the biggest 
landlords in the region and at the time a member 
of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1990 he 
rallied a group of Mukhiyas and landlords and 
started a campaign called the Jan Jagran Abhiyan 
(Public Awakening Campaign). Their way of 
‘awakening’ the ‘public’ was to form a hunting 
party of about three hundred men to comb the 
forest, killing people, burning houses and 
molesting women. The then Madhya Pradesh 
Government­Chhattisgarh had not yet been 
created­provided police back up. In Maharashtra, 
something similar, called ‘Democratic Front’ 
began its assault. Peoples’ War responded to all 
of this in true Peoples’ War style, by killing a 
few of the most notorious landlords. In a few 
months the Jan Jagran Abhiyan, the ‘white terror’ 
­Comrade Venu’s term for it­faded. In 1998, 
Mahendra Karma who had by now joined the Congress 
Party, tried to revive the Jan Jagran Abhiyan. 
This time it fizzled out even faster than before.

Then, in the summer of 2005, fortune favoured 
him. In April, the BJP Government in Chhattisgarh 
signed two MOUs to set up integrated steel plants 
(the terms of which are secret). One for Rs 7000 
crore with Essar Steel in Bailadila, and the 
other for Rs10,000 crore with Tata Steel in 
Lohandiguda. That same month Prime Minister 
Manmohan Singh made his famous statement about 
the Maoists being the "Gravest Internal Security 
Threat" to India. (It was an odd thing to say at 
the time, because actually the opposite was true. 
The Congress Government in Andhra Pradesh had 
just out-maneuvered the Maoists, decimated them. 
They had lost about 1600 of their cadre and were 
in complete disarray.) The PMs statement sent the 
share-value of mining companies soaring. It also 
sent a signal to the media that the Maoists were 
fair game for anyone who chose to go after them. 
In June 2005, Mahendra Karma called a secret 
meeting of Mukhiyas in Kutroo village and 
announced the Salwa Judum (the Purification 
Hunt). A lovely mÈlange of tribal earthiness and Dwij/Nazi sentiment.

Unlike the Jan Jagran Abhiyan, the Salwa Judum 
was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move 
people out of their villages into roadside camps, 
where they could be policed and controlled. In 
military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. 
It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 
1950 when the British were at war against the 
communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very 
popular with the Indian Army, which has used it 
in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telengana. The BJP 
Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh 
announced that as far as his government was 
concerned, villagers who did not move into camps, 
would be considered Maoists. So in Bastar, for an 
ordinary villager, just staying at home, living 
an ordinary life, became the equivalent of 
indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.

Along with a steel mug of black tea, as a special 
treat, someone hands me a pair of earphones and 
switches on a little MP3 player. It’s a scratchy 
recording of Mr D S Manhar, the then SP Bijapur, 
briefing a junior officer over the wireless about 
the rewards and incentives the State and Central 
Governments are offering to ‘jagrit’ (awakened) 
villages, and to people who agree to move into 
camps. He then gives clear instructions that 
villages that refuse to ‘surrender’ should be 
burnt and journalists who want to cover Naxalites 
should be shot on sight. (I’d read about this in 
the papers long ago. When the story broke, as 
punishment­it’s not clear to whom­ the SP was 
transferred to the State Human Rights Commission.)

The first village the Salwa Judum burnt (on 18th 
June 2005) was Ambeli. Between June and December 
2005, it burned, killed, raped and looted its way 
through hundreds of villages of South Dantewara. 
The centre of its operations were the districts 
of Bijapur and Bhairamgarh, near Bailadila, where 
Essar Steel’s new plant was proposed. Not 
coincidentally, these were also Maoist 
strongholds, where the Jantana Sarkars had done a 
great deal of work, especially in building 
water-harvesting structures. The Jantana Sarkars 
became the special target of the Salwa Judum’s 
attacks. Hundreds of people were killed in the 
most brutal ways. About sixty thousand people 
moved into the camps, some voluntarily, others 
out of terror. Of these, about three thousand 
were appointed Special Police Officers (SPOs) on 
a salary of fifteen hundred rupees.

For these paltry crumbs, young people, like 
Nilesh’s brother, have sentenced themselves to a 
life-sentence in a barbed wire enclosure. Cruel 
as they have been, they could end up being the 
worst victims of this horrible war. No Supreme 
Court judgement ordering the Salwa Judum to be 
dismantled can change their fate.

The remaining hundreds of thousands of people 
went off the government radar. (But the 
development funds for these 644 villages did not. 
What happens to that little goldmine?) Many of 
them made their way to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa 
where they usually migrated to work as contract 
labour during the chilly-picking season. But tens 
of thousands fled into the forest, where they 
still remain, living without shelter, coming back 
to their fields and homes only in the daytime.

In the slipstream of the Salwa Judum, a swarm of 
Police stations and camps appeared. The idea was 
to provide carpet security for a ‘creeping 
reoccupation’ of Maoist-controlled territory. The 
assumption was that the Maoists would not dare to 
attack such a large concentration of security 
forces. The Maoists for their part, realized that 
if they did not break that carpet security, it 
would amount to abandoning people whose trust 
they had earned, and with whom they had lived and 
worked for twenty-five years. They struck back in 
a series of attacks on the heart of the security grid.

On 26th January 2006 the PLGA attacked the 
Gangalaur police camp and killed seven people . 
On 17 July 2006 the Salwa Judum camp at Erabor 
was attacked, 20 people were killed and 150 
injured. (You might have read about it: "Maoists 
attacked the relief camp set up by the state 
government to provide shelter to the villagers 
who had fled from their villages because of 
terror unleashed by the Naxalites.") On 13 Dec 
2006 they attacked the Basaguda ‘relief’ camp and 
killed 3 SPOs and a constable. On 15 March 2007 
came the most audacious of them all.



  One hundred and twenty PLGA guerillas, attacked 
the Rani Bodili Kanya Ashram, a girls hostel that 
had been converted into a barrack for 80 
Chhattisgarh Police (and SPOs) while the girls 
still lived in it as human shields. The PLGA 
entered the compound, cordoned off the annexe in 
which the girls lived, and attacked the barracks. 
55 policemen and SPOs were killed. None of the 
girls was hurt. (The candid SP of Dantewara had 
shown me his Power Point presentation with 
horrifying photographs of the burned, 
disemboweled bodies of the policemen amidst the 
ruins of the blown up school building. They were 
so macabre, it was impossible not to look away. 
He looked pleased at my reaction.)



The attack on Rani Bodili caused an uproar in the 
country. Human Rights organizations condemned the 
Maoists not just for their violence, but also for 
being anti-education and attacking schools. But 
in Dandakaranya the Rani Bodili attack became a 
legend: songs and poems and plays were written about it.



The Maoist counter-offensive did break the carpet 
security and gave people breathing space. The 
police and the Salwa Judum retreated into their 
camps, from which they now emerge­usually in the 
dead of night­only in packs of 300 or 1000 to 
carry out Cordon and Search operations in 
villages. Gradually, except for the SPOs and 
their families, the rest of the people in the 
Salwa Judum camps began to return to their 
villages. The Maoists welcomed them back and 
announced that even SPOs could return if they 
genuinely, and publicly regretted their actions. 
Young people began to flock to the PLGA. (The 
PLGA had been formally constituted in December 
2000. Over the last thirty years, its armed 
squads had very gradually expanded into sections, 
sections had grown into platoons, and platoons 
into companies. But after the Salwa Judum’s 
depredations, the PLGA was rapidly able to declare battalion strength.)



The Salwa Judum had not just failed, it had backfired badly.



As we now know, it was not just a local operation 
by a small time hood. Regardless of the 
doublespeak in the press, the Salwa Judum was a 
joint operation by the State Government of 
Chhattisgarh and the Congress Party which was in 
power at the Centre. It could not be allowed to 
fail. Not when all those MOUs were still waiting, 
like wilting hopefuls on the marriage market. The 
Government was under tremendous pressure to come 
up with a new plan. They came up with Operation 
Green Hunt. The Salwa Judum SPOs are called Koya 
Commandos now. It has deployed the Chhattisgarh 
Armed Force (CAF), the Central Reserve Police 
Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF), 
the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the 
Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Grey 
Hounds, Scorpions, Cobras. And a policy that’s 
affectionately called WHAM­Winning Hearts and Minds.



Significant wars are often fought in unlikely 
places. Free Market Capitalism defeated Soviet 
Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. 
Here in the forests of Dantewara a battle rages 
for the soul of India. Plenty has been said about 
the deepening crisis in Indian democracy and the 
collusion between big corporations, major 
political parties and the security establishment. 
If any body wants to do a quick spot check, Dantewara is the place to go.



A draft report on State Agrarian Relations and 
the Unfinished Task of Land Reform (Volume 1) 
said that Tata Steel and Essar Steel were the 
first financiers of the Salwa Judum. Because it 
was a Government Report, it created a flurry when 
it was reported in the press. (That fact has 
subsequently been dropped from the final report. 
Was it a genuine error, or did someone receive a 
gentle, integrated steel tap on the shoulder?)



On 12 October 2009 the mandatory public hearing 
for Tata’s steel plant, meant to be held in 
Lohandiguda where local people could come, 
actually took place in a small hall inside the 
Collectorate in Jagdalpur, many miles away, 
cordoned off with massive security. A hired 
audience of 50 tribals was brought in a guarded 
convoy of government jeeps. After the meeting the 
District Collector congratulated ‘the people of 
Lohandiguda’ for their co-operation. The local 
newspapers reported the lie, even though they 
knew better. (The advertisements rolled in.) 
Despite villagers’ objections, land acquisition for the project has begun.



The Maoists are not the only ones who seek to 
depose the Indian State. It’s already been 
deposed several times, by Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism.



Lohandiguda, a five-hour drive from Dantewara, 
never used to be a Naxalite area. But it is now. 
Comrade Joori who sat next to me while I ate the 
ant chutney works in the area. She said they 
decided to move in after graffiti had begun to 
appear on the walls of village houses, saying 
Naxali Ao, Hamein Bachao (Naxals come and save 
us!) A few months ago Vimal Meshram, President of 
the village panchayat was shot dead in the 
market. "He was Tata’s Man," Joori says, "He was 
forcing people to give up their land and accept 
compensation. It’s good that he’s been finished. 
We lost a comrade too. They shot him. D’you want 
more chapoli?" She’s only twenty. "We won’t let 
the Tata come there. People don’t want them." 
Joori is not PLGA. She’s in the Chetna Natya 
Manch (CNM), the cultural wing of the Party. She 
sings. She writes songs. She’s from Abhujmad. 
(She’s married to Comrade Madhav. She fell in 
love with his singing when he visited her village with a CNM troupe.)



I feel I ought to say something at this point. 
About the futility of violence, about the 
unacceptability of summary executions. But what 
should I suggest they do? Go to court? Do a 
dharna in Jantar Mantar, New Delhi? A rally? A 
relay hunger strike? It sounds ridiculous. The 
promoters of the New Economic Policy ­who find it 
so easy to say "There Is No Alternative" ­should 
be asked to suggest an alternative Resistance 
Policy. A specific one, to these specific people, 
in this specific forest. Here. Now. Which party 
should they vote for? Which democratic 
institution in this country should they approach? 
Which door did the Narmada Bachao Andolan not 
knock on during the years and years it fought against Big Dams on the Narmada?

It’s dark. There’s a lot of activity in the camp, 
but I can’t see anything. Just points of light 
moving around. It’s hard to tell whether they are 
stars or fireflies or Maoists on the move. Little 
Mangtu appears from nowhere. I found out that 
he’s one of a group of ten kids who are part of 
the first batch of the Young Communists Mobile 
School, who are being taught to read and write, 
and tutored in basic communist principles. 
("Indoctrination of young minds!" our corporate 
media howls. The TV advertisements that brainwash 
children before they can even think, are not seen 
as a form of indoctrination.) The young 
communists are not allowed to carry guns or wear 
uniforms. But they trail the PLGA squads, with 
stars in their eyes, like groupies of a rock band.



Mangtu has adopted me with a gently proprietorial 
air. He has filled my water bottle and says I 
should pack my bag. A whistle blows. The blue 
jhilli tent is dismantled and folded up in five 
minutes flat. Another whistle and all hundred 
comrades fall in line. Five rows. Comrade Raju is 
the Director of Ops. There’s a roll call. I’m in 
the line too, shouting out my number when Comrade 
Kamla who is in front of me, prompts me. (We 
count to twenty and then start from one, because 
that’s as far as most Gonds count. Twenty is 
enough for them. Maybe it should be enough for us 
too.) Chandu is in fatigues now, and carries a 
sten gun. In a low voice Comrade Raju is briefing 
the group. It’s all in Gondi, I don’t understand 
a thing, but I keep hearing the word RV. Later 
Raju tells me it stands for Rendezvous! It’s a 
Gondi word now. "We make RV points so that in 
case we come under fire and people have to 
scatter, they know where to regroup." He cannot 
possibly know the kind of panic this induces in 
me. Not because I’m scared of being fired on, but 
because I’m scared of being lost. I’m a 
directional dyslexic, capable of getting lost 
between my bedroom and my bathroom. What will I 
do in 60,000 square kilometers of forest? Come 
hell or high water, I’m going to be holding on to Comrade Raju’s pallu.



Before we start walking, Comrade Venu comes up to 
me "Okaythen Comrade. I’ll take your leave." I’m 
taken aback. He looks like a little mosquito in a 
woolen cap and chappals, surrounded by his 
guards, three women, three men. Heavily armed. 
"We are very grateful to you comrade, for coming 
all the way here." he says. Once again the 
handshake, the clenched fist. "Lal Salaam 
Comrade." He disappears into the forest, the 
Keeper of the Keys. And in a moment, it’s as 
though he was never here. I’m a little bereft. 
But I have hours of recordings to listen to. And 
as the days turn into weeks, I will meet many 
people who paint color and detail into the grid 
he drew for me. We begin to walk in the opposite 
direction. Comrade Raju, smelling of iodex from a 
mile off, says with a happy smile, "My knees are 
gone. I can only walk if I have had a fistful of pain-killers."



Comrade Raju speaks perfect Hindi and has a 
deadpan way of telling the funniest stories. He 
worked as an advocate in Raipur for eighteen 
years. Both he and his wife, Malti, were Party 
members and part of its city network. At the end 
of 2007, one of the key people in the Raipur 
network was arrested, tortured and eventually 
turned informer. He was driven around Raipur in a 
closed police vehicle and made to point out his former colleagues.



Comrade Malti was one of them. On 22 January 2008 
she was arrested along with several others. The 
main charge against her is that she mailed CDs 
containing video evidence of Salwa Judum 
atrocities to several Members of Parliament. Her 
case rarely comes up for hearing because the 
police know their case is flimsy. But the new 
Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) 
allows the police to hold her without bail for 
several years. "Now the Government has deployed 
several battalions of Chhattisgarh police to 
protect the poor Members of Parliament from their 
own mail." Comrade Raju says. He didn’t get 
caught because he was in Dandakaranya at the 
time, attending a meeting. He’s been here ever 
since. His two school-going children who were 
left alone at home, were interrogated extensively 
by the police. Finally their home was packed up 
and they went to live with an uncle.



Comrade Raju received news of them for the first 
time only a few weeks ago. What gives him this 
strength, this ability to hold on to his acid 
humour? What keeps them all going, despite all 
they have endured? Their faith and hope­and 
love­for the Party. I encounter it again and 
again, in the deepest, most personal ways.



[]


PLGA militants are the hardhitters of the Maoist fighting force.



We’re moving in single file now. Myself, and one 
hundred, ‘senselessly violent’, bloodthirsty 
insurgents. I looked around at the camp before we 
left. There are no signs that almost a hundred 
people had camped here, except for some ash where 
the fires had been. I cannot believe this army. 
As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian 
than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon 
footprint than any climate change evangelist. But 
for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to 
sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for 
example, it is stripped down and every part is 
cannibalized. The steering wheel is straightened 
out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine 
upholstery stripped and used for ammunition 
pouches, the battery for solar charging. (The new 
instructions from the high command are that 
captured vehicles should be buried and not 
cremated. So they can be resurrected when 
needed.) Should I write a play I wonder­Gandhi 
Get Your Gun? Or will I be lynched?



We’re walking in pitch darkness and dead silence. 
I’m the only one using a torch, pointed down so 
that all I can see in its circle of light are 
Comrade Kamla’s bare heels in her scuffed, black 
chappals, showing me exactly where to put my 
feet. She is carrying ten times more weight than 
I am. Her backpack, a rifle, a huge bag of 
provisions on her head, one of the large cooking 
pots and two shoulder bags full of vegetables. 
The bag on her head is perfectly balanced, and 
she can scramble down slopes and slippery rock 
pathways without so much as touching it. She is a 
miracle. It turns out to be a long walk. I’m 
grateful to the history lesson because apart from 
everything else it gave my feet a rest for a whole day.



It’s the most beautiful thing, walking in the 
forest at night. And I’ll be doing it night after night.

We’re going to a celebration of the centenary of 
the 1910 Bhumkal rebellion in which the Koyas 
rose up against the British. Bhumkal, means 
earthquake. Comrade Raju says people will walk 
for days together to come for the celebration. 
The forest must be full of people on the move. 
There are celebrations in all the DK divisions. 
We are privileged because Comrade Leng, the 
Master of Ceremonies, is walking with us. In Gondi Leng means ‘the voice’.



Comrade Leng is a tall, middle-aged man from 
Andhra Pradesh, a colleague of the legendary and 
beloved singer-poet Gadar who founded the radical 
cultural organization Jan Natya Manch (JNM) in 
’72. Eventually JNM became a formal part of the 
PWG and in Andhra Pradesh could draw audiences 
numbering in the tens of thousands.



Comrade Leng joined in 1977 and became a famous 
singer in his own right. He lived in Andhra 
through the worst repression, the era of 
‘encounter’ killings in which friends died almost 
every day. He himself was picked up one night 
from his hospital bed, by a woman Superintendent 
of Police, masquerading as a doctor. He was taken 
to the forest outside Warangal to be 
‘encountered’. But luckily for him, Comrade Leng 
says, Gadar got the news and managed to raise an 
alarm. When the PWG decided to start a cultural 
organization in DK in 1998, Comrade Leng was sent 
to head the Chetana Natya Manch. And here he is 
now, walking with me, wearing an olive green 
shirt, and for some reason, purple pyjamas with 
pink bunnies on them. "There are 10,000 members 
in CNM now", he told me. "We have 500 songs, in 
Hindi, Gondi, Chhattisgarhi and Halbi. We have 
printed a book with 140 of our songs.



Everybody writes songs." The first time I spoke 
to him, he sounded very grave, very 
single-minded. But days later, sitting around a 
fire, still in those pyjamas, he tells us about a 
very successful, mainstream Telugu film director 
(a friend of his), who always plays a Naxalite in 
his own films. "I asked him," Comrade Leng said 
in his lovely Telugu accented Hindi, "why do you 
think Naxalites are always like this?" ­ and he 
did a deft caricature of a crouched, 
high-stepping, hunted-looking man emerging from 
the forest with an AK-47, and left us screaming with laughter.



I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to the 
Bhumkal celebrations. I fear I’ll see traditional 
tribal dances stiffened by Maoist propaganda, 
rousing, rhetorical speeches and an obedient 
audience with glazed eyes. We arrive at the 
grounds quite late in the evening. A temporary 
monument, of bamboo scaffolding wrapped in red 
cloth has been erected. On top, above the hammer 
and sickle of the Maoist Party, is the bow and 
arrow of the Janatana Sarkar, wrapped in silver 
foil. Appropriate, the hierarchy. The stage is 
huge, also temporary, on a sturdy scaffolding 
covered by a thick layer of mud plaster. Already 
there are small fires scattered around the 
ground, people have begun to arrive and are 
cooking their evening meal. They’re only 
silhouettes in the dark. We thread our way 
through them, (lalsalaam,lalsalaam,lalsalaam) and 
keep going for about fifteen minutes until we re-enter the forest.



At our new campsite we have to fall-in again. 
Another roll call. And then instructions about 
sentry positions and ‘firing arcs’­decisions 
about who will cover which area in the event of a 
police attack. RV points are fixed again.



An advance party has arrived and cooked dinner 
already. For dessert Kamla brings me a wild guava 
that she has plucked on the walk and squirreled away for me.



 From dawn there is the sense of more and more 
people gathering for the day’s celebration. 
There’s a buzz of excitement building up. People 
who haven’t seen each other in a long time, meet 
again. We can hear the sound of mikes being 
tested. Flags, banners, posters, buntings are 
going up. A poster with the pictures of the five 
people who were killed in Ongnaar the day we arrived has appeared.



I’m drinking tea with Comrade Narmada, Comrade 
Maase and Comrade Rupi. Comrade Narmada talks 
about the many years she worked in Gadchiroli 
before becoming the DK head of Krantikari Adivasi 
Mahila Sanghathan (KAMS). Rupi and Maase have 
been urban activists in Andhra Pradesh and tell 
me about the long years of struggle of women 
within the Party, not just for their rights, but 
also to make the Party see that equality between 
men and women is central to a dream of a just 
society. We talk about the ‘70s and the stories 
of women within the Naxalite movement who were 
disillusioned by male comrades who thought 
themselves great revolutionaries but were hobbled 
by the same old patriarchy, the same old 
chauvinism. Maase says things have changed a lot 
since then, though they still have a way to go. 
(The Party’s Central Committee and Polit Bureau have no women yet.)



Around noon another PLGA contingent arrives. This 
one is headed by a tall, lithe, boyish looking 
man. This comrade has two names­Sukhdev, and 
Gudsa Usendi­ neither of which is his. Sukhdev is 
the name of a very beloved Comrade who was 
martyred. (In this war only the dead are safe 
enough to use their real names.) As for Gudsa 
Usendi, many comrades have been Gudsa Usendi at 
one point or another. (A few months ago it was 
Comrade Raju.) Gudsa Usendi is the name of the 
Party’s spokesperson for Dandakaranya. So even 
though Sukhdev spends the rest of the trip with 
me, I have no idea how I’d ever find him again. 
I’d recognize his laugh anywhere though. He came 
to DK in ’88 he says, when the PWG decided to 
send one third of its forces from North Telengana 
into DK. He’s nicely dressed, in ‘civil’ (Gondi 
for ‘civilian clothes’) as opposed to ‘dress’ 
(the Maoist ‘uniform’) and could pass off as a 
young executive. I ask him why no uniform.



He says he’s been traveling and has just come 
back from the Keshkal Ghats near Kanker. There 
are reports of bauxite deposits­3 million 
tonnes­that a company called Vedanta has its eye on.



Bingo. Ten on ten for my instincts.



Sukhdev says he went there to measure the 
peoples’ temperature. To see if they were 
prepared to fight. "They want squads now. And 
guns." He throws his head back and roars with 
laughter, "I told them it’s not so easy, bhai." 
 From the stray wisps of conversation and the 
ease with which he carries his AK-47, I can tell 
he’s also high up and hands on PLGA.



Jungle post arrives. There’s a biscuit for me! 
It’s from Comrade Venu. On a tiny piece of paper, 
folded and re-folded, he has written down the 
lyrics of a song he promised he would send me. 
Comrade Narmada smiles when she reads them. She 
knows this story. It goes back to the 1980s, 
around the time when people first began trust to 
the Party and come to it with their 
problems­their ‘inner contradictions’ as Comrade 
Venu put it. Women were among the first to come. 
One evening an old lady sitting by the fire, got 
up and sang a song for the Dada log. She was a 
Maadiya, among whom it was customary for women to 
remove their blouses and remain bare-breasted after they were married.



Jumper polo intor Dada, Dakoniley

Taane tasom intor Dada, Dakoniley

Bata papam kittom Dada, Dakoniley

Duniya kadile maata Dada, Dakoniley

They say we cannot keep our blouses, dada, Dakoniley

They make us take them off, Dada,

In what way have we sinned, Dada,

The world has changed has it not Dada,

Aatum hatteke Dada, Dakoniley

Aada nanga dantom Dada, Dakoniley

Id pisval manni Dada, Dakoniley

Mava koyaturku vehat Dada, Dakoniley

But when we go to market Dada,

We have to go half-naked Dada,

We don’t want this life Dada,

Tell our ancestors this Dada,



This was the first women’s issue the Party 
decided to campaign against. It had to be handled 
delicately, with surgical tools. In1986 it set up 
the Adivasi Mahila Sanghathana (AMS) which 
evolved into the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila 
Sangathan (KAMS) and now has 90,000 enrolled 
members. It could well be the largest women’s 
organization in the country. (They’re all Maoists 
by the way, all 90,000 of them. Are they going to 
be ‘wiped out’? And what about the 10,000 members 
of CNM? Them too?) The KAMS campaigns against the 
adivasi traditions of forced marriage and 
abduction. Against the custom of making 
menstruating women live outside the village in a 
hut in the forest. Against bigamy and domestic 
violence. It hasn’t won all its battles, but then 
which feminists have? For instance, in 
Dandakaranya even today, women are not allowed to 
sow seeds. In Party meetings men agree that this 
is unfair and ought to be done away with. But in 
practice, they simply don’t allow it. So the 
Party decided that women would sow seeds on 
common lands, which belongs to the Jantana 
Sarkar. On that land they sow seed, grow 
vegetables, and build check dams. A half-victory, not a whole one.



As police repression has grown in Bastar, the 
women of KAMS have become a formidable force and 
rally in their hundreds, sometimes thousands to 
physically confront the police. The very fact 
that the KAMS exists has radically changed 
traditional attitudes and eased many of the 
traditional forms of discrimination against 
women. For many young women, joining the Party, 
in particular the PLGA, became a way of escaping 
the suffocation of their own society. Comrade 
Sushila, a senior office bearer of KAMS talks 
about the Salwa Judum’s rage against KAMS women. 
She says one of their slogans was Hum Do Bibi 
layenge! Layenge! (We will have two wives! We 
will!) A lot of the rape and bestial sexual 
mutilation was directed at members of the KAMS. 
Many young women who witnessed the savagery then 
joined the PLGA and now women make up 45% of its 
cadre. Comrade Narmada sends for some of them and they join us in a while.



Comrade Rinki has very short hair. A Bob-cut as 
they say in Gondi. It’s brave of her, because 
here, ‘bob-cut’ means ‘Maoist.’ For the police 
that’s more than enough evidence to warrant 
summary execution. Comrade Rinki’s village, Korma 
was attacked by the Naga Battalion and the Salwa 
Judum in 2005. At that time Rinki was part of the 
village militia. So were her friends Lukki and 
Sukki, who were also members of the KAMS. After 
burning the village, the Naga battalion caught 
Lukki and Sukki and one other girl, gang raped 
and killed them. "They raped them on the grass", 
Rinki says, " but after it was over there was no 
grass left." It’s been years now, the Naga 
Battalion has gone, but the police still come. 
"They come whenever they need women, or chickens."



Ajitha has a bob-cut too. The Judum came to 
Korseel, her village and killed three people by 
drowning them in a nallah. Ajitha was with the 
Militia, and followed the Judum at a distance to 
a place close to the village called Paral Nar 
Todak. She watched them rape six women and shoot a man in his throat.



Comrade Laxmi who is a beautiful girl with a long 
plait, tells me she watched the Judum burn thirty 
houses in her village Jojor. "We had no weapons 
then," she says, "we could do nothing, but 
watch." She joined the PLGA soon after. Laxmi was 
one of the 150 guerillas who walked through the 
jungle for three and a half months in 2008, to 
Nayagarh in Orissa, to raid a police armoury from 
where they captured 1,200 rifles and 200,000 rounds of ammunition.



Comrade Sumitra joined the PLGA in 2004, before 
the Salwa Judum began its rampage. She joined she 
says, because she wanted to escape from home. 
"Women are controlled in every way," she told me. 
"In our village girls were not allowed to climb 
trees, if they did, they would have to pay a fine 
of Rs 500 or a hen. If a man hits a woman and she 
hits him back she has to give the village a goat. 
Men go off to the hills for months together to 
hunt. Women are not allowed to go near the kill, 
the best part of the meat goes to men. Women are 
not allowed to eat eggs." Good reason to join a guerilla army?



Sumitra tells the story of two of her friends, 
Telam Parvati and Kamla who worked with KAMS. 
Telam Parvati was from Polekaya village in South 
Bastar. Like everyone else from there, she too 
watched the Salwa Judum burn her village. She 
then joined the PLGA and went to work in the 
Keshkal ghats. In 2009 she and Kamla had just 
finished organizing the March 8th Women’s day 
celebrations in the area. They were together in a 
little hut just outside a village called Vadgo. 
The police surrounded the hut at night and began 
to fire. Kamla fired back, but she was killed. 
Parvati escaped, but was found and killed the next day.



That’s what happened last year on Women’s Day. 
And here’s a press report from a national 
newspaper about Women’s Day this year.



Bastar rebels bat for women's rights Sahar Khan, 
Mail Today, Raipur, March 7, 2010



The government may have pulled out all stops to 
combat the Maoist menace in the country. But a 
section of rebels in Chhattisgarh has more 
pressing matters in hand than survival. With 
International Women's Day around the corner, 
Maoists in the Bastar region of the state have 
called for week- long "celebrations" to advocate women's rights.

Posters were also put up in Bijapur, a part of 
Bastar district. The call by the self- styled 
champions of women's rights has left the state 
police astonished. Inspector- general (IG) of 
Bastar T. J. Longkumer said, " I have never seen 
such an appeal from the Naxalites, who believe only in violence and bloodshed."



And then the report goes on to say:



"I think the Maoists are trying to counter our 
highly successful Jan Jagran Abhiyaan (mass 
awareness campaign). We started the ongoing 
campaign with an aim to win popular support for 
Operation Green Hunt, which was launched by the 
police to root out Left- wing extremists," the IG said.



This cocktail of malice and ignorance is not 
unusual. Gudsa Usendi, chronicler of the Party’s 
present knows more about this than most people. 
His little computer and MP3 recorder are full of 
press statements, denials, corrections, Party 
literature, lists of the dead, TV clips and audio 
and video material. "The worst thing about being 
Gudsa Usendi" he says, "is issuing clarifications 
which are never published. We could bring out a 
thick book of our unpublished clarifications, 
about the lies they tell about us." He speaks 
without a trace of indignation, in fact with some amusement.



"What’s the most ridiculous charge you’ve had to deny?"



He thinks back. "In 2007, we had to issue a 
statement saying ‘Nahi bhai, humney gai ko 
hathode say nahin mara.’ (No brother, we did not 
kill cows with hammers.). In 2007 the Raman Singh 
Government announced a Gai Yojana (cow scheme), 
an election promise, a cow for every Adivasi. One 
day the TV channels and newspapers reported that 
Naxalites had attacked a herd of cows and 
bludgeoned them to death­ with hammers­ because 
they were anti-Hindu, anti-BJP. You can imagine 
what happened. We issued a denial. Hardly anybody 
carried it. Later it turned out that the man who 
had been given the cows to distribute was a 
rogue. He sold them and said we had ambushed him and killed the cows."



And the most serious?



"Oh there are dozens, they’re running a campaign 
after all. When the Salwa Judum started, the 
first day they attacked a village called Ambeli, 
burned it down and then all of them, SPOs, the 
Naga Battalion, police, moved towards 
Kotrapal
you must have heard about Kotrapal? It’s 
a famous village, it has been burnt 22 times for 
refusing to surrender. When the Judum reached 
Kotrapal, our militia was waiting for it. They 
had prepared an ambush. Two SPOs died. The 
militia captured seven, the rest ran away. The 
next day the newspapers reported that the 
Naxalites had massacred poor adivasis. Some said 
we had killed hundreds. Even a respectable 
magazine like Frontline said we had killed 18 
innocent adivasis. Even K.Balagopal, the human 
rights activist, who is usually meticulous about 
facts, even he said this. We sent a 
clarification. Nobody published it. Later, in his 
book, Balagopal acknowledged his mistake
. But who noticed?"



I asked what happened to the seven people that were captured.



"The Area Committee called a Jan Adalat (Peoples 
Court). Four thousand people attended it. They 
listened to the whole story. Two of the SPOs were 
sentenced to death. Five were warned and let off. 
The people decided. Even with informers ­which is 
becoming a huge problem nowadays­ people listen 
to the case, the stories, the confessions and say 
"Iska hum risk nahin le sakte" (We’re not 
prepared to take the risk of trusting this 
person) or, "Iska risk hum lenge" (We are 
prepared to take the risk of trusting this 
person.) The press always reports about informers 
who are killed. Never about the many that are let 
off. Never about the people who these informers 
have had killed. So everybody thinks it is some 
bloodthirsty procedure in which everybody is 
always killed. It’s not about revenge, its about 
survival and saving future lives
 Of course there 
are problems, we’ve made terrible mistakes, we 
have even killed the wrong people in our 
ambushes, thinking they were policemen, but it is 
not the way it’s portrayed in the media."



The dreaded ‘Peoples’ Courts’. How can we accept 
them? Or approve this form of rude justice?



On the other hand, what about ‘encounters’ fake 
and otherwise­the worst form of summary 
justice­that get policemen and soldiers bravery 
medals, cash awards and out-of-turn promotions 
from the Indian Government? The more they kill, 
the more they are rewarded. "Bravehearts" they 
are called, the ‘Encounter specialists’. 
‘Anti-nationals’ we are called, those of us who 
dare to question them. And what about the Supreme 
Court that brazenly admitted it did not have 
enough evidence to sentence Mohammed Afzal 
(accused in the Dec 2001 Parliament Attack) to 
death, but did so anyway, because "the collective 
conscience of the society will only be satisfied 
if capital punishment is awarded to the offender."



At least in the case of the Kotrapal Jan Adalat, 
the Collective was physically present to make its 
own decision. It wasn’t made by judges who had 
lost touch with ordinary life a long time ago, 
presuming to speak on behalf of an absent Collective.



What should the people of Kotrapal have done I wonder? Sent for the police?

The sound of drums has become really loud. It’s 
Bhumkal time. We walk to the grounds. I can 
hardly believe my eyes. There is a sea of people, 
the most wild, beautiful people, dressed in the 
most wild, beautiful ways. The men seem to have 
paid much more attention to themselves than the 
women. They have feathered headgear and painted 
tattoos on their faces. Many have eye make-up and 
white, powdered faces. There’s lots of militia, 
girls in saris of breathtaking colors with rifles 
slung carelessly over their shoulders. There are 
old people, children, and red buntings arc across the sky.



The sun is sharp and high. Comrade Leng speaks. 
And several office-holders of the various Jantana 
Sarkars. Comrade Niti, an extraordinary woman who 
has been with the Party since 1997, is such a 
threat to the nation, that in January 2007 more 
than 700 policemen surrounded Innar village 
because they heard she was there. Comrade Niti is 
considered to be so dangerous, and is being 
hunted with such desperation, not because she has 
led many ambushes (which she has), but because 
she is an adivasi woman who is loved by people in 
the village and is a real inspiration to young 
people. She speaks with her AK on her shoulder. 
(It’s a gun with a story. Almost everyone’s gun 
has a story: Who it was snatched from, how, and by whom.)



A CNM troupe performs a play about the Bhumkal 
uprising. The evil white colonizers wear hats and 
golden straw for hair, and bully and beat 
Adivasis to pulp­causing endless delight in the 
audience. Another troupe from South Gangalaur 
performs a play called Nitir Judum Pito (Story of 
the Blood Hunt). Joori translates for me. It’s 
the story of two old people who go looking for 
their daughter’s village. As they walk through 
the forest, they get lost because everything is 
burnt and unrecognizable. The Salwa Judum has 
even burned the drums and the musical 
instruments. There are no ashes because it has 
been raining. They cannot find their daughter. In 
their sorrow the old couple starts to sing, and 
hearing them, the voice of their daughter sings 
back to them from the ruins: The sound of our 
village has been silenced, she sings. There’s no 
more pounding of rice, no more laughter by the 
well. No more birds, no more bleating goats. The 
taut string of our happiness has been snapped.



Her father sings back: My beautiful daughter, 
don’t cry today. Everyone who is born must die. 
These trees around us will fall, flowers will 
bloom and fade, one day this world will grow old. 
But who are we dying for? One day our looters 
will learn, one day Truth will prevail, but our 
people will never forget you, not for thousands of years.



A few more speeches. Then the drumming and the 
dancing begins. Each Janatana Sarkar has its own 
troupe. Each troupe has prepared its own dance. 
They arrive one by one, with huge drums and they 
dance wild stories. The only character every 
troupe has in common is Bad Mining Man, with a 
helmet and dark glasses, and usually smoking a 
cigarette. But there’s nothing stiff, or 
mechanical about their dancing. As they dance, 
the dust rises. The sound of drums becomes 
deafening. Gradually, the crowd begins to sway. 
And then it begins to dance. They dance in little 
lines of six or seven, men and women separate, 
with their arms around each other’s waists. Thousands of people.



This is what they’ve come for. For this. 
Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the 
Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, 
for days together to feast and sing, to put 
feathers in their turbans and flowers in their 
hair, to put their arms around each other and 
drink mahua and dance through the night. No one 
sings or dances alone. This, more than anything 
else, signals their defiance towards a 
civilization that seeks to annihilate them.



I can’t believe all this is happening right under 
the noses of the police. Right in the midst of Operation Green Hunt.



At first the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, 
standing aside with their guns. But then, one by 
one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the 
shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in 
and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of 
olive green dancers, swirling with all the other 
colours. And then, as sisters and brothers and 
parents and children and friends who haven’t met 
for months, years sometimes, encounter each 
other, the lines break up and re-form and the 
olive green is distributed among the swirling 
saris and flowers and drums and turbans. It 
surely is a Peoples’ Army. For now, at least. And 
what Chairman Mao said about the guerillas being 
the fish, and people being the water they swim 
in, is, at this moment, literally true.



Chairman Mao. He’s here too. A little lonely, 
perhaps, but present. There’s a photograph of 
him, up on a red cloth screen. Marx too. And 
Charu Majumdar, the founder and chief 
theoretician of the Naxalite Movement. His 
abrasive rhetoric fetishizes violence, blood and 
martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse 
as to be almost genocidal. Standing here, on 
Bhumkal day, I can’t help thinking that his 
analysis, so vital to the structure of this 
revolution, is so removed from its emotion and 
texture. When he said that only ‘an annihilation 
campaign’ could produce "the new man who will 
defy death and be free from all thought of 
self-interest"­ could he have imagined that this 
ancient people, dancing into the night, would be 
the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest?



It’s a great disservice to everything that is 
happening here that the only thing that seems to 
make it to the outside world is the stiff, 
unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party 
that has evolved from a problematic past. When 
Charu Mazumdar famously said, "China’s Chairman 
is our Chairman and China’s Path is Our Path" he 
was prepared to extend it to the point where the 
Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya 
Khan committed genocide in East Pakistan 
(Bangladesh), because at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan.



There was silence too, over the Khmer Rouge and 
its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence 
over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and 
Russian Revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within 
the Naxalite movement too, there have been 
violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend 
much of what they’ve done. But can anything they 
have done compare with the sordid achievements of 
the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir, 
Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat
 And yet, despite these 
terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar was a 
visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The 
party he founded (and its many splinter groups) 
has kept the dream of revolution real and present 
in India. Imagine a society without that dream. 
For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly. 
Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with 
Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of 
"the non-violent way" and his notion of Trusteeship:



  "The rich man will be left in possession of his 
wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably 
requires for his personal needs and will act as a 
trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society."



How strange it is though, that the contemporary 
tsars of the Indian Establishment­the State that 
crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly­ should now 
be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path.

Upside Down. Inside Out.



China’s Path has changed. China has become an 
imperial power now, preying on other countries, 
other peoples’ resources. But the Party is still 
right, only, the Party has changed its mind.



When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in 
Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to 
their every need, then it genuinely is a Peoples’ 
Party, its army genuinely a Peoples’ Army. But 
after the Revolution how easily this love affair 
can turn into a bitter marriage. How easily the 
Peoples’ Army can turn upon the people. Today in 
Dandakaranya, the Party wants to keep the bauxite 
in the mountain. Tomorrow will it change its 
mind? But can we, should we let apprehensions 
about the future, immobilize us in the present?



The dancing will go on all night. I walk back to 
the camp. Maase is there, awake. We chat late 
into the night. I give her my copy of Neruda’s 
Captain’s Verses (I brought it along, just in 
case). She asks again and again, "What do they 
think of us outside? What do students say? Tell 
me about the women’s movement, what are the big 
issues now? She asks about me, my writing. I try 
and give her an honest account of my chaos. Then 
she starts to talk about herself, how she joined 
the Party. She tells me that her partner was 
killed last May, in a fake encounter. He was 
arrested in Nashik, and taken to Warangal to be 
killed. "They must have tortured him badly." She 
was on her way to meet him when she heard he had 
been arrested. She’s been in the forest ever 
since. After a long silence she tells me she was 
married once before, years ago. "He was killed in 
an encounter too," she says, and adds with 
heart-breaking precision, "but in a real one."



I lie awake on my jhilli, thinking of Maase’s 
protracted sadness, listening to the drums and 
the sounds of protracted happiness from the 
grounds, and thinking about Charu Mazumdar’s idea 
of protracted war, the central precept of the 
Maoist Party. This is what makes people think the 
Maoists offer to enter ‘peace talks’ is a hoax, a 
ploy to get breathing space to regroup, re-arm 
themselves and go back to waging protracted war. 
What is protracted war? Is it a terrible thing in 
itself, or does it depend on the nature of the 
war? What if the people here in Dandakaranya had 
not waged their protracted war for the last 
thirty years, where would they be now?



And are the Maoists the only ones who believe in 
protracted war? Almost from the moment India 
became a sovereign nation it turned into a 
colonial power, annexing territory, waging war. 
It has never hesitated to use military 
interventions to address political problems­ 
Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, Nagaland, Manipur, 
Telengana, Assam, Punjab, the Naxalite uprising 
in West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now 
across the tribal areas of Central India. Tens of 
thousands have been killed with impunity, hundreds of thousands tortured.



All of this behind the benign mask of democracy. 
Who have these wars been waged against? Muslims, 
Christians, Sikhs, Communists, Dalits, Tribals 
and, most of all against the poor who dare to 
question their lot instead of accepting the 
crumbs that are flung at them. It’s hard not to 
see the Indian State as an essentially 
upper-caste Hindu State (regardless of which 
party is in power) which harbours a reflexive 
hostility towards the ‘other’. One that in true 
colonial fashion, sends the Nagas and Mizos to 
fight in Chhattisgarh, Sikhs to Kashmir, 
Kashmiris to Orissa, Tamilians to Assam and so 
on. If this isn’t protracted war, what is?



Unpleasant thoughts on a beautiful, starry night. 
Sukhdev is smiling to himself, his face lit by 
his computer screen. He’s a crazy workaholic. I 
ask him what’s funny. " I was thinking about the 
journalists who came last year for the Bhumkal 
celebrations. They came for a day or two. One 
posed with my AK, had himself photographed and 
then went back and called us Killing Machines or something."



The dancing hasn’t stopped and it’s daybreak. The 
lines are still going, hundreds of young people 
still dancing. "They won’t stop", Comrade Raju 
says, "not until we start packing up."



On the grounds I run into Comrade Doctor. He’s 
been running a little medical camp on the edge of 
the dance floor. I want to kiss his fat cheeks. 
Why can’t he be at least thirty people instead of 
just one? Why can’t he be one thousand people? I 
ask him what it’s looking like, the health of 
Dandakaranya. His reply makes my blood run cold. 
Most of the people he has seen, he says, 
including those in the PLGA, have a Haemoglobin 
Count that’s between 5 and 6, (when the standard 
for Indian women is 11.) There’s TB caused by 
more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young 
children suffer from Protein Energy Malnutrition 
Grade II, in medical terminology called 
Kwashiorkor. (I looked it up later. It’s a word 
derived from the Ga language of Coastal Ghana and 
means "the sickness a baby gets when the new baby 
comes." Basically the old baby stops getting 
mother’s milk, and there’s not enough food to 
provide it nutrition.) "It’s an epidemic here, 
like in Biafra," Comrade Doctor says, "I have 
worked in villages before, but I’ve never seen anything like this."



Apart from this, there’s malaria, osteoporosis, 
tapeworm, severe ear and tooth infections and 
primary amenorrhea ­which is when malnutrition 
during puberty causes a woman’s menstrual cycle 
to disappear, or never appear in the first place.



"There are no clinics in this forest apart from 
one or two in Gadchiroli. No doctors. No medicines."



He’s off now, with his little team, on an 
eight-day trek to Abhujmad. He’s in ‘dress’ too, 
Comrade Doctor. So if they find him they’ll kill him.



Comrade Raju says that it isn’t safe for us to 
continue to camp here. We have to move. Leaving 
Bhumkal involves a lot of good-byes spread over time.



Lal lal salaam, Lal lal salaam,

Jaane waley Sathiyon ko Lal Lal Salaam,

(Red Salute to departing comrades)

Phir milenge, Phir milenge

Dandakaranya jungle mein phir milenge

We’ll meet again, some day, in the Dandakaranya Forest.



It’s never taken lightly, the ceremony of arrival 
and departure, because everybody knows that when 
they say "we’ll meet again" they actually mean 
"we may never meet again." Comrade Narmada, 
Comrade Maase and Comrade Roopi are going 
separate ways. Will I ever see them again?



So once again, we walk. It’s becoming hotter 
every day. Kamla picks the first fruit of the 
Tendu for me. It’s tastes like chikoo. I’ve 
become a tamarind fiend. This time we camp near a 
stream. Women and men take turns to bathe in 
batches. In the evening Comrade Raju receives a whole packet of ‘biscuits’.



News:



60 people arrested in Manpur Division at the end 
of Jan 2010 have not yet been produced in Court.



Huge contingents of police have arrived in South 
Bastar. Indiscriminate attacks are on.



On 8 Nov 2009, in Kachlaram Village, Bijapur 
Jila, Dirko Madka (60) and Kovasi Suklu (68) were killed.

On 24 Nov Madavi Baman (15) was killed in Pangodi village

On 3 Dec Madavi Budram from Korenjad also killed.

On 11 Dec Gumiapal village, Darba Division, 7 people killed (names yet to come)

On 15 Dec Kotrapal village, Veko Sombar and 
Madavi Matti, (both with KAMS) killed.

On 30 Dec Vechapal village Poonem Pandu and 
Poonem Motu (father and son) killed.

On Jan 2010 (date unknown) Head of the Janatana 
Sarkar in Kaika village, Gangalaur killed

On 9 Jan, 4 people killed in Surpangooden village, Jagargonda Area

On 10 Jan, 3 people killed in Pullem Pulladi village (no names yet)

On 25 January, 7 people killed in Takilod village, Indravati Area



On Feb 10 (Bhumkal Day) Kumli raped and killed in 
Dumnaar Village, Abhujmad,. She was from a village called Paiver.



2000 troops of the Indo Tibetan Border Patrol 
(ITBP) are camped in the Rajnandgaon forests 5000 
Additional BSF troops have arrived in Kanker



And then:

PLGA quota filled.



Some dated newspapers have arrived too. There’s a 
lot of press about Naxalites. One screaming 
headline sums up the political climate perfectly: 
Khadedo, Maaro, Samarpan Karao, (Eliminate, Kill, 
Make them Surrender.) Below that: Varta ke liye 
loktantra ka dwar khula hai (Democracy’s door is 
always open for talks.) A second says the Maoists 
are growing cannabis to make money. The third has 
an editorial saying that the area we’ve camped in 
and are walking through, is entirely under police control.



The young communists take the clips away to 
practice their reading. They walk around the camp 
reading the anti-Maoist articles loudly in radio-announcer voices.


New day. New place. We’re camped on the outskirts 
of Usir village, under huge Mahua trees. The 
mahua has just begun to flower and is dropping 
its pale green blossoms like jewels on the forest 
floor. The air is suffused with its slightly 
heady smell. We’re waiting for the children from 
the Bhatpal school which was closed down after 
the Ongnaar Encounter. It’s been turned into a 
police camp. The children have been sent home. 
This is also true of the schools in Nelwad, 
Moonjmetta, Edka, Vedomakot and Dhanora.



The Bhatpal school children don’t show up.



Comrade Niti (Most Wanted) and Comrade Vinod lead 
us on a long walk to see the series of water 
harvesting structures and irrigation ponds that 
have been built by the local Janatana Sarkar. 
Comrade Niti talks about the range of 
agricultural problems they have to deal with. 
Only 2% of the land is irrigated. In Abhujmad, 
ploughing was unheard of until ten years ago. In 
Gadricholi on the other hand, hybrid seeds and 
chemical pesticides are edging their way in. "We 
need urgent help in the agriculture department", 
Comrade Vinod says. "We need people who know 
about seeds, organic pesticides, permaculture. 
With a little help we could do a lot."



Comrade Ramu is the farmer in charge of the 
Janatana Sarkar area. He proudly shows us around 
the fields, where they grow rice, brinjal, 
gongura, onions, kohlrabi. Then, with equal 
pride, he shows us a huge, but bone-dry 
irrigation pond. What’s this? "This one doesn’t 
even have water during the rainy season. It’s dug 
in the wrong place" he says, a smile wrapped 
around his face, "it’s not ours, it was dug by 
the Looti Sarkar." (The Government that Loots). 
There are two parallel systems of government 
here, Janatana Sarkar and Looti Sarkar.



I think of what Comrade Venu said to me: They 
want to crush us, not only because of the 
minerals, but because we are offering the world an alternative model.



It’s not an Alternative yet, this idea of Gram 
Swaraj with a Gun. There is too much hunger, too 
much sickness here. But it has certainly created 
the possibilities for an alternative. Not for the 
whole world, not for Alaska, or New Delhi, nor 
even perhaps for the whole of Chhattisgarh, but 
for itself. For Dandakaranya. Its the world’s 
best kept secret. It has laid the foundations for 
an alternative to its own annihilation. It has 
defied history. Against the greatest odds it has 
forged a blueprint for its own survival. It needs 
help and imagination, it needs doctors, teachers, farmers.

It does not need war.



But if war is all it gets, it will fight back.



Over the next few days I meet women who work with 
KAMS, various office bearers of the Janatana 
Sarkars, members of the Dandakaranya Adivasi 
Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan DAKMS, the families of 
people who had been killed, and just ordinary 
people trying to cope with life in these terrifying times.



I met three sisters, Sukhiyari, Sukdai and 
Sukkali, not young, perhaps in their forties, 
from Narainpur district. They have been in KAMS 
for twelve years. The villagers depend on them to 
deal with the police. "The police come in groups 
of two to three hundred. They steal everything, 
jewelry, chickens, pigs, pots and pans, bows and 
arrows" Sukkali says, "they won’t even leave a 
knife." Her house in Innar has been burned twice, 
once by the Naga Battalion and once by the CRPF. 
Sukhiari has been arrested and jailed in Jagdalpur for 7 months.



  "Once they took away the whole village, saying 
the men were all Naxals." Sukhiari followed with 
all the women and children. They surrounded the 
police station and refused to leave until the men 
were freed. "Whenever they take someone away", 
Sukdai says, "you have to go immediately and 
snatch them back. Before they write any report. 
Once they write in their book, it becomes very difficult."



Sukhiari, who, as a child was abducted and 
forcibly married to an older man (she ran away 
and went to live with her sister), now organizes 
mass rallies, speaks at meetings. The men depend 
on her for protection. I asked her what the Party 
means to her. "Naxalvaad ka matlab humaara 
Parivaar (Naxalvaad means our family.) When we 
hear of an attack, it is like our family has been hurt." Sukhiari said.



I asked her if she knew who Mao was. She smiled 
shyly, "He was a leader. We’re working for his vision."



I met Comrade Somari Gawde. Twenty years old, and 
she has already served a two-year jail sentence in Jagdalpur.



  She was in Innar village on 8 January 2007, the 
day that 740 policemen laid a cordon around it 
because they had information that Comrade Niti 
was there. (She was, but had left by the time 
they arrived.) But the village militia, of which 
Somari was a member, was still there. The police 
opened fire at dawn. They killed two boys, Suklal 
Gawde and Kachroo Gota. Then they caught three 
others, two boys, Dusri Salam and Ranai, and 
Somari. Dusri and Ranai were tied up and shot. 
Somari was beaten within an inch of her life. The 
police got a tractor with a trailer and loaded 
the dead bodies into it. Somari was made to sit 
with the dead bodies and taken to Narainpur.



I met Chamri, mother of Comrade Dilip who was 
shot on 6 July 2009. She says that after they 
killed him, the police tied her son’s body to a 
pole, like an animal and carried it with them. 
(They need to produce bodies to get their cash 
rewards, before someone else muscles in on the 
kill.) Chamri ran behind them all the way to the 
police station. By the time they reached, the 
body did not have a scrap of clothing on it. On 
the way, Chamri says, they left the body by the 
roadside while they stopped at a dhaba to have 
tea and biscuits. (Which they did not pay for.) 
Picture this mother for a moment, following her 
son’s corpse through the forest, stopping at a 
distance to wait for his murderers to finish 
their tea. They did not let her have her son’s 
body back so she could give him a proper funeral. 
They only let her throw a fistful of earth in the 
pit in which they buried the others they had 
killed that day. Chamri says she wants revenge. 
Badla ku badla. Blood for blood.



I met the elected members of the Marskola 
Janatana Sarkar, that administers six villages. 
They described a police raid: They come at night, 
300, 400, sometimes 1000 of them. They lay a 
cordon around a village and lie in wait. At dawn 
they catch the first people who go out to the 
fields and use them as human shields to enter the 
village, to show them where the booby-traps are. 
(‘Booby-traps’ has become a Gondi word. Everybody 
always smiles when they say it or hear it. The 
forest is full of booby traps, real and fake. 
Even the PLGA needs to be guided past villages.) 
Once the police enter the village they loot and 
steal and burn houses. They come with dogs. The 
dogs catch those who try and run. They chase 
chickens and pigs and the police kill them and 
take them away in sacks. SPOs come along with the 
police. They’re the ones who know where people 
hide their money and jewelry. They catch people 
and take them away. And extract money before they 
release them. They always carry some extra Naxal 
‘dresses’ with them in case they find someone to 
kill. They get money for killing Naxals, so they 
manufacture some. Villagers are too frightened to stay at home.



In this tranquil-looking forest, life seems 
completely militarized now. People know words 
like Cordon and Search, Firing, Advance, Retreat, 
Down, Action! To harvest their crops they need 
the PLGA to do a sentry patrol. Going to the 
market is a military operation. The markets are 
full of mukhbirs (informers) who the police have 
lured from their villages with money. (Rs 1500 a 
month) I’m told there’s a mukhbir 
mohallah­informers’ colony­ in Narainpur where at 
least four thousand mukhbirs stay. The men can’t 
go to market any more. The women go, but they’re 
watched closely. If they buy even a little extra, 
the police accuse them of buying it for Naxals. 
Chemists have instructions not to let people buy 
medicines except in very small quantities. Low 
price rations from the Public Distribution System 
(PDS), sugar, rice, kerosene, are warehoused in 
or near police stations making it impossible for most people to buy.



Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the 
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:



Any of the following Acts committed with intent 
to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, 
racial, or religious group, as such: killing 
members of the group; causing serious bodily or 
mental harm to members of the group; deliberately 
inflicting on the group conditions of life 
calculated to bring about its physical 
destruction in whole or part; imposing measures 
intended to prevent births within the group; [or] 
forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.


All the walking seems to have finally got to me. 
I’m tired. Kamla gets me a pot of hot water. I 
bathe behind a tree in the dark. But I can’t eat 
dinner and crawl into my bag to sleep. Comrade 
Raju announces that we have to move.



This happens frequently, of course, but tonight 
it’s hard. We have been in camped in an open 
meadow. We’d heard shelling in the distance. 
There are 104 of us. Once again, single file 
through the night. Crickets. The smell of 
something like lavender. It must have been past 
eleven when we arrived at the place where we will 
spend the night. An outcrop of rocks. Formation. 
Roll call. Someone switches on the radio. BBC 
says there’s been an attack on a camp of Eastern 
Frontier Rifles in Lalgarh, West Bengal. 60 
Maoists on motorcycles. 14 policemen killed. 10 
missing. Weapons snatched. There’s a murmur of 
pleasure in the ranks. The Maoist leader Kishenji 
is being interviewed. When will you stop this 
violence and come for talks? When Operation Green 
Hunt is called off. Any time. Tell Chidambaram we 
will talk. Next question: It’s dark now, you have 
laid landmines, reinforcement have been called 
in, will you attack them too? Kishenji: Yes of 
course, otherwise people will beat me. There’s 
laughter in the ranks. Sukhdev the clarifier 
says, "They always say landmines. We don’t use landmines. We use IEDs."



Another luxury suite in the thousand star hotel. 
I’m feeling ill. It starts to rain. There’s a 
little giggling. Kamla throws a jhilli over me. 
What more do I need? Everyone else just rolls themselves into their jhillis.



By next morning the body count in Lalgarh has gone up to 21, 10 missing.



Comrade Raju is considerate this morning. We don’t move till evening.



One night people are crowded like moths around a 
point of light. It’s Comrade Sukhdev’s tiny 
computer, powered by a solar panel, and they’re 
watching Mother India, the barrels of their 
rifles silhouetted against the sky. Kamla doesn’t 
seem interested. I asked her if she likes 
watching movies. "Nahi didi. Sirf ambush video." 
(No didi. Only ambush videos.") Later I ask 
Comrade Sukhdev about these ambush videos. 
Without batting an eyelid, he plays one for me.



It starts with shots of Dandakaranya, rivers, 
waterfalls, the close up of a bare branch of a 
tree, a brainfever bird calling. Then suddenly a 
comrade is wiring up an IED, concealing it with 
dry leaves. A cavalcade of motorcycles is blown 
up. There are mutilated bodies and burning bikes. 
The weapons are being snatched. Three policemen, 
looking shell-shocked have been tied up.



Who’s filming it? Who’s directing operations? 
Who’s reassuring the captured cops that they will 
be released if they surrender? (They were released, I confirmed later.)

I know that gentle, reassuring voice. It’s Comrade Venu.

"It’s the Kudur Ambush" Comrade Sukhdev says.



He also has a video archive of burned villages, 
testimonies from eyewitnesses and relatives of 
the dead. On the singed wall of a burnt house it 
says ‘Nagaaa! Born to Kill!.’ There’s footage of 
the little boy whose fingers were chopped off to 
inaugurate the Bastar chapter of Operation Green 
Hunt. (There’s even a TV interview with me. My study. My books. Strange.)



At night on the radio there’s news of another 
Naxal Attack. This one in Jamui, Bihar. It says 
125 Maoists attacked a village and killed 10 
people belonging to the Kora Tribe in retaliation 
for giving police information that led to the 
death of 6 Maoists. Of course we know, the report 
may or may not be true. But if it is, this one’s 
unforgiveable. Comrade Raju and Sukhdev look distinctly uncomfortable.



The news that has been coming from Jharkhand and 
Bihar is disturbing. The gruesome beheading of 
the policeman Francis Induvar is still fresh in 
everyone’s mind. It’s a reminder of how easily 
the discipline of armed struggle can dissolve 
into lumpen acts of criminalized violence, or 
into ugly wars of identity between castes and 
communities and religious groups. By 
institutionalizing injustice in the way that it 
does, the Indian State has turned this country 
into a tinderbox of massive unrest. The 
Government is quite wrong if it thinks that by 
carrying out ‘targeted assassinations’ to render 
the CPI(Maoist) ‘headless’ it will end the 
violence. On the contrary, the violence will 
spread and intensify, and the Government will have nobody to talk to.


On my last few days we meander through the lush, 
beautiful Indravati valley. As we walk along a 
hillside, we see another line of people walking 
in the same direction, but on the other side of 
the river. I’m told they’re on their way to an 
anti-dam meeting in Kudur village. They’re over 
ground and unarmed. A local rally for the valley. 
I jumped ship and joined them.



The Bodhghat Dam will submerge the entire area 
that we have been walking in for days. All that 
forest, all that history, all those stories. More 
than 100 villages. Is that the plan then? To 
drown people like rats, so that the integrated 
steel plant in Lohandiguda and the bauxite mine 
and aluminum refinery in the Keshkal ghats can have the river?



At the meeting, people who have come from miles 
away, say the same thing we’ve all heard for 
years. We will drown, but we won’t move! They are 
thrilled that someone from Delhi is with them. I 
tell them Delhi is a cruel city that neither knows nor cares about them.



Only weeks before I came to Dandakaranya, I 
visited Gujarat. The Sardar Sarovar Dam has more 
or less reached its full height now. And almost 
every single thing the Narmada Bachao Andolan 
(NBA) predicted would happen has happened. People 
who were displaced have not been rehabilitated, 
but that goes without saying. The canals have not 
been built. There’s no money. So Narmada water is 
being diverted into the empty riverbed of the 
Sabarmati (which was dammed a long time ago.) 
Most of the water is being guzzled by cities and 
big industry. The downstream effects ­salt-water 
ingress into an estuary with no river­are becoming impossible to mitigate.



There was a time when believing that Big Dams 
were the ‘temples of Modern India’ was misguided, 
but perhaps understandable. But today, after all 
that has happened, and when we know all that we 
do, it has to be said that Big Dams are a crime against humanity.



The Bodhghat dam was shelved in 1984 after local 
people protested. Who will stop it now? Who will 
prevent the foundation stone from being laid? Who 
will stop the Indravati from being stolen? Someone must.

On the last night we camped at the base of the 
steep hill we would climb in the morning, to 
emerge on the road from where a motorcycle would 
pick me up. The forest has change even since I 
first entered it. The chironjee, silk cotton and 
mango trees have begun to flower.



The villagers from Kudur send a huge pot of 
freshly caught fish to the camp. And a list for 
me, of 71 kinds of fruit, vegetables, pulses and 
insects they get from the forest and grow in 
their fields, along with the market price. It’s 
just a list. But it’s also a map of their world.



Jungle post arrives. Two biscuits for me. A poem 
and a pressed flower from Comrade Narmada. A 
lovely letter from Maase. (Who is she? Will I ever know?).



Comrade Sukhdev asks if he can download the music 
from my Ipod into his computer. We listen to a 
recording of Iqbal Bano singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s 
‘Hum Dekhenge’ (We will Witness the Day) at the 
famous concert in Lahore at the height of the 
repression during the Zia-ul-Haq years.



Jab ahl-e-safa-Mardud-e-haram,

Masnad pe bithaiye jayenge

When the heretics and the reviled.

Will be seated on high

Sab taaj uchhale jayenge

Sab takht giraye jayenge

All crowns will be snatched away

All thrones toppled

Hum Dekhenge



Fifty thousand people in the audience in that 
Pakistan begin a defiant chant: Inqilab Zindabad! 
Inqilab Zindabad! All these years later, that 
chant reverberates around this forest. Strange, the alliances that get made.



The Home Minister has been issuing veiled threats 
to those who "erroneously offer intellectual and 
material support to the Maoists." Does sharing Iqbal Bano qualify?



At dawn I say good-bye to Comrade Madhav and 
Joori, to young Mangtu and all the others. 
Comrade Chandu has gone to organize the bikes, 
and will come with me upto the main road. Comrade 
Raju isn’t coming. (The climb would be hell on 
his knees). Comrade Niti (Most Wanted), Comrade 
Sukhdev, Kamla and five others will take me up 
the hill. As we start walking, Niti and Sukhdev 
casually, but simultaneously, unclick the safety 
catches of their AKs. It’s the first time I’ve 
seen them do that. We’re approaching the 
‘Border.’ "Do you know what to do if we come 
under fire?" Sukhdev asks casually, as though it 
was the most natural thing in the world.



"Yes," I said. "Immediately declare an indefinite hunger-strike."



He sat down on a rock and laughed. We climbed for 
about an hour. Just below the road, we sat in a 
rocky alcove, completely concealed, like an 
ambush party, listening for the sound of the 
bikes. When it comes, the farewell must be quick. Lal Salaam Comrades.



When I looked back, they were still there. 
Waving. A little knot. People who live with their 
dreams, while the rest of the world lives with 
its nightmares. Every night I think of this 
journey. That night sky, those forest paths. I 
see Comrade Kamla’s heels in her scuffed 
chappals, lit by the light of my torch. I know 
she must be on the move. Marching, not just for 
herself, but to keep hope alive for us all.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/22-walking-with-the-comrades-aj-07 


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