Authors: Patrick French
In 2004 the People’s War Group merged with other Naxalite outfits to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist), causing distress to comrades in the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who thought it sneaky to take
out their “rx” and replace it with an “o.” The Maoists continued to target the Marxists, viewing them as traitors to the left because they took part in government. Their leader was Ganapathy, alias Ramana, alias Srinivas, alias Dayanand, alias Chandrashekhar, alias Mallamma, alias Rajamma, alias Balreddy, alias Radhakishen, alias Shekhar—his name changed according to where he was. Aficionados knew him as plain “G.S.,” because he was general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). All these names sounded more glamorous than the one his parents gave him: Muppala Laxman Rao.
One of the few outsiders to have met Muppala Laxman Rao was K. Srinivas Reddy, a journalist from Hyderabad, who was summoned for a jungle interview in 1998. He told me how he was taken on a long and remote trek, escorted by relays of shadowy armed guards, in search of Ganapathy. Reaching a clearing in the forest, he saw a large mounted machine-gun pointing down at him from a tree. A military parade began, and the leader of the Maoists greeted the reporter with a clenched fist and a shout of “Lal salaam!”—“Red salute!” “I thought that I had better do the same back to him,” said Reddy, “which felt kind of strange. Ganapathy is a straightforward, open sort of guy, with grey hair and spectacles. He’s medium height, lean build, medium complexion—not too fair, not too black. He speaks frankly about politics and tactics and his hero, Che Guevara, and often refers to Mao and the Long March—and to Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old
Art of War
, which is like his handbook. He spends a lot of time on political education. Of course, he’s been underground for decades now, so he’s out of touch with what’s going on in the rest of the world.”
Why had he devoted his life to overthrowing the state? “He was attracted by what was going on in Bengal, by the Naxalite movement. Perhaps he saw certain failures of democracy, the exploitation of landlords, and was motivated to do something.”
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More than a decade passed before Ganapathy gave a second interview. This time, aided by the Internet, he had a more up-to-date grasp of events elsewhere in the world. His main aim was to continue fighting, only by stealth, never in the open, never at the ballot box: “The real terrorists and biggest threats to the country’s security are none other than Manmohan Singh [and] other ruling class leaders and feudal forces who terrorise the people on a daily basis,” he told the journalist Rahul Pandita. This was the consequence of “pressure exerted by the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the imperialists, particularly U.S. imperialists, who want to plunder the resources of our country without any hindrance.” He was not a fan
of President Barack Obama: “The hands of this new killer-in-chief of the pack of imperialist wolves are already stained with the blood of hundreds of women and children … bail-outs for the tiny corporate elite and attacks on democratic and human rights of U.S. citizens continue without any change.” Although he disapproved of al-Qaeda’s “social outlook,” Ganapathy thought Islamist extremists were motivated by the “bullying, exploitation and suppression” of imperialist wolves. Nor was he complimentary about his comrades who questioned the party, and was plain bitchy about one leader who had turned his back on Maoism: “Papi Reddy surrendered due to his loss of political conviction and his petty-bourgeois false prestige and ego.”
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Rahul Pandita had done something unusual: he had studied the movement at ground level for more than a decade, growing ever more interested in the way it functioned, travelling through the remoter jungles of central India for weeks on end and spending time with the tribal people. He was himself a Kashmiri Hindu who had been driven out of his home at the age of fourteen by Muslim separatists, at the start of the insurgency in 1990. “When I met Ganapathy, he asked me where I was from. I told him Kashmir, and he said they were pro the secessionist movement but saw fundamentalists as ‘obscurantist.’ I talked about my own exile. He was surprised. He thought the Indian government had expelled us. They have a lot of romantic ideas about secessionist movements. I’ve met other top Maoist commanders and they will speak about Amitabh Bachchan, Stalingrad, Sachin Tendulkar, local cultural traditions—it’s as if you’re having a couple of sundowners at the club with an Oxford professor—but when they talk about politics their whole face and demeanour changes. Their eyes become opiated. When a policeman was beheaded in Jharkhand, one said to me, quoting Mao: ‘Revolution is not a dinner party. You’re talking about one beheading. In the French Revolution, they had to invent the guillotine to cut off heads.’ ”
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Later I asked Pandita about his own exile, another war. He wrote to me in an email: “I left Kashmir on April 4, 1990, along with my family, leaving everything behind. We could not take anything with us except my parents’ educational degrees and some of my mother’s jewellery. Life was very tough initially and we had to sleep on newspaper sheets for days altogether. Life had become very difficult in Kashmir. One of my father’s friends was waylaid by terrorists, shot in his knees and then they sprayed pee on him, and after torture, he was shot dead. A woman, a nurse, was kidnapped, gang-raped for days and then cut alive on a mechanical wood-cutting
machine. On the roads, people from the majority community would jeer at us, saying, ‘Go away, this is Pakistan.’ We had become the Tutsis of Kashmir.” Another exile, another war.
The dense jungles of India where the Naxalites function are also home to various aboriginal Scheduled Tribes. In many cases, Adivasi or tribal life was a response to a particular geography: communities such as those in the foothills of the Himalayas simply could not survive if required to live more conventionally. Part of the complication was that the term “tribal” covered everybody from Angmo, a businesswoman who ran a successful trekking agency up in Leh, to Agatha Sangma, the young hereditary MP from Meghalaya. Scheduled Tribes ranged from the Asur people of Jharkhand and West Bengal, a small tribe who worship spirits and smelt iron, to the Kattunayakan from Kerala and Tamil Nadu who collect forest produce like wild pigs and honey, and the Gonds of central India, a tribe several million strong with a recorded history going back more than a thousand years. Since 1947, with a policy run from New Delhi and the state capitals, the covenant between the remote regions and the government has broken down. When large mines, dams and factories were built, the rehabilitation or resettlement was usually nominal. Tribal peoples were often given colonial treatment, as if they were somehow separate from the rest of India, despite usually being the Indians who were Indian before the rest arrived.
This problem was at its worst in the north-east, in the pocket of states bordering Burma, China, Tibet and Bhutan, which were linked to the rest of India only by a narrow corridor or “chicken’s neck” between Bangladesh and Nepal. The Constitution made a distinction between the tribal peoples of this region and those in other parts of India, but since independence this had rarely been observed. There was little sign of any policy except containment of separatist activity by the military when it occurred, and reliance on a handful of local ruling politicians. The north-east had several hundred tribal groups, and although a Karbi from Assam and an Ao from Nagaland might have little in common, they were perceived by the public as being the same: “Chinkies.” The region was sparsely populated, and with only twenty-five MPs it was difficult to exert political influence in New Delhi.
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Nearly all its funding came from the centre, and much of this money ended up in the pockets of bureaucrats and separatist extortionists. Little effort had been made to develop a more creative policy of administration, which recognized the links between remote regions and sources of
power outside India: in 1965, the tracks of the Bengal–Assam railway that linked the Assamese city of Guwahati to Dhaka (now the capital of Bangladesh) were torn up.
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A Khasi from Meghalaya told me he believed that all insurgency in his state would stop if the Indian army returned the land they had appropriated for their various operations and military bases.
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Millions of people whose ancestors were from Nepal found they were perceived as outsiders in India. Munish Tamang was a lecturer at Delhi University who wished to be perceived as a loyal citizen, but found it hard when many other Indians made assumptions based on his physical appearance. “Most of us came to India in the nineteenth century, to help with the tea cultivation,” he said. “My parents were part of the Indian National Congress and contributed to the freedom struggle. When my daughter’s friends saw me for the first time, they asked her: ‘Is your dad a Chinese or a Japanese?’ There was a Gorkha signatory to the Constitution of India. It was only in 1992 that Nepali became an official language in India. If you look at Bollywood films, we are shown only as guards, watchmen or ‘road Romeos’ who look at girls. Or we’re presented as fighters—brave, loyal Calibans.” Tamang’s organization, the Bharatiya Gorkha Parisangh, campaigned for a Gorkha state within India. “We want a Gorkha state as a mark of our identity, just as the Nagas can say they are from Nagaland. Back in 1907, the Hill Men’s Association was demanding that Darjeeling should not be part of Bengal, but should have a separate Gorkha administration. So we want to be more integrated: it’s separation for integration.”
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No resolution was apparent in the clash between modernization and the needs of India’s many minorities. The government’s wish to integrate or assimilate Scheduled Tribes was in many cases impractical, and the country had neither the spare land nor the social temperament to set up reservations for protected forest-dwelling tribes. Many Adivasis themselves liked to journey back and forth between modern and traditional life, yet tribal living was sometimes impossible under present conditions; moving from place to place or hunting and gathering from the forest had in practice been criminalized in parts of India. Rahul Pandita told me he had been to villages where the last time a government block development officer had visited was in 1967.
“You go to the huts and there is nothing. They have a lot of malnutrition. The Adivasis take the liquid of the mahua flower, which turns into alcohol. You can see women and children drunk. People from the outside look down on them for this, but the reason they drink is because they need the calories. They get mistreated by forest officers, who take their goats and
their chickens and try to take their wives too. In the old days the Adivasis could get a monkey or snake from the forest and drink water from a river. Now they find—because of all the mining and industrial processing—that the water is contaminated with fluoride and arsenic. The Maoists have set up schools in some places which have a mix of education and propaganda. They even show BBC science programmes. If you ask the Adivasis who they support, they say, ‘The police come here and beat us. The Maoists come and demand food, and then go on their way.’ You could call them sympathizers.”
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I went to Warangal and other destabilized parts of the Andhra region to meet the Maoists. The first was Gaddar (his name meant “revolution”—he was born Gummadi Vittal Rao), a bank clerk turned balladeer who could draw hundreds of thousands of people to his concerts. He was a legend among leftists, the founder of an organization that had spread revolution via cultural performances in the 1970s. Gaddar sang some of his songs to me, heartily, in Telugu, but was interested mainly in repeating slogans. At one point he even broke off our conversation to do a telephone interview with a foreign radio station:
“If you slap me once, I’ll slap you four times.”
“If I sow a seed, it has to break the earth in order to grow.”
“Coca-Cola is killing us every day.”
In 1997, Gaddar took six bullets to the chest, in what he believes was a contract assassination attempt by off-duty policemen, but survived. Without prompting, he removed his shirt to show me the gruesome scars.
The second revolutionary was Madhu, a squat and stunted man with a look of terror on his face, who looked as if he had been physically destroyed by a life of poor nourishment in the jungle. We met in a decrepit room, with lookouts all around, where flocks of mosquitoes bit us. Madhu had fever and the scars of old wounds on his legs. He told me he had joined the Maoists after being beaten by his landlord for not working properly. Again, he spoke mainly in slogans. When I asked him why he followed Maoism when it had been abandoned long ago in its country of origin, he said that I was following revisionist propaganda and added: “Revolution is a duty. We are not following Mao. We are following Maoism-Marxism-Leninism. Officially, we are following the mass line given to the Chinese Communist Party plenary in 1969 by Lin Biao, who said revolutionary groups in oppressed nations should not take part in elections or trades unions, but should follow the armed struggle.”
This was quite a claim: Lin Biao was a paranoid wreck of a man, a military
commander who had been promoted as Mao’s loyal servant and possible successor, and had been so mentally disturbed by the inversions in China that he had to be injected with tranquillizers before appearing in public. Lin Biao was discredited even among old-fashioned communists. This was a central aspect of the problem with India’s Maoists: they relied on dead mantras. The initiator of the Naxalite movement back in the 1960s, Charu Majumdar, had believed above all in bloodshed as a route to purity, the theory that if you annihilated the correct landlords and moneylenders (though in these backward areas, the landlords were themselves often not far from poverty) ancient social ills would disappear.
The third revolutionary was a more unlikely figure, though more representative than either of the others. Suneetha Kukka was a “surrendered” militant, meaning she had given herself up in exchange for the bounty that was on her own head—Rs20,000, or about $430—and agreed to abandon Maoism. Slim in her best pink sari, she said she was only twelve when she ran away from home to join the militants. A gang of revolutionaries had come to her village and made vigorous speeches against injustice, social evils and the oppression of women. For Suneetha, whose parents were landless labourers who had worked for a lifetime in return for less than a dollar a day, it seemed like a reasonable message. She had never been to school, and was one of eight children; the prospect of a career as a coolie was less appealing than joining a war. Suneetha had been attracted by the singing of the People’s War Group. The more Maoists I met, the more I heard about how they had been motivated and inspired by the local literature, poetry and songs of “resistance.”