On May 25, 1967, a farmer was attacked by goons sent by a landlord in a remote West Bengal hamlet known as Naxalbari. The event sparked off a violent uprising, led by Maoist leaders Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal. Naxalism was born. Forty-one years later, the extreme Left-wing movement in India has grown stronger and far more dangerous. From Pasupathi to Tirupathi, Maoists rule in large pockets where the government fears to tread.
In his latest book, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, journalist Sudeep Chakravarti, 44, argues that India could implode in a war fuelled by the anger of the poor and the dispossessed.
In a wide-ranging interview with Sarita Ravindranath, Chakravarti talks about the sham that is 'Superstar India' and his attempt to shake Middle India out of its mall-stupor and humanize a tragic conflict: Of a country at war with itself.
Your book goes against the grain of the 'Superstar India' image that mainstream media is celebrating. You focus instead on 250 million people who live on less than Rs 12 a day and the Maoists feeding on their anger. Why and when did you decide to write about them?
I have spent my career as a journalist, both as reporter and editor, tracking India's economic development, meeting top ministers, entrepreneurs and executives from India and abroad; and attending summits from Delhi to Davos. I am a direct beneficiary of India's ongoing economic liberalization and freedom of expression that India's urban middle classes have come to take for granted. But there is a growing disconnect I do not wish to keep quiet about.
Except for perhaps 'unity' based on the rupee, corruption, cinema and cricket, there is a grave disconnect between urban and rural India, and, even within urban India. This disconnect is economic, social and political. Seventy percent of India is away from the 'growth party'.
To imagine India can be unstoppable with its gross poverty and numbing caste issues is to be in lunatic denial, a display of unstoppable ego. Superstar India is the product of the fevered imagination of one celebrity writer who lives and thinks caviar and creme de la creme. That, too, is India, but that is not even 10 percent of India at present.
Is that what sparked Red Sun?
Red Sun was a story waiting to be told. There is a fairly large and excellent body of non-fiction writing on the Naxal movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, and various subsequent extreme-Left incarnations through the 1980s. But apart from the occasional writing and display in media around the time of major skirmishes between rebels and security forces, there isn't a book on the movements of today as driven by the CPI (Maoist) that attempts to demystify it.
The second reason is there is great lack of telling the human story about and around the present play of Left-wing rebellion. Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessed and the dead are not numbers; they were%u2013and are%u2013people. With Red Sun I have attempted to humanise a very tragic conflict, one of a country at war with itself.
A third reason is that learned writing about Maoism in India (it continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) is generally restricted to academic journals and analyses by think tanks. There is a crying need to mainstream it, tell the lay reader about what is going on, shake Middle India out of its mall-stupor, and diminish the delusions of grandeur of India's lawmakers.
There was every reason to write Red Sun. The truth about this wrenching war has to be told. And I am quite pleased with what a former chief of army staff told me a few days back. He said the problem with Red Sun is that it's true.
Reports say that Maoists control nearly one-third of India -- some 170 districts in 14 states -- and an estimated fifth of India's forests. Is Maoism a bigger threat than militancy in Kashmir or insurgency in the North East?
A clarification: Maoists do not 'control' one-third of India. While they certainly control vast forest areas like the Dandakaranya region that encompasses areas of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Orissa, and other forest areas in Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal, they operate with less impunity in other areas.
But that reality, too, is extremely significant, as it suggests abdication of governance by the state, lack of a justice system, extreme poverty, social discrimination and the state utterly taking its own people for granted.
The thing to keep in mind is that Maoists are not only in the forests of India. They are gradually spreading their influence in non-forested areas of Vidarbha and Marathwada in Maharashtra, industrial hotspots in Orissa, the plains of West Bengal, plantation areas of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and even in the agricultural hotspots in Punjab and Haryana.
Maoists are today allied with numerous groups across India, from those protesting displacement on account of large projects to those protesting ill treatment on account of their caste.
Maoist sympathizers amount to many tens of thousands. A former home minister of Karnataka mentioned he estimates at least 5,000 families in Bangalore are sympathetic to the Maoist cause. If these numbers don't seem significant in a country of over a billion, consider that it took only 19 people to bring the World Trade Centre towers, attack the Pentagon, and trigger an attack on Afghanistan, and the still unwinnable global war against terror.
In this context, 'threat' is relative. Insurgency in Kashmir and India's Northeast steadily bleeds India. But even as it demolishes the myth of India being a wholesome nation, it does not currently hold the power to demolish India.
The Maoist issue, on the other hand, goes to the heart of India. It has the power to implode India: poverty, dissatisfaction, helplessness and anger make for potent ammunition. We have great islands of prosperity, but great oceans of discontent, too. Maoism is not India's greatest internal security threat. Poverty, non-governance and corruption are. Maoist rebels merely mirror our own failings as a nation.
You blame poverty and development that excludes the poor for the rise of Maoism. Why is the government so reluctant to acknowledge this?
Because the government of India and various state governments have no fingers to point at anyone but themselves. There is no 'foreign hand', no xenophobia to feed on, no shrill cries of 'secessionism' to blame for the abysmal failure of governance, stunning apathy and callousness of our rulers and administrators.
We can send a man to the moon, but there is no great joy in being only a little above sub-Saharan Africa in Development Indices and human rights. Our record shows that we are an innately corrupt, innately caste conscious, racist bunch of people content to vote criminals back to power over and over again.
In Jharkhand, politicians have used money meant for upgrading policing facilities to buy SUVs for themselves. All over India, Dalits are beaten, raped and burnt. And only ten percent of development funds reach the intended. Such examples are endless. Why are we surprised when there is anger and resentment? Why are we surprised when some are driven to arms when state agencies fail? No less a person than the president of India is on record saying citizens are increasingly taking justice into their own hands because there is a failure of law and order.
By the way, Maoists are patriots by their own admission. Some analysts even call them 'extreme patriots'. It's worth thinking about it, given our past, given that Bhagat Singh, a hardcore leftwing revolutionary, has a bust in Parliament, and the Information Ministry takes out newspaper advertisements on his birth anniversary!
Maoist rebels are fighting to be heard, to be given the most basic rights. If they are heard, and their problems addressed, why would there be any reason to fight? We may not like it, but there it is.
Despite your clear position that armed revolution is never a solution, some reviews of Red Sun hint that you're a tad too empathetic towards the Maoists.
I can't comment on reviewers, except to humbly acknowledge that most reviews have been kind and instructive. Others have been ludicrous and evidently written by people whose idea of adventure is to add a second drop of Tabasco sauce to their Bloody Marys, and their sense of India is whether their favourite Hollywood movie has arrived at the multiplex the same time as it does in America. Having mentioned this, reviewers are entitled to their opinion like anyone else. If I'm free to write, they are free to comment.
Perhaps the more pertinent point is that some people don't like the truth. I have seen this during my career, and I certainly have seen it with Red Sun. I like to tell it like it is. With Red Sun, I have attempted to present as many sides of the story as possible, including that of Maoists, security forces and the administration, and those caught in the middle.
Do you sometimes feel like the people you write about - people who're caught in the middle of the Maoists and the state?
Unlike the people I write about in Red Sun, I don't feel the least bit trapped. Instead, I feel liberated for having told the story, for having been able to reach out to an audience, to make some people think. In that, I am privileged.
Your book touches briefly on the divide between Indian and Nepalese Maoists. Last week, Indian Maoist spokesperson Azad told The Hindu that Nepal Maoists, despite an impressive electoral victory, would be stifled by the pressures of democracy and a coalition government. And that no radical restructuring of the system is possible without an armed struggle
The situation in Nepal is different. Maoists have nearly attained their goal of ruling Nepal, and they have done so rapidly. It took only 10 years for the revolution%u2013in great measure aided by common people-to steamroll the state, the monarchy. For the past two years, Nepal's Maoists have been in Kathmandu. They are now the single largest party in Nepal's Constituent Assembly.
The story in India is vastly different, though Maoist influence is spreading here too. Nepal was at a dead-end politically and economically. In India, there is some forward movement, in certain pockets, even astounding movement.
India's Maoists are the first to acknowledge their task of national domination is made much more difficult precisely on account of India's growth. But India's Maoists don't really need to win; they just need to be there, to show us where we have gone wrong.
Azad's comment reflects the grim truth in India, reflects the wariness of the Indian revolutionary whose arc of play is much lower than his Nepali counterpart.
History shows us that it's usually easier to rebel than to rule. It has happened in every ancient civilization and nearly every modern one-barring, possibly and notably, the United States. Mao is as good an example as any. He brought off a stunning rebellion, ruthlessly united a country, and then ruled it at whim.
Nepal is today dealing not merely with the absence of war, but also the chaos of peace, reconciliation and a scheming monarchy. I expect there will be more trouble in Nepal till things settle down. In some ways, it is where India was in 1947.
But history moves on, as it has in Russia, China, and it will in Nepal. In India, Maoist rebellion-indeed, any rebellion, conceivably even a Dalit one-is and will surely continue to provide impetus to change. The wise ought to see the writing on the wall and ensure socio-economic, administrative and judicial delivery so that Mao and his principles needn't have to show the way in India.
Until this happens, rebellion in India is a no-brainer. We have asked for it. It's called 'privileging violence': unless people take up arms, they are not listened to. It's all very unfortunate.
Do you regret that you've not been able to interview a "real", practising Maoist for the book?
I have met numerous practicing Maoists. Many of them are in the book, and from many, I have learnt about the movement. But if this question is about meeting a Maoist in the jungle, the gun-wielding kind, then yes, I have that regret.
From the beginning, I was clear that I would not attempt a history. Essentially, I wanted to adopt the role of storyteller, to tell the story of a poison pill inside the nation%u2013of the nation's own making.
I wanted to portray the everydayness of Maoism and reactions to it. It seemed important to me to expose the thinking of both Maoists and the state; get a sense of how people, subject and victim on both sides, play the game, or are caught in the middle.
As an independent researcher-writer, I was welcome because I had no ties to any media organisation, the establishment-or the anti-establishment. But independence was an irony that cut both ways. If I wasn't affiliated to any media, a university, or some tangible organisation, who was I really with, what kind of story would I tell? Could I be trusted? Was I playing both sides? If I wasn't 'one of us', was I then 'against us'?
While numerous doors were opened, this uncertainty cost me the chance to force open some closed doors. This is particularly true of my interaction with Maoists. They're on the defensive in Andhra Pradesh, and acutely aware of enhanced state security in several other key states where they dominate and operate. They were deeply suspicious, and stopped the kind of easy access %u2013 which some in the media called Maoist Travel Service %u2013 they had provided to the media through much of 2005 and the early part of 2006. I hope to remedy this in my next book on the subject.
Some of your sources include "closet Maoists", educated urbanites like the friend you refer to as B. How different are they from the urban youth in the sixties who got drawn to the Naxal movement?
At the core, they are similar, because what they are angry about is similar to what the educated and privileged were angry about in the 1960s-and that is the true irony of India's 'development'.
But times have changed, social milieus have changed, the politics has changed. The revolutionary movement and security apparatus, too, have changed in their methods of reaction and counter-reaction.
The rebels this time around are savvier, better equipped, and more deliberate. The cadre is much more broadbased than in the 1960s. Many grassroots cadre have assumed leadership positions. They don't like to roll over and play dead.
What were your impressions of Naxalbari and Kanu Sanyal?
Naxalbari is like many smalls towns in India: crowded and dirty. The villages around Naxalbari, where the 'Naxal' rebellion began and took root, are today subsets of tea estates or large landholdings. Even today, the poor live at the mercy of the rich. The tea gardens are failing and they have to contend with the timber and construction mafia too.
Kanu Sanyal continues to live in this region, in a mud hut in a tiny, pretty, poor village called Hatighisa. He still believes in revolution, but he hopes to achieve it by empowering labour, fighting elections, and such. He lives very simply; he lives for his beliefs.
Both the area and the man appear tranquil. But there is restlessness, edginess, and anger in both that has not gone away. North Bengal and its hill districts are already in the throes of a great churn. Maoist literature is more prevalent. Maoist meetings are more frequent.
What is that one moment you'll never forget from your travels through Naxalite country?
Meeting a tribal woman in a tiny village called Pondum, deep inside Dantewada, in Chhattisgarh. It's a ghost village, because everybody was relocated. I found her sitting with her young daughter in their broken down home, unsure about the future, quite lost. Her daughter held her as we talked, as she cried. All around us were quiet fields, and silk cotton trees and wildflowers in full bloom. The pure beauty, and the pure horror and tragedy of that moment still wrench me.
You've written about the forced relocation of tribals into camps. Do you see more states resorting to controversial forums like Chhattisgarh's Salwa Judum to combat Maoism?
Senior police and security officials from even Maoist-affected states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Orissa, and many from the Centre have told me what a bad idea Salwa Judum is. So far, there is no move to transplant the Salwa Judum concept into other such states. Even in the Ministry of Home Affairs, there are strong opponents to Salwa Judum, even as there are strong proponents.
The truth about Salwa Judum is that it is not spontaneous. It is a monster created cynically from a real grouse that some tribal people and farmers harboured against the heavy-handedness of Maoists in the area. The government tapped into this partial resentment and created Salwa Judum with state support%u2013financial, logistical and moral.
But by setting brother against brother, Chhattisgarh has created a situation of mutually assured destruction of tribals. Homes are razed, lands are lost, livelihoods are destroyed, and futures erased.
The chaos that Salwa Judum has caused is perhaps the only reason why other states haven't employed similar methods as strategy. Senior policemen, intelligence officials and security experts have told me Salwa Judum is a no-hoper. But Chhattisgarh can%u2019t retract it. It has become a prestige issue, a noose.
The Salwa Judum camps are little more than instant slum, laced with sewers, oppression, fear and dejection. These house wrecked lives of a people who are treated as the lowest forms of life. Think of an abject slum in a city, marry it with scenes of a resettlement camp immediately after a flood or earthquake, populate it with security forces, and you begin to get a sense of it. This hell is created as strategy by the state, mirroring what it earlier practiced in Nagaland and Mizoram, in the 1950s and 1960s. It's absolutely unpardonable.
Are you optimistic that public pressure will lead to the release of civil rights activists like Dr Binayak Sen and Ajay T G in Chhattisgarh?
Binayak Sen, Ajay T G and others in Chhatisgarh will not be released until the Chhattisgarh government can be made to feel less foolish. These people are soft targets. To my mind, Dr Sen's imprisonment is nothing but a paranoid reaction of the state. It's a classic tactic of retaliation to focus on 'soft' targets in order to divert attention from real failures-of governance, administration, policing, socio-economic development.
In addition, there is the grinding exploitation of tribals and the poor that no amount of finessing or propaganda can hide. The government of Chhattisgarh is now engaged in denying legitimate NGOs space to function in rural areas. It's a stupid, knee-jerk strategy that will bring immense harm.
Besides further fracturing society, it will only serve to escalate the conflict. I, for one, hope public pressure leads not only to the release of Dr Sen and others, but also that it leads ultimately to dialogue between the state and Maoists.
The Maoists are a divided house. Do you think that any one factor can stop them from winning their war?
True development and governance. These are greatest weapons against anger and resentment. The state can try to steamroll leftwing extremism-for that matter, any extremism-and it did with Naxalism in the 1970s But it has only got worse even with so-called development. Spread real development. Ensure development funds actually reach the intended. Ensure efficient administration, policing and justice. The government knows exactly what it has to do. It appears to have little will to do it.
What do you do when you're not worrying about the Maoists?
If I worry about something, it's about India, of which Maoists are a part. We have so much to do, so much to look forward to, and yet there is so much holding us back. It's a cause for concern. I like to express this concern, engage people in debate and discussion, through my writing-whether it's in media, or through works of non-fiction as well as fiction.
When I am not engaged in writing, I earn a living as a media consultant, and as a practicing futurist. My leisure time is spent with family, reading, learning martial arts, scuba diving, and travelling anywhere I can to learn about people, cultures, and issues.
What does a 'futurist' mean?
A futurist is just someone engaged in analyses and projection, into the future in any area from demographics and culture to medicine, robotics and warfare. My focus is in areas of political economy, business, and regional issues, and this I conduct for the private sector and think-tanks.
I have mapped an extreme future scenario in Red Sun %u2013 one I sincerely wish does not come to pass. I believe that, given current dynamics, India will in the not too distant future move into what I call 'In-Land' and 'Out-Land'. In-Land will constitute massive City States (Kolkata and environs; Mumbai and environs, possibly including Pune; Delhi, Jaipur, Chandigarh; Greater Bangalore; Greater Hyderabad; Greater Chennai; and so on). Outside these gated City States will lie Out-Land, present day rural India, as ever out of sight and therefore, out of mind. It is entirely possible that Maoists or others like them could control this Out-Land. If some turn rogues, they could turn to 'warlordism'.
This is not far-fetched. It's already happening; the trends will merely get firmer. Look at the growth of cities, SEZs, patterns of migration, the debilitation and lawlessness of the countryside. We have mapped our future and we are doing everything in our power to validate this future. And the scary part for urban India will be that, unless growth is more equitable, tensions that currently rent Out-Land will steadily move In. And In-Land too could become an unsustainable pressure cooker.
Consider a few points. Rural and urban India will together have more than 300 million more people over the next two and half decades. Foodgrain production needs to more than double in the same time. But our landmass will remain the same.
Our cities are tinderboxes-Mumbai, for example, is 60 per cent slum. Think about it. This is not the time for "Shantaram Tours" of Mumbai's slums. This is the time to ensure there is no need for such grotesque display.
If you had to write Red Sun all over again, would anything be different?
Red Sun is done. It's too late for regrets and wishes. Let me simply say that for better or worse, Red Sun has made a mark; it is well received, and I am so very happy.
Moreover, it has taught me more about my own country, my own people. It has made me more determined to tell stories that need to be told, come what may, and tell it honestly and to the best of my ability and circumstance at a given time. And I sincerely hope my story-telling abilities get better with each story I tell.
This interview was first published on sify.com on April 24, 2009)
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