Walking with Comrades

by Arundhati Roy

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.’

Between 1986 and 2000, the Party redistributed 300,000 acres (1214 square kilometres) of forest land. Today, Comrade Venu says, there are no landless peasants in Dandakaranya.

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.

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.

‘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.’

And what about the Supreme Court that brazenly admitted it did not have enough evidence to sentence Mohammed Afzal (accused in the December 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’.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

‘Once they took away the whole village, saying the men were all Naxals.’

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.

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