Hello Bastar

by Rahul Pandita

On Sundays, the city's middle class would come out in hordes, in their small and big cars, enjoy ice cream at India Gate and then watch a movie at one of the multiplexes. This would cost a family of four at least Rs 1500, more than what 74 million households or 37.2 per cent of India's population earned in two months. The city was a paradox. People would come out to rally for the rights of pet animals, and others would brand their underage maidservants with a hot iron. It was a city where the malnutrition rate was 35 per cent,1 far worse than sub-Sahara. In the same city, surveys2 revealed that 40 per cent of schoolkids were overweight. For the Commonwealth Games, the homes of the poor were being dismantled. Leviathan billboards were being put up to eclipse slums so that foreign athletes would only be able to see glitzy shopping malls and departmental stores selling soy milk and broccoli.

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.

Caste is one major reason why Naxalism flourished in Bihar. And crushing poverty.

'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; where countless people die of sheer neglect; where many are hungry while food is hoarded for profit; where usurers and tricksters extort the fruits of labour from those who do the work; where the honest suffer whilst the villainous prosper; where justice is the exception and injustice the rule; and where the total physical and mental energy of millions of people is spent on the struggle for mere survival.'

In an interview12 in 1999, Ranvir Sena chief Brahmeshwar Singh said that his party would kill every Dalit irrespective of age or gender because they provided shelter to MCC squads. Upon being asked why the Ranvir Sena would not spare children and women, he said that Hanuman set the whole of Lanka afire, killing all demons including those in wombs.

Unfortunately, the Maoists have been used by political parties to further their own interest. In recent times, it has happened in Bihar, in Jharkhand, and in West Bengal as well. In Andhra Pradesh also, political parties would use them for electoral benefits and once they assumed power, the same party, now in charge of the government, would crush them.

The PWG document provides an assurance that the State (the Maoist state) shall not discriminate towards anyone in terms of tribe, caste, religion, nationality, gender, language, region, education, post and status. It shall deal with all as equals. It shall give equal opportunities to all. Citizens will have the right to believe or disbelieve religion and the state shall oppose all kinds of religious fundamentalism. The document says that the party will confiscate the lands of landlords and religious organisations and distribute them to the poor, landless peasants and agricultural labourers on the basis of 'land to the tiller'. It shall strive for the development of agriculture.

A weak force can defeat a bigger and more sophisticated force only through guerilla warfare depending on extensive involvement of the masses. So, guerilla warfare is the method adopted to protect 'people's forces' and 'people's organisations.' As these forces develop into an established army, a 'people's liberation army', it evolves into mobile warfare where, besides self defence, the Maoists wipe out enemy forces.

Death begins chasing us right from birth and seizes us as we approach 50 years of age.'

In this part of the country, I think, there is hardly any difference between a mongrel and an Adivasi. Upon being kicked by the woman, the mongrel ran to the Maoists just as the Adivasis ran to them after being kicked by the State.

It is a sense of identity that prevents Suresh from leaving the Maoists. The work they do and the guns his senior comrades carry give him a purpose in life. It is the same sense of identity that prevents another young boy from removing his cap. It is olive green with a star.

Before that, he received training with the Naga battalion of the CRPF. 'But I tell you, the training was nothing in comparison with the training given by Naxals. They have a lot of jazba (motivation) … But look at the central forces. You just need to burst a cracker, and they will all roll over to one side. Naxals burst Laxmi crackers and the CRPF exhaust their ammunition in the return fire,' he said.27

The girl was kept in Jangi's house along with a few men of the village who the police suspected of being Naxals. The next morning, the girl was taken to a nearby field, blindfolded, her hands tied, and raped several times. A fact-finding team which visited her after the incident was told by the girl that the police did 'badmaash kaam' with her. She told them that the first person who raped her was Munna Thakur. 'He said I must have heard his name as he pushed himself over me,' the girl told the team. The girl said she fainted several times during her ordeal.

In 2006, 17-year-old Ramsay Jangi was picked up by C-60 commandos and beaten up severely. When his cousin Mathru Jangi went pleading that he was innocent, the police assured him that he would be freed after first-aid. In the night, the villagers saw Munna Thakur. They heard him shouting at his men, instructing them to 'finish off the work A moment later, the villagers heard several gunshots. The police had shot dead Ramsay Jangi. The body was taken to Dhanora taluka. After ten days, the police came back and asked Ramsay's father Manik Jhangi to come and collect his son's body. But nobody went, fearing arrest. The police disposed of the body.

How did a girl like Anuradha, born into privilege, come to choose a life of struggle and hardship in the treacherous jungles of Bastar, a rifle by her side and a tarpaulin sheet for her bedding? The answer perhaps lies in the times she lived in. Or the kind of person she was. Or, maybe, a bit of both.

One such area is north-west Delhi's Bawana that the TV journalist Ravish Kumar calls the Bastar of Delhi. In a medium obsessed with pretty faces and glam news, Ravish does something that the big bosses of TV journalism term as 'downmarket': he visits areas like Bawana, inhabited by the poor, and chronicles the life of people living in such areas in his weekly show. What Ravish has seen has left him shocked. He speaks of meeting women who earn 60 paise a day after a day's hard labour. 'I couldn't show that in my show because no one would believe me,' he says. But such women do exist, he says, here in the national capital. These are women who sift through mountains of paper waste out of which about a kilo of cardboard is prepared for which they are paid an amount ranging from 60 paise to Rs 1.25 a day. He has met women who glue together key chains commemorating the Commonwealth Games, and after putting together 144 such keychains, the women are paid three rupees. Out of this, 50 paise is taken as commission by the contractor.

Vedanta acquire more than 6,000 acres of land even as the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research had identified 1.82 million tonnes of thorium-bearing monazite resources along the Orissa coast—the same area, coincidentally, where Agarwal wants his world-class university. Those opposed to the deal called it 'India's biggest land grab', and alleged that Vedanta was being favoured because it had funded the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha election campaigns of the state's ruling party, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). They contended that when some of the world's top universities such as Harvard or MIT had main campuses under 400 acres, why did Vedanta require so much land?

Fidel Castro said in his famous 1953 speech: 'History will absolve me.'

what if Usman ever gets to go to Giridih? Or what if Giridih visits him in Gurgaon?

On 5 February this year, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, a 16-year-old Dalit girl was attacked by three upper-caste youth. While she was returning from the fields, they dragged her away in an attempt to rape her. When she resisted and shouted for help, they fled. But before running away they chopped off her ears and part of her hand with an axe and badly injured her face. The inhumanity of this action would be unthinkable in any civilised society. But here, in India, it is hardly noticed. This is routine. In our highly patriarchal system, a girl's life is cheap; a poor Dalit girl is less than a chattel in the prevailing upper-caste/ upper-class social thinking.

In a society where a small percentage of people consider themselves superior to all others merely due to birth, there can be no democratic consciousness. Where major sections of society are seen as inferior (and nearly 20 percent treated as untouchable) merely due to their birth, what results is a society that is hierarchical and not democratic.

Caste consciousness supercedes national consciousness, identity, loyalty—everything.

Her child-like simplicity with no element of pretence, trickery, or cunning allowed her to focus fully on whatever issue she took up. Her mind was not dissipated in varied futile directions to create impressions, appearances and images. As a result, her mental sharpness and intellectual capacity continued to flower and grow even towards the last years of her life, even after she was afflicted with the deadly disease, systemic sclerosis. In the 35 years that I knew her—from a simple student leader to a mass leader—she never lost her straightforwardness and pristine honesty. I never saw her struggle to achieve this; it all came very naturally to her. One tends to see these values amongst the simple tribal folk who live with nature and have not as yet been corrupted by the system and are also outside of the caste framework.