Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam

by Vivek Agnihotri

"If anything, if you can get somebody interested in something and get them excited, that's great. You should be praised for having opened the debate and having asked the right questions. - Oliver Stone

feel like a fetus about to be ripped out from the womb. Abortion by mob.

It’s difficult to guess a hardworking person’s age as they jump straight from childhood to middle age.

Prabhu hails from a state which can put even West Bengal to shame - Bihar. His village is 100 miles away from Patna. He came to Calcutta to earn a living and feed his family back home. He did odd jobs, like any other migrant, and lived in a tiny room with 20 other Biharis.

It’s strange, how we find more honest and righteous people as we climb down the economic strata.

‘This, perhaps, is the only place in the world where people hate development,’

‘Yeh bhadralok ki rajneeti kabhi Hindustan ko amir nahi banne degi’

Why do we love making speed breakers? Maybe it’s a subliminal reflection of our system’s psyche that thrives on creating as many hurdles as possible on our way to success. More hurdles mean more corruption, more money for the law enforcers.

Soon in India, more people will have access to 4G telephones than water.

In 70 years of independence, we haven’t been able to provide water to our citizens.

Because they are against the Leftist ideology of armed struggle, they are considered right wing.

JU – the nursery of radical politics?

The story goes that when a pregnant lady crosses the JU gates, the baby in her womb starts talking politics.

‘Bloody fascist Brahmin. Go back Agnihotri’.

‘Because there is no place for alternative narrative at JU.’

These students played poker, drank beer, smoked pot, attended standup comedy shows and dreamt of having an IT professional for a wife and driving a BMW in an American

Agitations, dharnas and strikes are good business for some.

We now know that the recent Jat reservation agitation costs the states Rs. 34,000 crores,

The practice of wooing and appeasement of minority communities was started by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Prime Minister VP Singh’s politics of Mandal converted it into a competitive political mafia. Identity politics today has become India’s biggest socio-political malaise.

Gujjars are a pastoral community. The name Gujjar is derived from the term gaucharana...

In every dham, there are many agents for everything. We have a setting with them. Hotels, restaurants, chaiwala, sadhus, pundits, everyone is a part of it. That’s where we really earn money as commission.’

When you stand nowhere, you are closest to yourself.

How does one eliminate middlemen when everyone is a middleman in one way or the other?

We hurry when we are not interested. We hurry when we don’t care.

Urban Nexals -- Vivek Agnihotri

What is the reason for calling someone, fighting with a gun in Kashmir, a terrorist and another man with a gun in Bastar, a revolutionary?

Stress has a strange quality. It blocks all our positive thoughts.

We are told a wrong history. Jiski laathi uski bhains—strength triumphs.

Whoever rules, writes his own history.

Nehru judged history and filtered it to what should be told to an independent India and what should be hidden. He made sure that the history reinforced his ideology and made him look like a hero. His daughter Indira Gandhi and later her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi tuned our history to further their political agendas. In independent India, only a certain kind of narrative is allowed; the one that suits the ruler's agenda.

the world’s largest Asian ghetto.

whose father is a clerk in the Customs & Excise department and maintains a journal of all corrupt officers, thinking that some day he would expose them and eradicate corruption.

These people who work at the bottom of a hierarchy, as spot boys, light boys, setting boys, even the walkie-talkie attendants and many others keep working on film after film without knowing anything about the subject. They go outdoors but don't know the names of the city where they shoot. They keep moving shoot after shoot, following dead instructions without ever knowing what they are doing, and why. Did the workers on Sholay have any idea what kind of history they were participating in?

These people work on a film-to-film basis. Between two

“Marxists say God is a fraud. But God has lasted thousands of years, Marx could barely last a hundred years.”

Urban Nexals

the forests of Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region. The early morning breeze flowing from Indravati river and brushing along champa and chandan trees work as a perfect catalyst for meditation. In the evening, the same breeze brushing through tendua and mahua leaves works as an aphrodisiac. The Indravati river, which starts its journey from the Vindhyas, converts into a picturesque delight at the point where Chitrakoot Falls are located. It is believed that due to its heavenly fragrances of chandan and champa forests, Lord Indra and Indrani came down from heaven to stay here for some time. One day during his regular walks, Indra got lost and reached a small village Sunabeda, where he saw a beautiful girl Udanti, fell in love with her and stayed back with her. After waiting for Indra for a long time, Indrani couldn’t control her patience and sorrow and went around asking people about Indra. Everyone knew about the Indra and Udanti; they gave her solace and gently broke the news to her. When she broke down, they suggested that she stay with them as part of their family. Unable to hide her scorn, she cursed Indra and Udanti that they would never meet again. It is believed that she transformed into a river and stayed with the local tribals. Indra and Udanti rivers flow there separately, without meeting each other due to the curse of Indrani.

#LocalStories #UrbanNexals

‘The jungle is our life. We exist as long as jungles exist,’ I was told by a young tribal man when I had visited Bastar in the late 1970s. In Bastar, traditions and rituals are closely linked to these forests and trees. The tribals believe that their gods and goddesses reside in this jungle and, therefore, every tree is sacred. The saja, the mahua, the semal, the mango, the karanji, the banyan, the peepal, the salfi trees are symbols of good fortune and prosperity. The number of salfi trees in a house is an indicator of the wealth and prosperity of the household. The drink that is made from its fruit is an integral part of their culture. If the drinks of salfi, chind, and mahua are not offered during ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death, the ceremonies are considered incomplete. People revere trees just as they revere their parents and their deities. For they have never seen anything other than these forests. They don’t know that outside these forests lies an India that has been to the Moon and Mars.

#Tribes are more civilized than us, people living in cities and exploiting nature upto its core.

Feudalism prevailed and the only reason outsiders came here was to exploit its rich mineral wealth of iron ore, bauxite, tin, granite, marble, limestone, and corundum. These tribals are isolated from the rest of India– demographically, geographically, economically, socially, culturally, politically and psychologically. India has many Indias within. But they are not on the radar of the mainstream narrative.

While the CRPF team was returning, Naxalites blew up the bus with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), commonly known as landmines. Though overwhelmed by the heavily armed ambush of Naxalites firing from the heights, the CRPF men fought back and the encounter lasted until all eighty men fell one by one and those who survived ran out of ammunition. The Naxals then climbed down and shot the wounded men and looted their weapons. Seventy-six CRPF men were killed by over a thousand Naxals comprising of a supporting cast of local militia and sangam village associations. ‘It was a total siege,’ a police officer reported. ‘The CRPF men were attacked not just from three sides, but even from the open area.’ Some defenceless surviving CRPF men pretended to be dead but Naxals searched bodies, shot the pretenders and looted all weapons and ammunition. Only three rifles were found at the site of encounter. It was a swift affair and perhaps the deadliest in the history of independent India. Even at the Line of Control (LOC) and in Kashmir, where our forces have been fighting an unending battle with Pakistani forces and terrorists, we never lost so many soldiers in a single attack.

#Nexals

Some find Naxals messiahs for the oppressed and some think they are the villains who stall India’s growth story. And none is willing to listen to the other. I have to find the truth.

if the truth is not popular, it seems like a lie.

Truth

Naxalism started as a social justice movement, 50 years ago, in a half village-half town in Darjeeling district of West Bengal where some poor peasants forcefully took away land from landlords. The police were called in on 24 May, 1967 and police officer Sonam Wangdi was killed by arrows shot by tribal peasant leader Jangal Santhal and others. The next day, a large armed police contingent arrived at Naxalbari and they fired at the peasants, killing nine women and two children. In a young independent India, where social disparity and feudal oppression was the order of the day, this tragedy enraged the youth who wanted to build a nation based on equality and justice. Many young people joined this movement led by Charu Majumdar, a hardline leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M).

Majumdar later quit CPI(M) to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(ML), which believed in killing “class enemies” to establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The movement came to be known as Naxalism and the young men and women who led this movement came to be known as Naxals or Naxalites.

But slowly, the immediate economic and social problems of the masses took a back seat and the battle for the supremacy with ...

Naxals in Jharkhand have set aside their ideals and emerged as a mining mafia. A report claims that a multi-crore mining scam is being staged by the Naxalites. The Maoist extortion business is estimated to be around a whopping Rs 2,000 crore. All contractors have to pay five to ten percent of the project cost to Naxalites as ‘protection money’. Trucks that pass through the ‘Red Corridor’ pay Rs 1,000 each per month.

In July 2007, a group of armed Naxalites extorted Rs65,000 from a poor farmer in Chikmagalur in Karnataka.

In February 2009, the Naxals, who are active in this area, held a so-called ‘people’s court’ and accused Ansari and Singh of acting under the influence of the police and being ‘involved in counter-revolutionary activities’.

poor tribals who work on MGNREGS are always in trouble. On one side, there are corrupt contractors. On the other, there are the Naxals, who support contractors to get money. ‘While both the Naxals and the MGNREGS contractors claim to be working for the welfare of the tribal communities, in reality, they are engaged in a nexus to benefit themselves. Which is why they don’t want anyone to create awareness about people’s rights,’

Sister Valsa kept trying to work against the criminal nexus led by the Naxals and she was seen as a stumbling block to their evil aspirations. On November 15, 2011, a mob of fifty armed men, out of which over thirty were Naxals, broke into her house and hacked her to death.

This is not the Naxal movement I knew of. In a story of oppressor versus oppressed, we tend to look for a Robin Hood, the hero. In independent India’s story, media has tried to make Naxals look like Robin Hood. Which is why incidents like the Niyamat and Valsa murders are rarely reported in detail and if reported, they always put the blame on the State.