India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (26 page)

I tell the maverick administrator about my trip to Chavela and its lack of amenities. He doesn’t seem surprised. He knows far worse cases, he tells me. Three months back, for example, he visited a village called Beenagonda. Located at the very limits of the Gadchiroli district, in the dense forests of Abujmarh, the isolated settlement is home to thirty-five huts and two hundred and nineteen residents. Beenagonda has no roads and no electricity. The nearest market is fifty-seven kilometres away.

The only evidence of the State is an ashram school and a rural health centre. Of the fourteen teachers on the payroll, he found only three at their posts. The Deputy Collector’s assessment report talks of blocked school toilets, roofless bathrooms and leaking classrooms. The health centre earned an equally unfavourable verdict. It lacked both a doctor and medicines. Undocumented, the village’s tribal residents have never benefited from a government welfare scheme. Beenagonda has two wells: one dry, the other clogged up. Its inhabitants make do with muddy water from a stream.

The remote village has another defining characteristic. It is situated deep in the heart of ‘Naxal infested’ territory. According to army intelligence, the left-wing guerrilla group runs training camps and explosive-manufacturing units in the surrounding forests. The hillsides are said to be planted with landmines to keep the army at bay.

The nearest settlement is the village of Leheri, about twenty kilometres away. It has a small police barracks. A year before the Deputy Collector’s visit, Naxal gunmen ambushed the remote outpost and shot seventeen policemen dead. The road runs out in the same spot. So it was there that the official alighted from his jeep and began his trek into the hilly forests to Beenagonda. He was on government business. His boss, the Collector, had ordered an appraisal of all the tribal schools in the region and had assigned the inaccessible adivasi village to his deputy.

The Deputy Collector is frank about his reasons for going. Fulfilling his assignment was, at best, only a part of his motivation to risk his life trekking through hostile terrain to reach Beenagonda. A secret, ulterior motive drove him too. He hoped to run into some Naxals. Startled, I ask why. His overriding interest, he reiterates, is the development of the district. Gadchiroli’s ‘backwardness’ is often blamed on the guerrilla insurgents. They scare away investors, it’s said, and hold the tribals back. He wanted to hear from them if that was true.

The local police chief said he couldn’t guarantee his safety. A team of government-funded welfare officers had tried carrying out a census of Abujhmad’s tribal population earlier in the year. The Naxals had forcibly refused them access. The only other serious attempt to map the area had happened during Akbar’s reign, five centuries ago. That, too, had been stymied by the aggression of its inhabitants. The Deputy Collector resolved to take his chances. With considerable persuasion, he managed to persuade seven others to join him.

What followed has become the subject of much talk in the district. After forty-eight hours, no word had been received from the senior government official or his team. Local villagers reported seeing the group wading through a river a short way out of Leheri. After that, nothing. Total silence. The security forces feared the worst and hit the panic button. A call was put in to the home minister. A police search party was dispatched. Local scouts were recruited. Within hours, news of a major kidnapping on the Maharashtra–Chhattisgarh border was running across TV bulletin boards.

Then late on the second day, the white-haired diver walked out of the forest. Tired and wet, but otherwise unharmed, he was surprised by all the fuss. He was immediately escorted back to Gadchiroli. A press conference was hastily arranged. The Collector bustled him out in front of the cameras and ordered him to scotch the rumours of a kidnapping. The Deputy obliged. But he went further. Not only did he say that the Naxalites had caused him no harm, he accused the security forces of inciting violence.

The comment was occasioned by an experience on the drive back, when a uniformed policeman ordered him out of his official car at gunpoint. ‘In the so-called “dreaded Naxal area”, no Naxal attacked me with a gun,’ he explains. ‘But when I came back into my own area, my own police showed me the gun.’

The listening journalists lapped it up. A second media frenzy ensued. His superiors went ballistic. An official case was launched against him for ‘demoralising’ state security forces and ‘glorifying’ the Naxals. The investigation remains ongoing.

We both sit in silence for a few seconds. A government official apparently sympathising with the enemy. The Deputy Collector really is an intriguing mix. Has he always harboured such feelings, I wonder, or did his trip into the forest spark some kind of Damascene conversion? The thought sparks another question: did he achieve his hidden objective? Did he actually meet with the Naxals? I ask him straight.

The question is met with an ambiguous reply: ‘I didn’t meet anyone who declared themselves to be a Naxal.’

‘So you did meet with the Naxals, then?’

He merely repeats the statement again, although this time with a knowing smile.

And so it is that we fall into a hypothetical discussion about what the Naxals might have said had he met them. The conversation becomes peppered with caveats and comic conditionals. ‘There are reports that . . .’ ‘Some people say . . .’ ‘Everyone knows . . .’ For all his attempts at subterfuge, his true feelings lie close to the surface. The Naxals, he’d ultimately concluded, are not against development. ‘They are against exploitation.’ It’s true that they might oppose roads and bridges. This, he maintains, is only because better transportation is designed for the authorities to get into the forest and not for the tribespeople to get out.

Nor does he subscribe to the general view that the Naxals abuse tribal communities. They’re ‘friendly’, he says. If they were to ask for food, ‘let’s suppose’, then they’d pay for it. The only ones at risk are teachers. ‘Teach well,’ they tell them, ‘or you’ll be in trouble.’ Perhaps that’s why so many absented themselves,
I suggest. He shrugs. Naturally, he ‘wouldn’t know’. He’s merely repeating what he’s heard.

I shift tack. If he can’t tell me directly what the Naxals say, what do the villagers say about them? Are they sympathetic?

He lightens up. Speaking to the villagers was, after all, part of the official reason he’d been sent to Beenagonda. Some of them do support the Naxals, he confirms. I ask why. He takes one of the pens from his pocket and begins to scribble doodles on a sheet of paper. ‘The old generation of adivasi, they are content,’ he eventually responds. ‘But this new generation has no direction. They have no employment or means of livelihood. Yet they are exposed to the luxurious life. They are confused and . . .’

He drops into Hindi, struggling for the word in English.

‘Frustrated?’ I suggest.

‘Yes, frustration. They have very much frustration.’

He draws two mountains on the sheet of paper in front of him. With the tip of his pen, he points to the valley between them. The tribals are on one side and the ‘civilised’ world on the other. One in the light, he says, the other in darkness. ‘They have their own traditions, values and culture, but they have been told that they must come into the mainstream. They are being shown luxuries they don’t know how to achieve.’ The Naxals play on that, he says. Their tactics are sometimes crude. They pay new recruits a start-up fee, for instance. Unlike Dr Kopulwar, he’s prepared to put a figure on it. Three thousand rupees. ‘It’s an open secret.’

In other ways, their methods show more subtlety. Many adivasi groups oppose plans to develop the region’s mineral deposits on the grounds that it will mean the appropriation and denuding of tribal lands. The guerrilla group took up their cause and made it their own. Posters began appearing that pledged never to concede an inch to ‘Capitalists and Imperialists’. The tribals remember the guerrilla for previous interventions too: fights for fairer pay for forest products like tendu leaves (the base ingredient for beedi cigarettes) and bamboo; protection from heavy-handed forestry officials; retaliation against murderous paramilitaries.

Faced with an indifferent, often violent State on the one hand, and an illegal but armed defence force on the other, the choice for many tribals is simple. As the Deputy Collector concludes: ‘In a sense, they [the Naxals] are the messiahs of the poor.’

I turn the conversation to the district’s other gun-touting group, the security services. With mention of the police, he relaxes his charade of impartiality. Perhaps because of what he sees as his own unfair treatment or perhaps because he no longer cares, he’s content to speak his own mind. ‘The police are more violent than the Naxals,’ he insists. ‘Ask anyone in Gadchiroli and they will tell you the same.’

He has his own theory as to why this is. He thinks the police are exaggerating the movements of the Naxalites to spread fear among the population. Fifty-seven deaths in three decades. The Naxalite rap sheet in Gadchiroli is bad, he admits, but it doesn’t merit the huge security resources being poured into the area. There are currently around nine thousand state and paramilitary forces in the district, ranging from everyday police to specially trained anti-terrorist commandos. No one can be sure how many fully fledged Naxals there are, but official estimates put it at no more than three hundred. The Deputy Collector spies a racket. ‘In defining this as a “Naxal-affected district”, the security forces get more funds and facilities. That’s the root cause.’

As corruption stories go, it’s one of the more extreme I’ve heard yet: the police misrepresenting the terror threat so as to keep their budgets augmenting. I have a hunch his mind is set and, without any evidence to the contrary, I leave it there.

Instead, I focus the time we have left on the positive spin he gives the Naxals. Before arriving in the backwater town, I’d done a quick survey of newspaper reports from the district. Stories abound of tribals being dragged from their homes by guerrilla soldiers. Each account finishes in the same fashion: with the individuals being branded ‘informants’ and summarily executed. The Deputy Collector does not refute the practice. ‘I never said the Naxals are good,’ he insists. ‘My version is that the police are worse.’ The Naxals, he continues, carry out ‘targeted killings’.
The violence unleashed by the police, in contrast, is ‘unlimited’ and ‘random’.

Just two days ago, a fire-fight had broken out between security forces and a Naxalite unit in the tribal village of Sawargaon, not far from Gadchiroli. During the confrontation, a grenade was lobbed into the school. Four died instantly – two pupils, a female cook and a villager. Another pupil died later of his injuries. All the reports suggest it was the Naxals’ doing. What’s that if not random violence? The Deputy Collector sees things differently. Who’s to say it was the Naxals who threw the grenade? The police. And who’s to say they can be trusted? I feel myself being drawn into his web of distrust and double-guessing. As with all conspiracy theories, suddenly nothing seems clear-cut. I sense it’s time to finish off.

We’ve been talking for over three hours as it is. Outside, the last of the light has long passed. The Deputy Collector toys with his top button, smiling as he does so. He rocks back in his chair.

There is something I should know, he says confidentially. He is currently on suspension. His salary has been frozen for the last three months. His debts are mounting (he paid for his Swedish trip by credit card). A second investigation has now been brought out against him, this time for ‘unauthorised leave’. His bosses allege that his diving vacation in Europe had not been officially sanctioned – something that the indicted official fiercely disputes.

The Deputy Collector is evidently something of a loose cannon. How much truth there is to his theories of duplicity and state-sponsored violence is unclear. I have my doubts. If Gadchiroli was such a lucrative posting, for example, why are roughly half the senior posts in the collectorate vacant? Yet his description of the tribals’ wretchedness rings true. And the idea that the Naxalite movement (though far from being messianic) might be somehow related to that wretchedness sounds plausible too.

What seems certain beyond doubt is that the system the Deputy Collector once hoped to change is now turning in against him. His questioning of official doctrine – namely, that Naxals are a nihilist
menace and a stain on the face of New India – has lost him any support that he may once have enjoyed.

The censured official is not the only one to fall foul of the establishment. Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy recently wrote a cover story for the popular weekly magazine
Outlook
in which she linked the Naxal phenomenon to the ‘downward spiral of indigence’ experienced by India’s tribal population. The article elicited a furore of abuse. One leading academic compared her to Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s apologist. The Chhattisgarh police even threatened to charge her under the state's draconian Public Safety Act. In the case of Dr Binayak Sen, a human rights activist and vocal Naxal sympathiser, the authorities delivered on their threat. The sixty-one-year-old was recently convicted for sedition and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Naxals are not welcome in New India. That much is understandable. Yet the Naxals’ cause and the tribals’ plight are not one and the same, however the guerrillas or the government try to spin it. It’s possible to object to the first and still support the tribals’ struggle. Yet the space to do so is shrinking. As the two issues continue to be confused, so the Red Corridor will carry on being a place for outsiders – be they armed or otherwise.

The next day, I travel out to Mendha Lekha. I had been feeling out of sorts ever since leaving the Deputy Collector’s office the previous night. After so many months on the trail of New India, such an abrupt return to the Old had left me confused and despondent.

Returning to the spartan hostel, I’d spent a sleepless night. The desperation still apparent in India’s forgotten hinterlands depressed me. Travelling through India provides endless scope for wonderment in face of the poverty and inequality, which remains so transparently evident.