Hello Bastar

by Rahul Pandita

Even as it sends missions to the moon and boasts of being a nuclear power, India has so far failed to ensure that nobody goes hungry. There have been cases where foodgrains were left out in the open to rot while the godowns of the state-run Food Corporation of India were rented out to liquor companies to store alcohol.

Feudalism is one big factor that contributed to the rise of Naxalism since the beginning. In his jail diary, Naxal ideologue and poet Varavara Rao describes the plight of women working as labourers in the fields of a feudal landlord, Visunuru Deshmukh. Once the women begged him to let them off for a while to enable them to breastfeed their children who lay outside the fields. He is believed to have ordered them to fill a few earthen pots with their milk. Then he snatched away the pots and threw that milk over his fields.

When the police arrived, they took the side of the landlords, further alienating the tribals. In fact, the role of the police follows a more or less similar pattern even decades later: in the 1984 Sikh pogrom, in communal riots in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and elsewhere.

On 7 September 1978, over one lakh agricultural labourers and other poor people from 150 villages took out a march to Jagtial town. Hidden in their houses, the landlords watched this development. By the next day a number of them were so shaken by this spectacle that they fled to the cities. The same day, the district collector of the area issued a letter which said that land reforms in Karimnagar should be implemented on a war footing.

Due to the Jagtial march, a rare phenomenon took place, perhaps the only one of its kind till now in the history of India. The poor working class decided to socially boycott those landlords who would not surrender the land they illegally occupied.

Meanwhile, the thirst for land among landless peasants and tribals was at its peak in Andhra Pradesh. It was Indira Gandhi, say veteran Maoist ideologues, who first created this thirst among the landless in the state.

Thousands of villagers were rendered homeless to make national parks for animals. For the State, the Adivasis counted for less than animals.

Often an Adivasi caught in the forest area collecting firewood or forest produce would be threatened with dire consequences and then coerced into sending his womenfolk or his cattle to the forest officials.

Because of such acts, many young Adivasis were attracted to the Maoist cause.

'Amalendu's crime, Kalpana's crime, is the crime of all those who cannot remain unmoved and inactive in an India where a child crawls in the dust with a begging bowl; where a poor girl can be sold as a rich man's plaything; where an old woman must half-starve herself in order to buy social acceptance from the powers-that-be in her village;

Of late, the Maoists have also been accused of having a nexus with corporates such as mining companies. A recent report24 by the Asian Centre for Human Rights cites intelligence reports that at least three Jharkhand-based corporate houses have paid 2.5 million rupees each to the Maoists in 2007-08.

The Adivasis have no reference point to a better life. They have few aspirations apart from, perhaps, better food. Nothing has changed in these parts of the country for centuries except a sense of empowerment engendered by the Maoists.

The Maoists had earlier participated in similar agitations in Singur and Nandigram, where the protests had turned violent. Participating in such agitations is a part of the urban agenda of the CPI (Maoist).