Red Sun : Travels In Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti

Summary of Red Sun : Travels In Naxalite Country

Shortlisted for Indiaplaza Golden Quill Award, 2009 in the category of Readers' Choice Award for Non -Fiction.

Spread over fifteen of the country’s twenty-eight states, India’s Maoist movement is now one of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated extreme-left movements. Hardly a week passes without people dying in strikes and counter-strikes by the Maoists interchangeably known as the Naxalites and the police and paramilitary forces. In this brilliant and sobering examination of the ‘Other India’, Sudeep Chakravarti combines reportage, political analysis and individual case histories as he takes us to the heart of Maoist zones in the country areas of extreme destitution, bad governance and perpetual war.

In the Ramayana, Dandakaranya, the forest of Dandaka, is where Prince Ram settled down for his fourteen years in exile before reclaiming the throne of Ayodhya. It was a cursed wilderness; full of demons and pestilence, and it was to remain so cursed till Ram set foot in it, accompanied by his wife Sita and brother Lakshman. Peace was fleeting. Sita was abducted from their forest home by the demon king Ravan, and in Ram’s lofty chase to recover his bride, men, animals, gods and demons, all displaying various shades of good and various shades of evil, joined the battle. True to epic form, good and evil are often interwoven in the Ramayana, and perception holds the key.

Today’s Dandakaranya covers an area of nearly 92,000 square kilometres and spans impressive chunks of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh— mostly Chhattisgarh. The area is nearly twice the size of Kerala. It is quite hilly, and thickly forested, easily seen as a dark green deciduous vastness on Google Earth or any proficient school atlas. Patches and strips of similar dark green link it all the way north to Nepal and all the way south to Kerala. The forces of establishment and the police, the assumed forces of good, simply call it DK. The forces of anti-establishment, the hardcore of left-wing revolutionaries who comprise the CPI (Maoist) also call it DK, but they have an additional acronym for the area: DKSZ, or Dandakaranya Special Zone. It’s been their home for over a quarter century, since the early 1980s, when armed action began against landlords and moneylenders. The Maoists too insist they are the forces of good. A post at the popular web log ‘Naxalrevolution’ says: ‘The notion that a Naxal is someone who hates his country is naïve and idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.’

And to radically break the law, for which he is hunted and killed.

Good versus good. As ever, reality can be deceptive. Well inside Dandakaranya, I’m in the four-room cottage Himanshu calls home. It’s more sprawling hut. I’m refreshed after bathing in chilled well-water, and the simple lunch of roti, dal, and potato curry tastes heavenly after greasy eggs and glasses of sickly sweet tea at a Payal Air Lines pit stop in the middle of the night. Himanshu’s wife Veena is feeding their daughter Haripriya lunch in an adjacent room, from which Mallika the mongrel has been banished for the duration. She sits and whines outside the mosquito-screen door. Sampatti the maid brings us fresh rotis.

‘Tell me about Salwa Judum,’ I ask Himanshu after lunch as we stroll towards his office, a low air-cooled building powered by solar energy. Workers and volunteers—young men and women, a mix of tribal and non-tribal—are feeding in data into several desktop computers, data on literacy programmes, water use and sanitation. ‘There must be some root for Salwa Judum to take hold. It can’t happen out of nothing.’

‘The Naxalis did get a little overconfident,’ he admits. ‘And some cadre were clearly pushing villagers. They would say, Don’t do this and don’t do that. Don’t collect tendu leaves [used to roll bidis] if you don’t get a better price. But what will villagers eat if they don’t work? They would decide on projects and sometimes even marriages. In some places this became a problem.

‘Equally, I believe Salwa Judum is wrong. It’s not a spontaneous Jan Jagran [People’s Awakening] as the government claims, but a government-sponsored movement. The government pays for everything. I tell them, you can’t fight violence with violence.’

Himanshu claims to be a believer in the Sarvodaya movement, a manner of post-Gandhian simple-living, dogooder philosophy propounded by Vinoba Bhave, whose framed photograph finds pride of place in the homestead. It’s also what prompted Veena to give up the middle-class dream of an American Green Card and join her activist husband in these jungles thirteen years earlier.

‘This Pisda, the collector, he’s a tribal himself,’ Himanshu refers to Dantewada district collector K.R. Pisda, the seniormost civil administration official of the region. ‘I told him, You are giving away bows and arrows in the name of Salwa Judum. As a collector you should be giving away pens.’ Pisda is in good martial company. Just days into Salwa Judum, the local paper Haribhumi—the Land of Krishna—of 10 July 2005 carried a photograph of Pisda’s counterpart in Kanker, S.K. Raju, posing with a standard military-issue INSAS rifle. ‘They say, Listen to us, or we’ll send the Nagas,’ Himanshu says. ‘It’s like asking children to shut up or a nasty dog will bite them. This is how the administration scares villagers.’

A young man drops by Himanshu’s desk to take a draft of a letter to Pisda, mentioning that a Dutch doctor has volunteered to work in Salwa Judum camps in the area, so could he be given permission. I raise my eyebrows. Himanshu is grinning. I ask if the administration has ever put pressure on him, a do-what-we-say-or-else sort of thing.

‘The collector has said to me more than once, and so have the police—You must be giving information to the Naxalis because you travel from one place to another. I tell them I live in the forest, I can give information to them anytime, I don’t need to travel for that. You see, we empower people, teach them to read and write, tell them about basic rights, and this goes against local landlords, politicians, moneylenders and traders. So they call me a Naxali…Let us just say the administration and I maintain our peace.’

But this qualifier is evidently too much for Himanshu. ‘I mean, look at the mentality of the administration,’ he says with more frustration than anger. ‘Some days ago I wrote a letter pointing out that there are no facilities in Salwa Judum camps, and yesterday the concerned minister announces flamboyantly, “Kaun kahta hai nahin ho sakta? We will have ten lakh toilets in Dantewada.” A million toilets for 2,00,000 families in the area. These people say whatever comes into their heads.’

A sturdy local, Sukhdev, drops by to say Salwa Judum have called a meeting towards the end of April and that they have requested use of the ashram’s computers and printer to design posters for it. Himanshu folds his hands and raises them to his forehead in a classic gesture of exasperation. ‘Please thank them and tell them to let us be.’

‘We’re caught in the middle in this civil war,’ he says, turning to face me. ‘The Naxalis think I’m with the government as I don’t openly support them, and the government thinks I’m with the Naxalis because I live in the forest and I criticize Salwa Judum. Both think if you’re not with us, you’re against us.’

We sip some tea and lapse into silence.

‘Hum to buri maut marengey,’ Himanshu says suddenly. He then escalates from how he will die a ‘terrible death’ to ‘a dog’s death’: ‘Hum kuttey ki maut marengey.’ The news was pouring in as I prepared to travel to Chhattisgarh on 20 April 2006. Nepal was exploding with popular protest. CNN-IBN had a story about the secretary to Nepal’s home minister being arrested for participating in an anti-king rally— if it had come to this, the monarchy’s autocratic rule was all but over.

The Author

Sudeep Chakravarti attended Mayo College, Ajmer and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He began his career in journalism at the /Asian Wall Street Journal/, and subsequently worked at /Sunday/, /India Today/ and the /Hindustan Times/. Sudeep is also a professional futurist affiliated to the World Future Society. His debut book, /Tin Fish/ (Penguin Books India), was published in 2005 to both popular and critical acclaim. His second novel, /Once Upon a Time in Aparanta/ (also by Penguin Books India), was published in 2008.

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