Nightmarch

Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas

Alpa Shah

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226590479
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Sociology

Winner of the2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book PrizeShortlisted for the Orwell Prize Shortlisted for the New India Foundation Book Prize Anthropologist Alpa Shah found herself in an active platoon of Naxalites—one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of dense, hilly forests in eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah's journey, grounded in her years of living with India's tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement's history and futureand a powerful contemplation of how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today's world.The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: here we meet a high-caste leader who spent almost thirty years underground, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India's poor have shunned the world's largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims.By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.

PART ONE

Going Underground

1

Following the Call

I BEGAN THE JOURNEY from Ranchi city in the dark, in the bracing bitter cold before sunrise one February morning in 2010. The message had arrived the night before. The phone rang and I recognised the voice at the other end. ‘Two p.m. tomorrow’, was all it had said. And then the line went dead.

By dawn the bus was slowly climbing into the hills. Through the cracked panes of the window glass I watched a procession of men pushing bicycles heaped with jute sacks bursting with coal. Like a line of ants carrying food crumbs three times their size, the men were walking alongside the vehicles on the road, their dark naked backs shining with sweat. They would have started work at two in the morning, packing coal scavenged from working mines, from abandoned beds, or dug out of seams found in village common lands. They were transporting the coal to local traders who would sell it to city households, local businesses, small factories and brick kilns.

It was Sebastião Salgado, known for travelling the world documenting the perilous conditions of human existence created by globalisation and economic liberalisation, who first painted a penetrating picture in my imagination of the men and women in the coalfields of what is today the Indian state of Jharkhand, literally meaning ‘land of the forests’. The Royal Festival Hall in London was hosting an exhibition of his photographs and I happened to be walking along the South Bank of the Thames. With their pickaxes on their backs and their faces and clothes covered in coal, the silver lips of the coal miners of eastern India stood out as though they had been painted on with an expensive fluorescent white lipstick. In a curious subversion of signs of exhaustion, the bags under their eyes were similarly a silvery white. It was as though they were signalling their dignified resolution to fight on, saying that this grinding work in these bleak surroundings could never break them. Their intent and determination was hauntingly piercing. Now they were so close, just on the other side of the bus window.

The bicycles disappeared up a mud track at the side of the road. I realised why when we came to an abrupt halt amidst a discord of honking buses, jeeps and cars. It was by now unbearably hot. The forests had given way to dry barren land. Clouds of dust engulfed us and smoke rose out of cracks in the ground. Finding it hard to breathe, I tied a handkerchief covering my nose and mouth.

The road had caved in along a half-kilometre stretch, leaving a huge crater with a roaring fire in its pit. This was one of the infamous subterranean coal fires of Jharkhand that turn large tracts of ground into a burning honeycomb. This one had begun in an abandoned coal mine and then spread rapidly along the seam of coal that ran right under the road, making it subside. No one had yet taken responsibility for fixing the damage. Not the private mining companies, the Central Coalfields (a subsidiary of Coal India, which was an undertaking of the Government of India), or the district administration. It could take years to repair.

Nearby villagers had ingeniously created a dusty, rocky track, going past their mud huts, for the vehicles to manoeuvre through. Groups of young men in their late teens and early twenties, dressed in jeans, their chests bare, with caps or bandanas tied around their heads, blocked three sections of the new dirt road. From the bus, I watched middle-class passengers shrink into the back seats of their cars, instructing their chauffeurs to roll up the windows, apparently afraid of the youths who had surrounded their cars and were knocking at their windows with sticks. The young men were demanding a fee of Rs 10 and shouting angrily at those who didn’t comply.

The owners of the national and multinational corporations behind these mining developments lived a life of opulence. Indian billionaires were buying some of the most expensive houses in London’s Mayfair and Kensington. One mansion was rarely enough. Stately homes in the English countryside were as likely to be among their assets as multi-storey houses in India’s metropolitan cities. Yet, at night, the footpaths of Mumbai are crowded with the slumbering bodies of people who have nowhere else to make their home. Indeed, India remained a country of extreme polarities, with more poor people than anywhere else in the world: 800 million people living on less than two dollars a day and eight states having more poor people than twenty-five of Africa’s poorest countries put together.¹

With no access to the privileged worlds of the Indian developers behind the mining, Rs 10 seemed a pittance to demand as some kind of taxation for the suffering of those who lived here, whose homes had either subsided into the crater, or, if left standing, were caked in the dirt, dust and pollution of the traffic.

By noon the pace of the bus had picked up again. I knew we had crossed from Jharkhand into Bihar when we left the winding hill roads behind, and flat rice fields began to whizz past. The sun was now so strong that a mirage hung above the tarmac.

The instruction was to arrive in a town just over 200 kilometres from Ranchi city, in the middle of the great Asian route, the Grand Trunk Road. Sher Shah Suri, founder of the Sur Empire with its capital in Delhi, built the road in the sixteenth century to stretch from Chittagong in Bangladesh to Kabul in Afghanistan. My destination was a town flanked by the Morhar and Sorhar rivers, a spot where Sher Shah Suri had once hunted down a lion. It was now just another dusty nondescript place with no characteristics to reflect its imposing name: Sherghati, ‘Lion Pass’.

Sherghati was also the place where the first known meteorite from Mars landed on Earth in 1865, the Shergottite meteorite. Famous amongst astronomers, I had seen a part of the meteorite in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Science in Cambridge on my way to lectures in the Geography Department next door. What with the meteorite, the spontaneous combustion of coal, and now the insurgents, the area has been explosive for the last three centuries.

As the bus veered off the tarmac and jolted to a dusty stop, I anxiously peered out through the window at Sherghati’s bazaar. I had been told that the guerrillas would send a ‘receiver’, a person to meet me, and guide me to their forest hideout. But how long would it take to spot the man? Vegetable vendors, watch sellers, chicken and goat dealers and cosmetics merchants, traders of all sorts swarmed between the buses, vans and jeeps. People were buying and selling, drinking chai, or just loitering and passing time. What would happen if the ‘receiver’ was not there? How long should I wait? When did the last bus back to Ranchi leave?

There were many tales of what could go wrong at this stage. One that would send the guerrillas into great hoots of laughter was about a Naxalite leader from the south of India who was waiting for his ‘receiver’ outside a busy temple in Jharkhand, holding a bunch of bananas as a signal. As he stood in anticipation under a banyan tree, a monkey crept up on him, snatched the bananas and ran up the tree. Unperturbed by the stones being thrown at it from below, the monkey calmly ate the bananas, watching the angry man beneath him. To the leader’s further distress, bananas were out of season in Jharkhand and, though he searched high and low, there was no way of buying them in the vicinity. In the end, the allotted time for the meeting came and went and he had no choice but to return to the city where he had begun. It took six months to rearrange his trip to the forests of Jharkhand. From then on, the Naxalites agreed that both parties needed at least two objects to recognise each other, a common greeting, and, in many cases, a second meeting time in case things went wrong at the first.

A short podgy man climbed on to the bus with a carton of small tins. His well-rehearsed chant, almost a song, advertised a coal-black powder that miraculously left teeth sparkling white. No doctor, dentist or toothpaste could match its magic, he claimed, as passengers bought his product. An old woman in a rainbow-striped sari, carrying a basket of small newspaper packages full of peanuts, followed him. Behind her a teenage boy selling a multitude of battery-powered torches squeezed on board. Torches were an essential item, as there were no streetlights in the town and the villages were not electrified.

As the hustle and bustle of the bus stop engulfed us on the vehicle, I became ever more anxious about the ‘receiver’. I scanned the horizon and, from the height of the bus, spotted a red cap in the distance. The cap’s owner was a tall dark man with a newspaper rolled up under his arm. Everything was as it had been described.

My black hair was neatly oiled into a slick bun and I had wrapped a cheap flowery red and yellow chiffon sari around me to blend in among the local people. But taller and lighter skinned than the local women, I knew I still stood out in this male-dominated environment and thought that the ‘receiver’ would be able to identify me. Nevertheless, as agreed, I carried a loaf of bread. Object in hand, I approached the ‘receiver’.

The man did not look at me. He wore a neatly ironed, plain white collared cotton shirt, beige trousers, and a pair of imitation black leather slip-on shoes which, although gleamingly polished, had worn-out soles, and I could see that he had a squint. ‘You must be tired?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied. A sigh of relief. Passwords uttered. Job done.

I followed the man in silence, not knowing what lay ahead. Nobody was expected to speak except to get from one place to the next. It was essential to protect our anonymity, especially with the counterinsurgency operations now surrounding us.

The man walked to another bus stand. It was for intra-state transport but was busier than the inter-state terminal. The bus we boarded was heaving with people to such an extent that it leaned precariously to one side. Men sat across the roof. The fittest youths hung from the ladder at the back. A line of legs even dangled across the windscreen. The ‘receiver’ disappeared halfway down the crowds standing in the aisle of the bus. As a woman, I was offered a space to sit perched on top of the piping hot gearbox gurgling with oil, and shared this with five other women. My knees knocked against those of the woman on the seat opposite me, and one of her two young daughters climbed on to my lap. To my right a row of dusty plastic gods lined the cracked windscreen. Ganesh, the elephant god, was surrounded by garishly flashing lights.

With great ceremony, the bus hooted its departure out of Sherghati. The conductor chanted the bus’s destination at the top of his voice, in a repetitive machine-gun mantra. As the bus left the stand, there was a last-minute dash of people trying to climb aboard, ramming their bodies into any remaining space. We were soon on the highway and then we turned down a quieter potholed mud road. Despite the bumpy, uncomfortable journey, I was overcome with tiredness and fell asleep.

The thunder of heavy vehicles made me jump up with a start. We were surrounded by tanks and armoured troop carriers, some as large as the bus. It was an Indian security force patrol out on what had become popularly known as ‘Operation Green Hunt’, the intense counterinsurgency measures that were aimed at eliminating the guerrillas and that had escalated over the last few months. About 100,000 state counterinsurgency forces, called the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), had been sent to reinforce state police forces and surround the hilly forests of central and eastern India. The Border Security Force (BSF) and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) were also mobilised. Ten CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) battalions, elite forces specially trained to fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla, were being raised and dispersed. A fleet of ten armed helicopters from the Indian Air Force were to be at hand to support these troops.

Journalists were increasingly being kept out of the guerrilla areas unless it was to show some dreaded terrorist encounter. Some journalists had reported that they were being paid not to write at all.² Anyone found ‘supporting’ the Maoists could be prosecuted under Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs declared in 2008. Human rights activists had already been arrested and imprisoned. One of the most famous cases was that of Binayak Sen, a paediatrician and human rights activist, who was first arrested in 2007, under the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act of 2005, charged with sedition and with allegedly helping the Maoists set up a network to fight the state. He would later, in 2010, be sentenced to life imprisonment and only granted bail after an international campaign for his release supported by dozens of intellectuals including Noam Chomsky, and the award of several international human rights and peace awards. But most such acts of silencing were going unreported. Scores of activists, lawyers and journalists who tried to enter the guerrilla strongholds to pressure the police into upholding its constitutional responsibilities, keep a civil war at bay, or even simply to find out what was happening in the heart of India were chased out with violence or its threat.

I shrank down into my makeshift seat, worrying that even though I was of Indian origin, my ‘Western-ness’ would stick out. If the security patrol noticed me, too many questions would have to be answered.

We got off the bus at the next village. It was built around a strip of roadside shops with a busy open-air market in front of them. The locals seemed to ignore the convoy of the security forces, but my mouth was dry and my stomach in knots. This was the machinery of war deployed to kill the people I was hoping to meet.

Quickly slipping past the men and women sitting on the roadside with baskets of aubergines, peas and tomatoes to sell, we made our way into a small hardware stall. From there we watched the security forces drive through the village. I counted at least twenty vehicles. This would have meant at least 500 armed men.

I was on my way to conduct a long-awaited interview with one of the Maoist Central Committee leaders. One of India’s most wanted men, he had been underground for more than thirty years. This was someone I was yet to meet, although for the past year and a half I had been living amongst the Adivasis of Lalgaon, a place the Naxalites called their ‘Red Capital’, deep in the forested hills of Jharkhand. This was only meant to be a short trip. Two days at most, I had been told. But it already promised to be much more than that.

My stomach heaved. Perhaps it was something I had eaten? Or was it from the constant jolting and lurching of the bus and the stench of diesel and exhaust fumes that had engulfed us as we bounced along the bumpy roads? Or maybe it was anxiety about the military convoy I had just seen?

2

Half a Century of Armed Resistance

IT IS HARD TO imagine now that Soviet Russia or Maoist China inspired an Indian revolutionary struggle that endures. But the Naxalites did indeed emerge from the world communist movement and from the Communist Party of India this movement had nurtured in the early 1920s. Like other communist organisations, their goal was to fight through all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of the state and for the creation of a communist society. No one knew what this society would look like except that it would be one where there was no private property, no division of mental and manual labour, and above all no social and economic inequality. Although the experiments to achieve those ends failed in China and Russia as the state turned capitalist and grew, rather than withering away, the dream of this classless society of freedom, equality and creativity has continued to inspire revolutionaries.

How to get there has always been the key question that divides the left. Anarchists promoted various means involving direct action to overthrow the authority of the state and organise small autonomous communes. Others, following the Bolsheviks in Russia, argued for a strategy to build broad mass movements involving peasants, soldiers and all oppressed groups, with the organised working class at its heart. In most parts of the world this meant the creation of communist parties, led by those people considered more ‘conscious’, sometimes called a vanguard. Over the years, parties have differed in opinion on several matters – whether to work within the parliamentary systems of states or whether to turn to arms and go entirely underground; whether the actions should be organised in stages of development or whether they should be spontaneous; whether the movement should be led by the urban working classes or centrally involve the peasantry; whether the struggle should begin in the cities as an insurrection or whether it should seep in from the countryside and slowly take over the urban areas.

After India’s independence from British colonial rule, major factions began to develop in the Communist Party in the subcontinent. In the mid-1950s, as the US built a Cold War alliance with Pakistan, the Soviet Union developed a closer relationship with India. The Soviet communist government wanted the Indian communists to be supportive of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his Congress Party, tone down their criticism of the Indian state and work within the parliamentary system. But the Congress government had earlier – in the 1940s – led a brutal attack on the communists in Telangana, which divided the Indian left on the direction they were receiving from the Soviet Union.¹ Moreover, relations between the ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Map
• Author’s Disclaimer
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Going Underground
• Part Two: Prashant, the Kid among the Goats
• Part Three: Gyanji, an Agile Mind
• Part Four: Kohli’s Home Away from Home
• Part Five: Vikas, Frankenstein’s Monster
• Part Six: Somwari’s Autonomy from the Shackles of Patriarchy
• Part Seven: What Came to Pass
• Fieldnotes on Making New Futures
• A Bibliographic Essay on the Naxalites
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author