The End of Karma Page 11

  I was scooped off the counter, hurried out of the shop, and plunked into the nearest rickshaw. The saris must have remained unfurled on the counter. Ma’s heart must have raced in fear. Her mouth must have been wide open, as it often is when she encounters the unknown.

  Mamu’s revolution turned out to be short-lived. By 1973, during Indira Gandhi’s administration, a tough counterinsurgency effort quashed the Naxalites with little resistance. There were unexplained extrajudicial killings. There were no tribunals to get to the bottom of who did what, no accountability.3

  My uncle received amnesty from the state. Many of his friends were jailed. A neighbor across the street was killed. The most privileged among them, I was told later, were escorted by parents to the international airport in Calcutta and sent off to universities in America. There were still many idealists, as Mamu recalls, but their movement splintered into numerous ideological shards.

  Still, over the next three decades, some of those Maoists quietly regrouped. They acquired guns and satellite phones. They expanded well beyond the few pockets where they had been active during my childhood. This time too, they were led by college-educated men and women, including at least one who had been educated in Britain. Their foot soldiers were young men and women from the hinterland, mostly adivasis who had been cheated for generations in free India.

  The rebellion blossomed once more at noonday. This time it was deadlier, more damaging. It showed how devastating it can be when young people are promised so much, and given so little.

  The volatile cocktail of rich lands and poor people has produced ugly conflicts elsewhere. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a fight over the control of copper and gold. In Nigeria, gun-toting gangsters have fought over control of the oil-rich delta. I have covered both. I have seen the devastation firsthand.

  In India’s case, the demand for natural resources—especially coal and iron ore—accelerated in the period after the economy opened up in 1991. In turn, it fueled an insurgency across an adivasi belt that stretched from the Jharkhand villages that Mani and her people call home through Rakhi’s rural Bengal and farther south into Orissa and Chhattisgarh. In my mamu’s time, adivasis were among the worst off in India. In my daughter’s time, they remain so.

  Here in West Bengal, it helped the rebels’ cause that adivasi villages had seen little improvement in seventy years of freedom. Complicating matters, the West Bengal state government had been run for three decades by politicians who also called themselves Communists. Their local apparatchiks behaved like thugs. Jobs went to the politically connected, if there were jobs at all.

  The guerrilla insurgency—and the state’s response to it—only made things worse for ordinary citizens who struggled to get by. For example, security forces turned schools into garrisons, which prompted the Maoists to raze them altogether.4 Astonishingly, if schools were rebuilt, they had to abide by Maoist specifications, with sloped tin roofs that security forces could not use as defensive bastions. Otherwise, villagers told me, the Maoists threatened to raze them all over again. That the rebels dictated the design of schoolhouses indicated how little authority local government officials had over government services.

  In some states, the government machinery responded to the rebellion by clamping down on law and liberty: Preventive detention laws were enacted. Suspected troublemakers—including journalists, activists, and even a doctor who for years had operated a clinic in an utterly neglected adivasi corner of central India—were picked up and thrown in jail, sometimes for years.5 The insurgency held up billions of dollars in investment in roads, mines, and factories.

  Most important, the conflict forever changed daily life in these villages. Fear hovered over everything. Neighbors could no longer trust one another. Corpses appeared on remote country roads. The casualties included cops, teachers, politicians, farmers, as well as suspected insurgents. Passenger trains were derailed. Land mines were planted on strategic roads. Mothers who subsisted on harvesting leaves and berries feared wandering into the forest. In some parts of the country, people scooped up blankets and water pots and fled deeper into the bush. At one point, in 2006 and 2007, as India’s economy was galloping, an estimated 50,000 villagers were displaced in Chhattisgarh state, as Maoists battled state-funded anti-Maoist militias.

  Dust and brambles blew through the empty villages when I visited Chhattisgarh in the summer of 2006. My goal was to see a Maoist commander inside the Abujmarh forest, which served as the rebel base. Getting that interview involved many months of negotiations by phone and email through a chain of minders and emissaries, followed by an initial, fruitless foray into the bush, followed, finally, by the coveted promise of a face-to-face meeting.

  I received my instructions in snatches. Fly to the state capital, Raipur, and wait. Drive to such-and-such tea shop two hours outside the capital and wait. Eat parathas. Wait. Follow those motorcyclists in your own car and wait. Board that jeep. Ask no questions.

  There were five of us on this trip: my colleague from the Delhi bureau, Hari Kumar, a photographer on assignment for the Times named Namas Bhojani, plus two journalists from the British newspaper The Guardian. We squeezed into a dark red jeep. We spent several hours being driven along a paved road, and then several more on unpaved roads, until it became dark and we had no idea where we were. We may as well have been driven around in circles. At some point, late in the evening, we were told to disembark and follow our guides into the jungle. We walked silently until we reached a shallow, gurgling stream. I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my jeans. The water came up to my knees.

  On the other side of the stream, motorcycle chauffeurs waited for us, procured by the Maoists to ferry us over a narrow dirt track through a pitch-dark forest. My chauffeur was a young man who said he had been conscripted for the evening. If he had a strong opinion about the Maoists, he certainly didn’t tell me. How could he? He was in their service. They ruled these jungles. He did muster the courage to ask me quietly as he maneuvered his bike through the inky black trees: “Didi, tell me, why do they blow up the roads all the time? It would be good to have some roads around here.”

  Our chauffeurs deposited us at an abandoned house. Being the only woman in our crew, I got my own room, with my own wooden platform for a bed, covered in cobwebs. I unfurled my purple sleeping bag liner and crawled inside, fully dressed. I turned on my headlamp and wrote in my notebook:

  frogs

  stars

  roads with trenches to keep away unwanteds

  I slept.

  Our minders woke us up when it was still pitch-dark. Wordlessly, they led us through the forest and deposited us as dawn broke at a small clearing circled by bamboo. The forest stirred. In the first indigo light of day, I could make out figures moving around me. The People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) cadres were beginning their day. They brushed teeth. They washed pots. They mostly wore standard-issue forest-green uniforms—pants and button-down shirts—with flip-flops instead of army boots. Their socks dried on tree branches. Someone turned on a transistor radio, crackling with news from the BBC Hindi Service. The company commander, who called himself Gopanna Markam, shaved.

  Slowly came light, revealing the guerrilla encampment. Flecks of morning sun warmed the forest floor. Someone blew a whistle, which was a signal for the cadres to gather around the cooking pot. Breakfast today was sweet, milky tea and puffed rice. Markam snapped his finger and a cup of hot water materialized for my Nescafe. Sleeping bag liners and Nescafe were among my vital supplies. No matter how long I lived in India, I could not bear milky tea. Nor could I function at dawn without coffee.

  The Maoists had brought us here today to witness a song-and-dance revue that Markam’s crew was putting on for the locals. After breakfast, the crew rehearsed. They went over their lines. They practiced their dance steps. They reminded me of cheerleaders. Instead of “Go Team” they chanted “Red Salute.” They looked like children—fourteen, fifteen years old maybe—but wh
en I pointed this out, Markam insisted that they were all adults.

  Such performances, Markam said, were an effective way to draw local kids. Indeed. Which kid in the world wouldn’t skip a day spent drawing well water and collecting firewood to dress up instead and sing?

  I was given clear rules of engagement. I was prohibited from talking to cadres. I could ask questions only of Markam. And his story had been carefully curated, skeletal in its details, deliberately everyman. Gopanna Markam was most certainly not his real name.

  Markam described himself as a farmer’s son from neighboring Andhra Pradesh. His family had the means to send him to college, where he joined something called the Radical Student Organization. “I was a little educated,” he said. “I thought the future was dark. I thought I would join to make a change.”

  This was his version of how the Maoists organized. By 1980, he went underground as a “full-timer,” as it is known, for the People’s War Group, or PWG. Throughout the 1980s, in Andhra Pradesh, the PWG would make its name by slaying some big landlords and forcing a bit of land reform. The Andhra Pradesh authorities struck back with a powerful counterinsurgency force. Many Maoists, Markam included, slipped into the poorly policed jungles of Chhattisgarh. They shifted focus to winning over adivasis.

  Those first few months in Chhattisgarh, whenever the locals saw Markam, they fled into the forest. It didn’t help that he was armed. It didn’t help that he didn’t speak the local language, Gondi.

  In time, he said, he learned that language. He learned about what the local people wanted. He helped them negotiate higher prices for their principal crop: leaves of the tendu tree, which they gathered from the forest floor and sold by the bundles to be rolled into country cigarettes, called bidis. Occasionally, the Maoists hauled the tendu pata traders into Maoist-run “people’s courts,” roughing them up if they refused to pay peasants for the crop. The Maoists’ principal targets, though, were police and any civilians they labeled as police informants. Markam recruited locals, training them to shoot (but also to conserve bullets) and to use machetes.

  On this morning, I noticed some of his subordinates were teaching one another to read. Others were tinkering with an improvised explosive device, as other teenagers elsewhere might tinker with model airplanes. There were plenty of young women in the ranks. Hair oiled and plaited. Belts clinched around the waist. Soldiers.

  Markam said the Maoists organized by forming armed village squads, known as dalams, and local governance units, known as People’s Revolutionary Councils. They took on village priests and headmen, the traditional sources of local power. They kept the cops out. They collected taxes, sometimes a slice of the tendu collection. They tried to discourage drinking, but they weren’t terribly successful. Maoist leaders like Markam could be a self-righteous, teetotaling lot. A defector once told me that it was the Maoists’ joylessness that finally drove him out—as he put it, they didn’t know how to enjoy an ice cream cone on a hot day.

  Markam told me he had also tried to persuade people not to vote. But this was not terribly successful either. Indians like to vote. Even out here, where choosing your leader brings so little.

  While the Maoists stepped up their organizing, the government authorities played right into their hands. In 2005, Chhattisgarh raised a militia to fight the Maoists. The state recruited mostly teenaged boys and young men for its anti-Maoist militia, handed them rifles and a license to be thuggish. The summer of my visit to the Abujmarh forest the widening conflict between the two sides had driven tens of thousands of villagers into refugee camps or deep into the bush. I wrote about it in the Times.6

  I asked Markam about the movement’s failures. He said he regretted that they hadn’t pilfered as many arms from the security forces as he would have liked, nor launched as many offensive strikes on security forces. Some of the cadres, he admitted, had unnecessarily killed some civilians.

  The song-and-dance show began later that morning. Men pounded on goatskin drums. Cadres led chants denouncing imperialism. Under an enormous mango tree they sang a Gondi version of “The Internationale.’’

  Then, the PLGA cadres came down from the hills; I counted nineteen uniformed fighters. Alongside came a second rung of fighters who tended their fields most days but who could be called upon to help the PLGA in battle—like a reserve force, dressed this afternoon in cheerful tie-dyed, wraparound lungis (I counted thirty men). In unison, they raised a hodgepodge of weapons—shotguns, antiquated .303 rifles, country-made pistols. They marched. They stood at attention. They circled the field in mismatched flip-flops and oversize sneakers, kicking up red dust.

  The audience, all locals instructed to attend the program, sat still in a semicircle. One woman held up her baby, so the child could have a better view. Some broke into giggles as the PLGA charged in a line, their weapons pointed at a chicken scurrying across the field.

  Abujmarh—“unknown highlands” in Gondi—spreads out across 3900 square kilometers of rolling hills, thickly covered with bamboo and the sweet berry of mohua.

  The very top leaders of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)—its sixteen-member leadership council is called the Politburo—hid up in these hills, directing the activities of the rebel organization in the rest of the country. Throughout the mid-2000s, as the Maoists stepped up the insurgency, the rebel group amassed more weapons, blew up trains, and executed politicians. They funded the rebellion in part through a lucrative extortion scheme. Anyone doing business in the Maoist belt had to pay a rebel tax.

  In April 2010 came the deadliest attack in this war. In Chhattisgarh, several dozen federal paramilitary troops with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were ambushed as they returned to their base after an all-night patrol. The Maoists first blew up an armored personnel carrier. Then they sprayed the troops with bullets, killing nearly all of them, seventy-six in all. The Maoists had been watching the federal forces from a strategic ridge just above the road.

  An official investigation into the ambush showed how unprepared the security forces were. They had little body armor to protect them. They were sleep-deprived and stressed. They were on unfamiliar terrain. And in an inexplicable tactical misstep, they were returning from their reconnaissance mission along exactly the same route they had taken on their way in. They were easy prey.

  A few days after that attack, I traveled back to the same patch of Abujmarh. I got nowhere near the Maoist base. I found instead a rattled CRPF battalion, trapped inside what used to be a residential school for adivasi children and was now a garrison for security forces.

  The men were boiling with anger, as much at the rebels as at their bosses who put them here. They spoke to me from the other side of a brick wall. They said they dared not venture out. They stayed awake all night in case of a Maoist ambush. They took turns sleeping during the day. This week the rebels had held up even their milk deliveries. So the troops had been reduced to drinking black tea. They said it was like being in jail.

  A long line of adivasi villagers listened quietly as the troops spat their grievances over the brick wall. The villagers had walked down to the main road that day to collect their government-subsidized food rations for the month. Ration trucks were no longer permitted to go up into the hills. So the hill people had to come down to collect the rations they were entitled to. It took three hours to get down here on foot, and longer to go back, what with the sacks of rice and salt on their heads. But there wasn’t much of a choice. If they didn’t come, they wouldn’t eat, they said. They knew what that was like—not eating.

  Rice, flavored with wild greens. That was their daily staple. If they were lucky and someone managed to slay a deer, there was meat. On what they called long days (summer days), they aspired to eat two meals. On short days, one.

  Of the thirty-five kilograms of rice they would procure this day at the ration shop, they said the Maoists would take five.

  * * *

  On this trip I met an orphan who called himself Manher Singh. This is the
story he told me.

  It was a winter’s evening in a hamlet nestled inside Abujmarh. The boy had just returned home from herding his uncle’s cattle, when men with guns stood in front of his house. They were from a platoon of Maoist guerillas. Come with us, they said.

  They took Manher to a neighboring hamlet, tied him up in a bamboo grove, and presented him before a village assembly. The boy could see their eyes shining in the dark, like so many surprised deer. The Maoists accused him of snitching to the police.

  Manher said he was innocent. He said he had nothing to do with the cops, that he had lost his parents long ago and lived with his uncle and occasionally went to school. To make himself useful, he herded his uncle’s cattle and gathered firewood for the evening meal.

  His captors were unconvinced. “They said if I wanted to leave, they would have to kill me. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll stay.’ ”

  And that is how the boy, fourteen at the time, became a beast of burden in a guerrilla war against the Indian state. He trekked through the jungle with a Maoist platoon, past small, remote villages and across rivers, easily avoiding police stations, health clinics, and government offices—because in Abujmarh there are very few of these institutions. For all intents and purposes, the Indian government did not govern here, not before the Maoists came and not after.