The Communist Party of India (Maoist) has called a 24-hour lockdown on September 30 in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal and Jharkhand to protest the death of more than 100 civilians in Jammu and Kashmir since June.
The lockdown shall also be enforced in the districts of Gadchiroli, Gondia and Chandrapur in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh's Balaghat district.
Even as Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram unveiled an eight-point initiative to defuse the unrest in the Kashmir valley, a statement issued by Anand, secretary, central regional bureau of the CPI (Maoist) and Abhay, spokesperson for the CPI (Maoist) central committee expressed support for, what he called, "the just struggle in Kashmir."
The last three months have witnessed increasing violence in Kashmir as stone-pelting youth clashed with security forces and local police who retaliated with live ammunition.
In a telephonic conversation with this correspondent, Dandakaranya special zonal committee spokesperson Gudsa Usendi said, "The Centre should stop the massacre of innocent civilians in Kashmir."
"The CPI (Maoist) also calls for withdrawal of the paramilitary forces from Kashmir and a repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act."
The Maoists demanded that a plebiscite be held in Kashmir and all political prisoners released. "The Kashmiris should be allowed to decide their own future," said Usendi.
Mr. Chidambaram on Saturday said the Centre had advised Jammu and Kashmir to release all students detained for pelting stones at security forces and to review the deployment of security forces in Kashmir, but said the repeal of the AFSPA had not been discussed.
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 10:06:00 AM
Sunday, September 26, 2010
[Naxalite Maoist India] The Lady Naxals - Open Magazine
Slightly built they may be, but you'd be a fool to take them lightly. Battle-hardened, fiercely committed to their cause and proud of the identity the movement gives them, the woman Maoists here are every bit as fierce as their male comrades.
DANDAKARANYA: In a largish clearing of forest along a flooded river, somewhere on the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border, Maoist commander Tarakka sits on a large boulder, wearing a shirt and bottle-green pyjamas. She is cleaning her AK-47 assault rifle with a toothbrush dipped in kerosene oil. The roar of the river is deafening, with the incessant nocturnal buzz of insects giving the air an eerie edge. The Maoist camp is also home to poisonous snakes, deadly looking spiders, wild pigs, even bears. An hour ago, they killed a huge snake with another snake in its mouth. "The police doesn't come here," Tarakka says with a smile, "They know they will be slaughtered."
"By the way, did you try that karela [bitter gourd] chutney? I made it," she adds, as she fits the magazine to her gun. It goes in with a distinct click.
Around her, a platoon of Maoist guerillas—mostly young men and women—goes about the daily grind with surgical precision. Men help cook while women go around with axes to chop firewood. Water is boiled to make it safe for drinking. In one corner, a few guerillas have returned after sentry duty at night and are fast asleep on a jhilli (thin plastic sheet). Some girls are reading to each other, while two comb their hair, listening to Gondi songs on a small tape recorder. In another tent, a class is being held on military strategy. In a corner, a bunch of guerillas from the Maoists' cultural troupe are rehearsing for a performance. No matter what you are doing, the gun always stays next to you, always less than an arm away.
In the monsoons, life becomes quite tough here. We have arrived at the camp after walking for days through dense forests, wading through rivers and nallahs overflowing with rainwater. It is lush green no matter where you look, and with continuous rains, it feels like Vietnam. For the night, we stay in tents or in small isolated huts of Adivasis on the outskirts of some village. We just sigh in the darkness; somebody lets out a cough, and somebody else takes out a tube of mosquito repellent and rubs yet another coat all over his body.
A night before arriving at the camp, we have halted at an Adivasi hut along with the Maoist squad. Under the influence of mahua, or maybe in spite of the intoxicant, the Adivasi begins to cry after some time as he forces a few morsels of rice down his throat.
"Why are you crying?" Maoist squad leader Samayya asks him in Gondi.
"I feel like crying," he replies.
IN THE WILDERNESS
The next afternoon, we reach the Maoist camp. This is to be our home for the next few days—till further orders. The orders, they keep coming all the time, from all over. Suddenly, anytime of the day or night, a squad of armed guerillas appears and Comrade Narmada, 48, a veteran who has spent 30 years in these jungles, breaks away politely from us to receive news or instructions. Maoist squads are always on the move, and in their area of influence, they move almost freely, without worrying about falling into a police ambush. The last time the police came around to a village neighbouring the camp was about two years ago, we are told.
Whenever Maoists establish a camp, it's a spectacle for villagers around the area; they keep their necks craned for a look. Here too, a few Adivasis have assembled on the border of the camp area. My friend Vanessa, a French journalist with us, tries speaking to them in broken Hindi that Narmada translates into Gondi. Vanessa is keen to know if there is any school around and if a teacher ever takes classes there.
Narmada translates her question. There is silence for a few seconds. Then one of them, Dolu, starts laughing. He can't stop. And when he finally does, he does abruptly, almost as if he has clenched his throat. "Guruji!" he speaks with the same wonder with which he utters "Dilli". "Guruji, he comes every year on 15 August, Jhanda phehraate hein (unfurls the flag) and that is it. We never see him again," he says, almost astonished at why anybody should ask him about the school teacher, as if this is what school teachers are supposed to do anyway.
A young woman—a child suckles her breast—walks over and kicks a mongrel. It runs away, whimpering, taking refuge beside two Maoists who sit on their haunches on one side.
It makes me wonder: is there a difference between the treatment meted out to mongrels and Adivasis around here? Kicked by the woman, the mongrel ran to the Maoists. Kicked by the State, do these Adivasis have a choice?
TARAKKA'S REBELLION
Ageing villagers across Gadchiroli recount their experiences. This is the district in Maharashtra that Maoist rebels entered back in 1980. At that time, the exploitation of Adivasis was at its peak. Forest officers, big-town businessmen and contractors would fleece them as a matter of routine. Wily traders introduced their diets to salt, and in exchange for 1 kg of it, they would take a kilogram of dry fruits from them. A social activist who works in this area recalls how a forest officer had collected1 lakh in three months from Adivasis living in crushing poverty in lieu of letting them stay in the jungle or collect firewood and other free resources of the forest. In connivance with tendu leaf and bamboo contractors, these officers would make them work on plantations for a pittance. To top it all, there was also sexual exploitation of Adivasi girls.
This injustice was what prompted Tarakka not to heed her parents' warning and go to the riverside in her village in Gadchiroli where Maoist rebels had put up a camp in the early 1980s. Initially, the villagers had feared that the rebels were dacoits and would loot them of their belongings. Finally, when no one would approach them, the rebels caught hold of a village boy and explained their aim and agenda to him. The word spread
Tarakka says that forest officers would come to her house every year for rice and jowar. "'Why are we giving them this?' I would ask my father," she recalls, "but he would just ask me to keep quiet." Ultimately, she went secretly to the riverside and met a senior Maoist leader she calls Shankar anna. She was 15 then. By 1986, a few years later, she had joined the rebels full-time. Her first military action was in 1993 when her squad attacked a police post. The last time she saw action, she says, was in 2008 when their camp came under police fire.
But Tarakka's name figures prominently in the October 2009 attack on police personnel in Gadchiroli's Laheri area in which 17 policemen lost their lives. A news report in a prominent newspaper refers to Tarakka as the leader of the attack, calling her 'a woman known not just for her commitment to the 'Naxalite cause' but also her beauty'. When the report is cited, she smiles with an almost girlish delight. "No, I was not in the group that attacked policemen in Laheri," she says, fiddling with her gun.
While Tarakka feels free to talk about her reasons for entering the Maoist fold, most of the younger lot shy away from discussing it, often citing constraints of language. Even when leaders who can speak Gondi and then translate it into Hindi or English offer to play interpreters, not much can be heard from the younger guerillas, especially the girls.
It is futile asking them why they joined, just as it is futile asking Adivasis what they would want in terms of a
better life. The younger lot have no specific answer on why they joined the Naxal rebellion.
After a few years of political instruction by higher-ups, they might bring themselves to utter phrases such as "class struggle" or "peasant insurrection", or raise their fists in a defiant 'red salute', but mostly it is because of the lure of battle fatigues. It offers them a sense of group bonding, a sense of who they are, and some purpose in life.
SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
As for a better life, over years and years of such jungle visits, I have come to realise that the typical Adivasi has no reference point for such an aspiration. Having been left in the lurch like this by the rest of India, filling their bellies is the main idea. Two villagers died of diarrhoea just a week before our arrival at the village next to the Maoist camp. The villagers grow paddy, but in the absence of proper knowledge, the crop often falls victim to disease. To avoid this, Adivasis use the services of a vadde—local witch doctor—to perform a dev puja. The paddy they grow is not enough to feed them. So their staple diet is rice gruel. The nearest ration shop is about 20 km away. "But by the time we come to know that rations have come, it is already over," says a villager. Many have run away to work as labourers in Bombay and Pune.
The villagers also have ties with Maoists. In the absence of the State, it is the guerillas who they rely on for help in small ways. Villagers often dine with them at the camp. Maoist medical teams also distribute medicines, including anti-malaria and anti-venom vaccines, among villagers. Unsurprisingly, some end up joining them. Like 14-year-old Suresh, who is now part of Chetna Natya Manch, the CPI (Maoist) cultural troupe. "We dissuaded him from joining us at such a young age, but he followed us for weeks," says his team leader Raju.
Suresh used to attend a local paathshala (school) run by the Tribal Affairs Ministry. "But the food there was so bad and erratic, I ran away," he says. Suresh has returned to his village after months, since he travels with the troupe from one village to another. His mother has come to meet him. "I ask him to come back," she says, "but he refuses."
The Maoist cause gives Suresh a sense of identity. The work and guns of his senior comrades give him a purpose in life.
It is the same sense of identity that stops another young boy from taking off his cap. It is olive green with a star. On its tip, he has scribbled the name given to him by the party: Viju. "Some comrades who knew his original name would call him by that, and he would get upset," says another guerilla. "That is why he wrote 'Viju' over that cap."
In the camp, Viju has fallen asleep. Narmada, who is the political head of the Gadchiroli division, looks at Viju lovingly and asks her bodyguard to pull a sheet over him for warmth. "From wearing saris to donning military fatigues like men, we women comrades have come a long way," she says. In a check shirt and loose trousers, with short hair, Narmada is hardly distinguishable from the rest of the platoon. She has just arrived at the camp five days ago after crossing a dirty nallah. This has led to a severe allergy all over her body.
Narmada comes from Andhra Pradesh and joined the Maoist movement when she was 18. "My father was a Communist, and in those times, a Communist was like a pariah. My father would talk about Naxals and say that they have broken away from the shackles of domesticity," she says. It was then, she says, that she made up her mind to join the Naxals. Today, she frames all policies for the female cadre of Maoists. Inside the camp, Narmada pops pills silently, as she goes about writing and discussing military strategy with Commander Eiatu, the military head of the Gadchiroli division.
When the whistle blows, both of them take out their steel plates and go to get food from the kitchen—mostly rice and dal. When guests arrive (in this case us), there might be eggs or an occasional chicken cooked without wasting any body part, not even the intestines.
Narmada's bodyguard is a young girl, Sunita, who, with her cropped hair, looks like an LTTE militant. She hardly smiles, and even while she eats, her AK-47 rests against her knee. In contrast, her friend Rummy, who likes to sing revolutionary songs about fallen comrades, smiles easily. All of them can read and write—and assemble a gun in seconds. During patrols, they move about stealthily and reputedly attack with ferocity.
The CPI (Maoist) has an open policy about relationships. A man can marry a woman comrade with mutual consent. There have been stories of a Maoist squad coming under fire and a husband-wife duo staying behind together to engage the police, sacrificing their lives jointly to let others flee to safety. Another girl, Surekha, shows us her kit which includes a hand grenade. Has she ever taken part in action? We ask. She doesn't say anything. Later, a senior Maoist confirms that she indeed has, and in some of the most deadly encounters.
THE WAR OUT THERE
Commander Eiatu's brother, a senior leader, was allegedly killed in a fake encounter along with his partner in 2008; another brother is also a Maoist commander. Eiatu's partner works with the Maoists' doctor brigade. "We meet sometimes," he says.
Later that night, Eiatu offers us glimpses of the military planning that went into the Laheri attack he had led. "Just before the Assembly election, the police had created fear in village after village to coerce people into submission," he says. One day, their platoon of Maoists got information that a team of police commandos, led by their leader Rama, was moving in the area. For two days, the guerillas followed them, without as much as stopping for food. Finally, hostilities broke out at Laheri in Bhamragarh taluka, just 750 yards away from the Laheri police station. Some 42 policemen and 18 Maoist guerillas (who'd reached before their other exhausted comrades) found themselves locked in a fierce gunbattle. "The police have a lot of ammunition," generalises Eiatu, "and they just lay on the ground, firing thousands of rounds all over. But since we have limited ammunition, we fire at specific targets."
The policemen, Eiatu says, kept shouting that the guerillas would be mowed down since police enforcements were coming, but they held their ground—and upped the ante. For the first 30 minutes, nobody was injured on either side. Then, in the next ten minutes, six policemen were killed. After this, Eiatu claims, most policemen fled, including their leader. Eight policemen who had taken positions at one particular spot were asked to surrender. "But they let out another volley of bullets in which our senior comrade was killed," says Eiatu. After this, the guerillas let their guns blaze—killing eight of them and three others. In all, 19 weapons were seized in that encounter. That also explains the extraordinary extent of modern weaponry I saw in the platoon's possession. In five major engagements over the past 18 months, Maoists have been able to snatch as many as 77 guns—mostly AK-47 and Insas rifles—from security forces in Gadchiroli district alone.
It's message time again. Everyone looks up. We cannot move further, it seems—all the rivers are in spate. (Later when we return, we learn of the death of senior Maoist leader Ganesh Uike who had malaria and could not be taken to a hospital in Bastar because of floods.) It is just too tough to embark on our return now. Roads are cut off. We are left stranded in a small village for three days. On the last day, we finally gather the courage to take a small boat across an angry river.
On the last night in the jungle, a writer who is with us, and has left his ailing mother behind, wakes up suddenly and cries: "Mother, I am coming." I tell Samayya this and we smile. "Yes, mothers can do that to you," he says. "Ho," he nods his head. Ho means yes. Yes.
--
Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 09:59:00 AM
DANDAKARANYA: In a largish clearing of forest along a flooded river, somewhere on the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border, Maoist commander Tarakka sits on a large boulder, wearing a shirt and bottle-green pyjamas. She is cleaning her AK-47 assault rifle with a toothbrush dipped in kerosene oil. The roar of the river is deafening, with the incessant nocturnal buzz of insects giving the air an eerie edge. The Maoist camp is also home to poisonous snakes, deadly looking spiders, wild pigs, even bears. An hour ago, they killed a huge snake with another snake in its mouth. "The police doesn't come here," Tarakka says with a smile, "They know they will be slaughtered."
"By the way, did you try that karela [bitter gourd] chutney? I made it," she adds, as she fits the magazine to her gun. It goes in with a distinct click.
Around her, a platoon of Maoist guerillas—mostly young men and women—goes about the daily grind with surgical precision. Men help cook while women go around with axes to chop firewood. Water is boiled to make it safe for drinking. In one corner, a few guerillas have returned after sentry duty at night and are fast asleep on a jhilli (thin plastic sheet). Some girls are reading to each other, while two comb their hair, listening to Gondi songs on a small tape recorder. In another tent, a class is being held on military strategy. In a corner, a bunch of guerillas from the Maoists' cultural troupe are rehearsing for a performance. No matter what you are doing, the gun always stays next to you, always less than an arm away.
In the monsoons, life becomes quite tough here. We have arrived at the camp after walking for days through dense forests, wading through rivers and nallahs overflowing with rainwater. It is lush green no matter where you look, and with continuous rains, it feels like Vietnam. For the night, we stay in tents or in small isolated huts of Adivasis on the outskirts of some village. We just sigh in the darkness; somebody lets out a cough, and somebody else takes out a tube of mosquito repellent and rubs yet another coat all over his body.
A night before arriving at the camp, we have halted at an Adivasi hut along with the Maoist squad. Under the influence of mahua, or maybe in spite of the intoxicant, the Adivasi begins to cry after some time as he forces a few morsels of rice down his throat.
"Why are you crying?" Maoist squad leader Samayya asks him in Gondi.
"I feel like crying," he replies.
IN THE WILDERNESS
The next afternoon, we reach the Maoist camp. This is to be our home for the next few days—till further orders. The orders, they keep coming all the time, from all over. Suddenly, anytime of the day or night, a squad of armed guerillas appears and Comrade Narmada, 48, a veteran who has spent 30 years in these jungles, breaks away politely from us to receive news or instructions. Maoist squads are always on the move, and in their area of influence, they move almost freely, without worrying about falling into a police ambush. The last time the police came around to a village neighbouring the camp was about two years ago, we are told.
Whenever Maoists establish a camp, it's a spectacle for villagers around the area; they keep their necks craned for a look. Here too, a few Adivasis have assembled on the border of the camp area. My friend Vanessa, a French journalist with us, tries speaking to them in broken Hindi that Narmada translates into Gondi. Vanessa is keen to know if there is any school around and if a teacher ever takes classes there.
Narmada translates her question. There is silence for a few seconds. Then one of them, Dolu, starts laughing. He can't stop. And when he finally does, he does abruptly, almost as if he has clenched his throat. "Guruji!" he speaks with the same wonder with which he utters "Dilli". "Guruji, he comes every year on 15 August, Jhanda phehraate hein (unfurls the flag) and that is it. We never see him again," he says, almost astonished at why anybody should ask him about the school teacher, as if this is what school teachers are supposed to do anyway.
A young woman—a child suckles her breast—walks over and kicks a mongrel. It runs away, whimpering, taking refuge beside two Maoists who sit on their haunches on one side.
It makes me wonder: is there a difference between the treatment meted out to mongrels and Adivasis around here? Kicked by the woman, the mongrel ran to the Maoists. Kicked by the State, do these Adivasis have a choice?
TARAKKA'S REBELLION
Ageing villagers across Gadchiroli recount their experiences. This is the district in Maharashtra that Maoist rebels entered back in 1980. At that time, the exploitation of Adivasis was at its peak. Forest officers, big-town businessmen and contractors would fleece them as a matter of routine. Wily traders introduced their diets to salt, and in exchange for 1 kg of it, they would take a kilogram of dry fruits from them. A social activist who works in this area recalls how a forest officer had collected1 lakh in three months from Adivasis living in crushing poverty in lieu of letting them stay in the jungle or collect firewood and other free resources of the forest. In connivance with tendu leaf and bamboo contractors, these officers would make them work on plantations for a pittance. To top it all, there was also sexual exploitation of Adivasi girls.
This injustice was what prompted Tarakka not to heed her parents' warning and go to the riverside in her village in Gadchiroli where Maoist rebels had put up a camp in the early 1980s. Initially, the villagers had feared that the rebels were dacoits and would loot them of their belongings. Finally, when no one would approach them, the rebels caught hold of a village boy and explained their aim and agenda to him. The word spread
Tarakka says that forest officers would come to her house every year for rice and jowar. "'Why are we giving them this?' I would ask my father," she recalls, "but he would just ask me to keep quiet." Ultimately, she went secretly to the riverside and met a senior Maoist leader she calls Shankar anna. She was 15 then. By 1986, a few years later, she had joined the rebels full-time. Her first military action was in 1993 when her squad attacked a police post. The last time she saw action, she says, was in 2008 when their camp came under police fire.
But Tarakka's name figures prominently in the October 2009 attack on police personnel in Gadchiroli's Laheri area in which 17 policemen lost their lives. A news report in a prominent newspaper refers to Tarakka as the leader of the attack, calling her 'a woman known not just for her commitment to the 'Naxalite cause' but also her beauty'. When the report is cited, she smiles with an almost girlish delight. "No, I was not in the group that attacked policemen in Laheri," she says, fiddling with her gun.
While Tarakka feels free to talk about her reasons for entering the Maoist fold, most of the younger lot shy away from discussing it, often citing constraints of language. Even when leaders who can speak Gondi and then translate it into Hindi or English offer to play interpreters, not much can be heard from the younger guerillas, especially the girls.
It is futile asking them why they joined, just as it is futile asking Adivasis what they would want in terms of a
better life. The younger lot have no specific answer on why they joined the Naxal rebellion.
After a few years of political instruction by higher-ups, they might bring themselves to utter phrases such as "class struggle" or "peasant insurrection", or raise their fists in a defiant 'red salute', but mostly it is because of the lure of battle fatigues. It offers them a sense of group bonding, a sense of who they are, and some purpose in life.
SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
As for a better life, over years and years of such jungle visits, I have come to realise that the typical Adivasi has no reference point for such an aspiration. Having been left in the lurch like this by the rest of India, filling their bellies is the main idea. Two villagers died of diarrhoea just a week before our arrival at the village next to the Maoist camp. The villagers grow paddy, but in the absence of proper knowledge, the crop often falls victim to disease. To avoid this, Adivasis use the services of a vadde—local witch doctor—to perform a dev puja. The paddy they grow is not enough to feed them. So their staple diet is rice gruel. The nearest ration shop is about 20 km away. "But by the time we come to know that rations have come, it is already over," says a villager. Many have run away to work as labourers in Bombay and Pune.
The villagers also have ties with Maoists. In the absence of the State, it is the guerillas who they rely on for help in small ways. Villagers often dine with them at the camp. Maoist medical teams also distribute medicines, including anti-malaria and anti-venom vaccines, among villagers. Unsurprisingly, some end up joining them. Like 14-year-old Suresh, who is now part of Chetna Natya Manch, the CPI (Maoist) cultural troupe. "We dissuaded him from joining us at such a young age, but he followed us for weeks," says his team leader Raju.
Suresh used to attend a local paathshala (school) run by the Tribal Affairs Ministry. "But the food there was so bad and erratic, I ran away," he says. Suresh has returned to his village after months, since he travels with the troupe from one village to another. His mother has come to meet him. "I ask him to come back," she says, "but he refuses."
The Maoist cause gives Suresh a sense of identity. The work and guns of his senior comrades give him a purpose in life.
It is the same sense of identity that stops another young boy from taking off his cap. It is olive green with a star. On its tip, he has scribbled the name given to him by the party: Viju. "Some comrades who knew his original name would call him by that, and he would get upset," says another guerilla. "That is why he wrote 'Viju' over that cap."
In the camp, Viju has fallen asleep. Narmada, who is the political head of the Gadchiroli division, looks at Viju lovingly and asks her bodyguard to pull a sheet over him for warmth. "From wearing saris to donning military fatigues like men, we women comrades have come a long way," she says. In a check shirt and loose trousers, with short hair, Narmada is hardly distinguishable from the rest of the platoon. She has just arrived at the camp five days ago after crossing a dirty nallah. This has led to a severe allergy all over her body.
Narmada comes from Andhra Pradesh and joined the Maoist movement when she was 18. "My father was a Communist, and in those times, a Communist was like a pariah. My father would talk about Naxals and say that they have broken away from the shackles of domesticity," she says. It was then, she says, that she made up her mind to join the Naxals. Today, she frames all policies for the female cadre of Maoists. Inside the camp, Narmada pops pills silently, as she goes about writing and discussing military strategy with Commander Eiatu, the military head of the Gadchiroli division.
When the whistle blows, both of them take out their steel plates and go to get food from the kitchen—mostly rice and dal. When guests arrive (in this case us), there might be eggs or an occasional chicken cooked without wasting any body part, not even the intestines.
Narmada's bodyguard is a young girl, Sunita, who, with her cropped hair, looks like an LTTE militant. She hardly smiles, and even while she eats, her AK-47 rests against her knee. In contrast, her friend Rummy, who likes to sing revolutionary songs about fallen comrades, smiles easily. All of them can read and write—and assemble a gun in seconds. During patrols, they move about stealthily and reputedly attack with ferocity.
The CPI (Maoist) has an open policy about relationships. A man can marry a woman comrade with mutual consent. There have been stories of a Maoist squad coming under fire and a husband-wife duo staying behind together to engage the police, sacrificing their lives jointly to let others flee to safety. Another girl, Surekha, shows us her kit which includes a hand grenade. Has she ever taken part in action? We ask. She doesn't say anything. Later, a senior Maoist confirms that she indeed has, and in some of the most deadly encounters.
THE WAR OUT THERE
Commander Eiatu's brother, a senior leader, was allegedly killed in a fake encounter along with his partner in 2008; another brother is also a Maoist commander. Eiatu's partner works with the Maoists' doctor brigade. "We meet sometimes," he says.
Later that night, Eiatu offers us glimpses of the military planning that went into the Laheri attack he had led. "Just before the Assembly election, the police had created fear in village after village to coerce people into submission," he says. One day, their platoon of Maoists got information that a team of police commandos, led by their leader Rama, was moving in the area. For two days, the guerillas followed them, without as much as stopping for food. Finally, hostilities broke out at Laheri in Bhamragarh taluka, just 750 yards away from the Laheri police station. Some 42 policemen and 18 Maoist guerillas (who'd reached before their other exhausted comrades) found themselves locked in a fierce gunbattle. "The police have a lot of ammunition," generalises Eiatu, "and they just lay on the ground, firing thousands of rounds all over. But since we have limited ammunition, we fire at specific targets."
The policemen, Eiatu says, kept shouting that the guerillas would be mowed down since police enforcements were coming, but they held their ground—and upped the ante. For the first 30 minutes, nobody was injured on either side. Then, in the next ten minutes, six policemen were killed. After this, Eiatu claims, most policemen fled, including their leader. Eight policemen who had taken positions at one particular spot were asked to surrender. "But they let out another volley of bullets in which our senior comrade was killed," says Eiatu. After this, the guerillas let their guns blaze—killing eight of them and three others. In all, 19 weapons were seized in that encounter. That also explains the extraordinary extent of modern weaponry I saw in the platoon's possession. In five major engagements over the past 18 months, Maoists have been able to snatch as many as 77 guns—mostly AK-47 and Insas rifles—from security forces in Gadchiroli district alone.
It's message time again. Everyone looks up. We cannot move further, it seems—all the rivers are in spate. (Later when we return, we learn of the death of senior Maoist leader Ganesh Uike who had malaria and could not be taken to a hospital in Bastar because of floods.) It is just too tough to embark on our return now. Roads are cut off. We are left stranded in a small village for three days. On the last day, we finally gather the courage to take a small boat across an angry river.
On the last night in the jungle, a writer who is with us, and has left his ailing mother behind, wakes up suddenly and cries: "Mother, I am coming." I tell Samayya this and we smile. "Yes, mothers can do that to you," he says. "Ho," he nods his head. Ho means yes. Yes.
Source - Open Magazine
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 09:59:00 AM
[Naxalite Maoist India] The Diary of a Woman Guerrilla - Bestseller in Nepal
When Devendra Bhattarai, a journalist and non-fiction writer, went to visit the tea garden district of Ilam in eastern Nepal six months ago, his host introduced him to a young woman who had walked for nearly three hours from her village to meet him.
"She came from a peasant family in Atghare village," Bhattarai recalls. "The eldest of three children, she helped her family farm the little land they had, milked the cows and took the milk to sell in the village shops. She had studied in a village school till Class 6."
The smiling but nervous young woman had brought a bundle of papers with her. It was a manuscript that recounted the 20-year-old's life story with moving simplicity. "I was intrigued by the writing and showed the manuscript to my publisher," says Bhattarai.
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 09:56:00 AM
"She came from a peasant family in Atghare village," Bhattarai recalls. "The eldest of three children, she helped her family farm the little land they had, milked the cows and took the milk to sell in the village shops. She had studied in a village school till Class 6."
The smiling but nervous young woman had brought a bundle of papers with her. It was a manuscript that recounted the 20-year-old's life story with moving simplicity. "I was intrigued by the writing and showed the manuscript to my publisher," says Bhattarai.
Today, Tara Rai's Chhapamar Yuvati Ko Diary or 'The Diary of a Woman Guerrilla', is a runaway best-seller, having sold over 5,000 copies in just two months, with a fifth edition in progress.
In her "diary", the writer chronicles how she joined the underground Maoist party — that fought a 10-year civil war from 1996 onwards — when she was only 15.
Story unfolds
In her "diary", the writer chronicles how she joined the underground Maoist party — that fought a 10-year civil war from 1996 onwards — when she was only 15.
Story unfolds
Tara Rai was assigned to the cultural wing of the party and had spent just three months there when she was arrested. "The army had surrounded us. A soldier came and yanked me by my hair," she writes. She hears the sound of digging and she thinks she will be killed and buried. Instead, she is sent to various prisons, where she spends almost a year in the midst of horrific experiences and unexpected love. She also meets a senior Maoist leader, Dharmashila Chapagain, who has been arrested with her daughter. Chapagain becomes a mother to Tara, mentoring her and fighting with the jail officials to get medical treatment for Tara's rheumatic fever.
The book ends with Tara's release in 2007, a year after the Maoists signed a peace pact and laid down arms in Nepal. However, disillusioned with the movement, she does not return to the party. Instead, she decides to go back to her family in her village.
"Probably some people will read the book for its curiosity value," says Bhattarai, who is also its editor. "But it has its own merit. Although Tara did not study beyond Class 6, she has a flair for writing. Also, unlike the books written by Maoist leaders after the civil war ended, her diary does not read like sloganeering. It is balanced. She shows the good as well as the bad side of the Maoists and the army is not an all-out enemy. There are good soldiers as well as bad soldiers, and she falls in love with one of her captors."
The book ends with Tara's release in 2007, a year after the Maoists signed a peace pact and laid down arms in Nepal. However, disillusioned with the movement, she does not return to the party. Instead, she decides to go back to her family in her village.
"Probably some people will read the book for its curiosity value," says Bhattarai, who is also its editor. "But it has its own merit. Although Tara did not study beyond Class 6, she has a flair for writing. Also, unlike the books written by Maoist leaders after the civil war ended, her diary does not read like sloganeering. It is balanced. She shows the good as well as the bad side of the Maoists and the army is not an all-out enemy. There are good soldiers as well as bad soldiers, and she falls in love with one of her captors."
Source - Deccan Herald
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 09:56:00 AM
[Naxalite Maoist India] Some Clarifications
1. This blog is not the official/unofficial website of any Maoist organisation.
2. I am not the official/unofficial spokesperson of any Maoist Organisation.
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 09:45:00 AM
2. I am not the official/unofficial spokesperson of any Maoist Organisation.
3. I am not a member of any political organisation currently nor have I ever been a member of any political organisation in the past.
4. It is not possible for me to arrange for any interviews with Maoist leaders either through online or offline means because of points 1,2 & 3. So please do not request the same by email/etc.
4. It is not possible for me to arrange for any interviews with Maoist leaders either through online or offline means because of points 1,2 & 3. So please do not request the same by email/etc.
I am a freelance journalist and this is my personal blog where I aggregate information about the Maoist movement from other websites and blogs. For more information about this blog kindly read this disclaimer.
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/27/2010 09:45:00 AM
Sunday, September 12, 2010
[Naxalite Maoist India] The Trickledown Revolution - By Arundathi Roy
The Trickledown Revolution
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/12/2010 03:12:00 PM
Article by Arundathi roy on Greenhunt and communist movement in India.
Read it on Outlook at the link below
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267040
Read it on Outlook at the link below
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267040
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/12/2010 03:12:00 PM
[Naxalite Maoist India] Maoist Leader Ganesh Uike dies from Malaria
A key Naxal leader, who had been hiding in Bastar forests in Chhattisgarh, is believed to have succumbed to malaria, a senior official said here.
Ganesh Uike, who headed the two Naxal "divisions" of west Bastar and Darbah areas and was wanted in several cases of killing of security personnel, died of malaria as he could not get any medical help.
"He was stuck in the middle of Bastar jungles and could not get any medical help as the area was cut off due to heavy floods," Chhattisgarh director general of police Vishwa Ranjan told PTI.
He said while his body was yet to be recovered, there were enough inputs that he had died. "But we are still waiting (to confirm his death)," he said.
Malaria has been a constant problem for Naxalites as well as security personnel in the Bastar area.
Earlier besides a Central Committee member, Anuradha Gandhi, wife of Kobad Gandhi, had died due to malaria.
Source: DNA
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/12/2010 03:09:00 PM
Ganesh Uike, who headed the two Naxal "divisions" of west Bastar and Darbah areas and was wanted in several cases of killing of security personnel, died of malaria as he could not get any medical help.
"He was stuck in the middle of Bastar jungles and could not get any medical help as the area was cut off due to heavy floods," Chhattisgarh director general of police Vishwa Ranjan told PTI.
He said while his body was yet to be recovered, there were enough inputs that he had died. "But we are still waiting (to confirm his death)," he said.
Malaria has been a constant problem for Naxalites as well as security personnel in the Bastar area.
Earlier besides a Central Committee member, Anuradha Gandhi, wife of Kobad Gandhi, had died due to malaria.
Source: DNA
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/12/2010 03:09:00 PM
Saturday, September 4, 2010
[Naxalite Maoist India] Fire in the Hole - Article about Indian Maoists in Fo...
How India's economic rise turned an obscure communist revolt into a raging resource war.
SEPT. / OCT. 2010
View a photo essay on India's hidden war
The richest iron mine in India was guarded by 16 men, armed with Army-issued, self-loading rifles and dressed in camouflage fatigues. Only eight survived the night of Feb. 9, 2006, when a crack team of Maoist insurgents cut the power to the Bailadila mining complex and slipped out of the jungle cover in the moonlight. The guerrillas opened fire on the guards with automatic weapons, overrunning them before they had time to take up defensive positions. They didn't have a chance: The remote outpost was an hour's drive from the nearest major city, and the firefight to defend it only lasted a few minutes.
The guards were protecting not only $80 billion-plus worth of mineral deposits, but also the mine's explosives magazine, which held the ammonium nitrate the miners used to pulverize mountainsides and loosen the iron ore. When the fighting was over and the surviving guards rounded up and gagged, about 2,000 villagers who had been hiding behind the commando vanguard clambered over the fence into the compound and began emptying the magazine. Altogether they carried out 20 tons of explosives on their backs -- enough firepower to fuel a covert insurgency for a decade.
Four and a half years after the attack in the remote Indian state of Chhattisgarh, the blasting materials have spread across the country, repackaged as 10-pound coffee-can bombs stuffed with ball bearings, screws, and chopped-up rebar. In May, one villager's haul vaporized a bus filled with civilians and police. Another destroyed a section of railway later that month, sending a passenger train careening off the tracks into a ravine. Smaller ambushes of police forces on booby-trapped roads happen pretty much every week. Almost all of it, local police told us, can be traced back to that February night.
The Bailadila mine raid was one of India's most profound strategic losses in the country's protracted battle against its Maoist movement, a militant guerrilla force that has been fighting in one incarnation or another in India's rural backwaters for more than 40 years. Over the course of the half-dozen visits we've made to the region during the past several years, we've come to consider the attack on the mine not just one defeat in the long-running war, but a symbolic shift in the conflict: For years, the Maoists had lived in the shadow of India's breakneck modernization. Now they were thriving off it.
Only a decade ago, the rebels -- often, though somewhat inaccurately, called Naxalites after their guerrilla predecessors who first launched the rebellion in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari in 1967 -- seemed to have all but vanished. Their cause of communist revolution looked hopelessly outdated, their ranks depleted. In the years since, however, the Maoists have made an improbable comeback, rooted in the gritty mining country on which India's economic boom relies. A new generation of fighters has retooled the Naxalites' mishmash of Marx, Lenin, and Mao for the 21st century, rebranding their group as the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and railing against what the rebels' spokesman described to us as the "evil consequences by the policies of liberalization, privatization, and globalization."
Although it has gotten little attention outside South Asia, for India this is no longer an isolated outbreak of rural unrest, but a full-fledged guerrilla war. Over the past 10 years, some 10,000 people have died and 150,000 more have been driven permanently from their homes by the fighting. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a high-level meeting of state ministers not long after the Bailadila raid that the Maoists are "the single greatest threat to the country's internal security," and in 2009 he launched a military surge dubbed "Operation Green Hunt": a deployment of almost 100,000 new paramilitary troops and police to contain the estimated 7,000 rebels and their 20,000-plus -- according to our research -- part-time supporters. Newspapers run stories almost daily about "successful operations" in which police string up the bodies of suspected militants on bamboo poles and lay out their captured caches of arms and ammunition. Many of the dead are civilians, and the harsh tactics have polarized the country.
It wasn't supposed to be this way -- not in 21st-century India, a country 20 years into an experiment in rapid, technology-driven development, one of globalization's most celebrated success stories. In 1991, with India on the brink of bankruptcy, Singh -- then the country's finance minister -- pursued an ambitious slate of economic reforms, opening up the country to foreign investment, ending public monopolies, and encouraging India's bloated state-run firms to behave like real commercial ventures. Today, India's GDP is more than five times what it was in 1991. Its major cities are now home to an affluent professional class that commutes in new cars on freshly paved four-lane highways to jobs that didn't exist not so long ago.
But plenty of Indians have missed out. Economic liberalization has not even nudged the lives of the country's bottom 200 million people. India is now one of the most economically stratified societies on the planet; its judicial system remains byzantine, its political institutions corrupt, its public education and health-care infrastructure anemic. The percentage of people going hungry in India hasn't budged in 20 years, according to this year's U.N. Millennium Development Goals report. New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore now boast gleaming glass-and-steel IT centers and huge engineering projects. But India's vast hinterland remains dirt poor -- nowhere more so than the mining region of India's eastern interior, the part of the country that produces the iron for the buildings and cars, the coal that keeps the lights on in faraway metropolises, and the exotic minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to electric cars to iPads.
If you were to lay a map of today's Maoist insurgency over a map of the mining activity powering India's boom, the two would line up almost perfectly. Ground zero for the rebellion lies in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, a pair of neighboring, mostly rural states some 750 miles southeast of New Delhi that are home to 46 million people spread out over an area a little smaller than Kansas. Urban elites in India envision them as something akin to Appalachia, with a landscape of rolling forested hills, coal mines, and crushing poverty; their undereducated residents are the frequent butt of jokes told in more fortunate corners of the country.
Revenues from mineral extraction in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand topped $20 billion in 2008, and more than $1 trillion in proven reserves still sit in the ground. But this geological inheritance has been managed so disastrously that many locals -- uprooted, unemployed, and living in a toxic and dangerous environment, due to the mining operations -- have thrown in their lot with the Maoists. "It is better to die here fighting on our own land than merely survive on someone else's," Phul Kumari Devi told us when we visited her dusty mining village of Agarbi Basti in June. "If the Maoists come here, then we would ask their help to resist."
The mines are also cash registers for the Maoist war chest. Through extortion, covert attacks, and plain old theft, insurgents have tapped a steady stream of mining money to pay their foot soldiers and buy arms and ammunition, sometimes from treasonous cops themselves. The result is the kind of perpetual-motion machine of armed conflict that is grimly familiar in places like the oil-soaked Niger Delta, but seems extraordinary in the world's largest democracy.
This isn't just an Indian story -- it's a global one. In the wake of Singh's economic reforms, foreign investment in the country has grown to 150 times what it was in 1991. Among other things, India has opened up its vast mineral reserves to private and international players, and now major global companies like Toyota and Coca-Cola rely on mining operations in the heart of the Maoist war zone. Investors in the region claim that the fighting is taking a toll on their businesses, and Bloomberg News recently estimated that some $80 billion worth of projects are stalled at least in part by the guerrilla war, enough to double India's steel output.
But in our visits to the region and dozens of interviews there -- with miners and politicians, refugees and paramilitary leaders, cops and go-betweens for the guerrillas -- we found a far more complex reality. Mining companies have managed to double their production in the two states in the past decade, even as the conflict has escalated; the most unscrupulous among them have used the fog of war as a pretext for land grabs, leveling villages whose residents have fled the fighting. At the same time, the Maoists, for all their communist rhetoric, have become as much a business as anything else, one that will remain profitable as long as the country's mines continue to churn out the riches on which the Indian economy depends.
The first sign you see as you leave the airport in Jharkhand's capital city of Ranchi welcomes you to the "Land of Coal," and indeed, mining underlies every aspect of life here. Seams of coal are visible in the earth alongside the rutted roads that connect the jungle hamlets. Travelers learn to anticipate mines not by any road signs, but by the processions of men pushing bicycles heaped with burlap sacks full of coal: day laborers who pay for the opportunity to scrape the stuff out of thousands of off-the-books mines and sell it door to door as heating fuel, for perhaps a few more dollars a day than they would make as farmers trying to eke out a living from Jharkhand's depleted soil.
India's coal country was mostly passed over by British colonists until they discovered its mineral wealth in the late 19th century and built the obligatory handful of dusty frontier towns and roads necessary to take advantage of it. Today the region bears the obvious scars of a hundred-odd years of heavy industry. The damage is most visible at road marker 221 of Jharkhand's main north-south highway, about 40 miles outside Ranchi, where a freshly paved patch of asphalt veers sharply west and snakes up a smoky hill through the village of Loha Gate and into an ecological disaster zone. Shimmering waves of heat, thick with carbon monoxide and selenium, waft through jagged cracks in the pavement large enough to swallow a soccer ball. A hundred feet below, a massive subterranean coal fire, started in an abandoned mine, burns so hot that it melts the soles of one's shoes. The only vestiges of plant life are the scattered hulks of desiccated trees. Like the legendary coal fire that destroyed Centralia, Pennsylvania, this blaze could easily smolder for another 200 years before the coal seam is finally burned through.
There are at least 80 coal fires like this burning in Jharkhand, turning much of the state's ground into a giant combustible honeycomb. A fire ignited in 1916 by neglectful miners near the city of Jharia has grown so large that it now threatens to burn away the land beneath the entire community, plunging the 400,000 residents into an underground inferno. One mine just outside Jharia collapsed in 2006, killing 54 people.
Coal mining and armed rebellion have long gone hand in hand in what is now Jharkhand, both dating back to the mid-1890s, when the British began extracting coal from the area and Birsa Munda, today a local folk hero, launched a tribal revolt to regain local control of resources. The British quelled the uprising with a massive deployment of troops, but the resentment festered. India's government after independence proved a poor landlord as well, with decades of mining disasters -- more than 700 people were killed in them between 1965 and 1975 alone -- and a corrupt, nearly feudal government that made what was then the state of Bihar notorious in India as the country's most poorly run, backward region.
By the 1990s, fed-up residents campaigned to carve Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh into their own jurisdictions. The politicians behind the movement argued that the people who lived in the shadow of the mines were the least likely to benefit from them, the spoils instead accruing to large out-of-state corporations and venal government officials in distant capitals. In 2000, India's Parliament acquiesced, forming new states that then-Home Minister L.K. Advani declared would "fulfill the aspirations of the people."
But statehood only enabled the rise of a new cast of villains. Absentee political landlords were replaced with home-grown thugs who exploited the new state government's lax oversight to build their own fiefdoms. Madhu Koda, one of Jharkhand's former chief ministers, is awaiting trial on allegations he siphoned $1 billion from state coffers -- an astonishing 20 percent of the state's revenues -- during his two-year tenure. Mining operations, fast-tracked without regard for environmental or safety concerns, expanded at an alarming rate and are now projected to displace at least half a million people in Jharkhand by 2015.
The blighted landscape has proved to be fertile ground for the Maoist insurgency's renaissance. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Maoists' predecessors in the Naxalite movement had waged a bloody revolutionary campaign across rural India, only to mostly fade away by the early 1990s. The Maoists who have picked up the Naxalites' banner in recent years are different, and the contours of their rebellion are hard to pin down.
These fighters claim to be led in battle by an elusive figure called Kishenji, who depending on whom you ask is either a one-legged, battle-hardened Brahmin, a 1960s-era radical with a Ph.D. from New Delhi, or simply a moniker used by anyone within the organization who wishes to sound authoritative or confuse the police. The guerrillas shun email and mobile phones and rarely communicate with the world beyond the jungle, mostly via letters ferried back and forth by foot soldiers. Over several years of attempted correspondence, we received only a few missives in return. All were written in an opaque style full of the sort of arcane Marxist jargon that the rest of the world forgot in the 1970s.
Today's Maoists maintain the radical leftist politics of their predecessors and draw their civilian support from the same rural grievances -- poverty, lack of justice, political disenfranchisement. But they are less an organized ideological movement than a loose confederation of militias, and many of their local commanders appear to be in it for the money alone. They wage war sporadically across a 1,000-mile swath of India, operating without a permanent base, relying on the tacit support of villagers to evade the police and paramilitary forces that hunt them, and periodically raiding remote police stations for resupplies of arms and ammunition.
But the rebels' primary revenue comes from the region's mines. Where the Naxalites used to congregate in areas with longstanding conflicts between landowners and laborers, Maoist strongholds now tend to pop up within striking distance of large-scale extractive operations. Such mines cover vast areas and are difficult to secure, making them sitting ducks for well-armed insurgents. "Most of the mines in this state are in the forests, so we are easy targets," says Deepak Kumar, the owner of several such mines in Jharkhand. "The only way to stop the attacks is to negotiate."
Kumar comes from a long line of Jharkhandi robber barons. In the 1980s, he used his mining camps as staging grounds for stalking the region's near-extinct Bengal tigers. Today he owns a series of profitable but (by his own admission) illegal coal mines, hidden in the palm forests. Legal mines extract ore with giant machines that carve craters to the horizon; Kumar's are more like secret caves, the coal dug out of deep tunnels with pickaxes by day laborers working for $2 to $3 a day. He told us his revenues run about $4 million a year, typical for off-the-books operations in a state where less than half of raw materials are extracted legitimately.
On July 4, 2004, Kumar was closing out the day's accounts in his makeshift office at one of his mines when seven female guerrillas carrying automatic rifles broke down his door, forcing him into the forest at gunpoint. They marched him to a riverbed, where they stopped and held a gun to his head. "I thought I was going to die," he recalls. Instead they demanded $2.5 million for his ransom.
Through the night, the Maoists marched him barefoot over crisscrossing trails, until they happened across a police patrol that was searching for him. Kumar escaped in the ensuing gun battle. But after he returned to work several weeks later, Maoist negotiators knocked on his door and let him know he was still a target. So, Kumar told us, he quickly hashed out a business arrangement with the rebels: In exchange for their leaving his operation alone, he would pay them 5 percent of his revenues.
The protection money, like the small bribes Kumar says he pays to the police to avoid troublesome safety and environmental regulations, has simply become another operating cost. Kumar says that every mine owner he knows pays up, too. By his back-of-the-envelope approximation, if the other estimated 2,500 illegal mines in the state are doling out comparable kickbacks to the rebels, the Maoists' annual take would come to $500 million -- enough to keep a militant movement alive indefinitely. "It works like a tax," he says with a Cheshire grin, "just another business expense and now everything runs smoothly."
Calls by politicians to clamp down on the Maoists' extortion racket ring hollow as long as the politicians themselves are running the same sort of scheme -- and in Jharkhand, they often are. Shibu Soren, a former national minister for coal and chief minister of Jharkhand until he was removed from office in May, has been tried for murder three times, though he was ultimately acquitted. (The crimes' witnesses had a habit of disappearing, or turning up dead.) Last year, local newspapers exposed a case in which two henchmen of another local politician assassinated a children's development aid worker, reportedly because he refused to pay the obligatory 10 percent kickback of his dairy goods after receiving a government contract. What they would have done with 3,000 gallons of milk is anyone's guess.
"If you want to be somebody in Jharkhand, just kill an aid worker," T.P. Singh, a Jharkhand correspondent for the Sahara Samay cable network, told us. A large man with a thick mustache, a TV-ready cocksure grin, and a penetrating stare, Singh is the network's crime and corruption exposé king, and a celebrity in the region. He plays the role of the TV cowboy to the hilt, right down to the ubiquitous ten-gallon hat he was wearing when we met him at the local press club in the Jharkhandi mining city of Hazaribagh to ask about the dangers of reporting on powerful people in a land with no effective laws.
"You know how I get those boys to respect me?" Singh replied. "With this." He reached into the waistband underneath his knee-length kurta and pulled out a Dirty Harry six-shooter, loaded and ready for action. A former Maoist turned politician, sitting on a couch across from Singh awaiting an interview, nodded his solemn approval.
The act is part bluster, but also part necessity. Many of Singh's media compatriots in Jharkhand have been killed, kidnapped, or threatened with death by the Maoists, miners, politicians, or all three at some point in their careers. In some areas, local law enforcement has simply ceded authority to government-sanctioned civilian militias, which are often accused by locals of pillaging even more rapaciously than the Maoists -- and contributing to the fighting by arming poor villagers. The most feared among them is Salwa Judum, secretly assembled by the Chhattisgarh government in 2005 to fight the Maoists; its 5,000-odd members patrol the state armed with everything from AK-47s to axes. Some roam the forest with bows and arrows.
"The Maoists have been killing locals for years," Mahendra Karma, the founder of Salwa Judum, told us. "But when [Salwa Judum members] kill Maoists or Maoist supporters, all of a sudden people shout the word 'human rights.' There should be no double standard. If we kill a Maoist, then how is that a violation of human rights?"
Karma has the thick frame and round face of a heavyweight boxer a decade past his prime. When we met him in his office, far from the fighting, in Chhattisgarh's capital of Raipur, he was flanked by armed guards. Above his desk was a life-size portrait of Mahatma Gandhi.
Karma founded the militia in 2005, when he was opposition leader in the state parliament. In the years since, he has presided over his district's descent into a war zone, as the Maoists and Salwa Judum have taken turns torching villages and raping and killing hundreds of people each year in a spiral of revenge attacks. Some villages have been attacked more than 15 times by one side or the other. Salwa Judum members are also accused of extracurricular killing to settle personal scores, even dressing the bodies in Maoist uniforms to cover up their crimes.
When we met, Karma was happy at first to talk about the militia. But when our questions turned probing, his mood soured. Finally, rising to his feet and jabbing his finger into our chests, he shouted, "These questions you ask have come from the Naxalites -- you are the men of the Naxalites!" In Chhattisgarh, Karma's rage could easily amount to an extrajudicial death sentence. We were on the first flight back to Delhi.
It was just as well because by that point our attempts to contact anyone in the Maoist rebel camps had yielded next to nothing. After leftist author Arundhati Roy paid a visit to the Maoists this year, the Indian government reinterpreted its anti-terrorism laws to make speaking favorably about the rebels or their ideological aims -- including opposition to corporate mining -- punishable by up to 10 years in prison. This has made the Maoists' civilian allies cagey about dealing with outsiders, and the already reclusive fighters even more difficult to reach. After months of sporadic contact with the Maoists' liaisons, exchanging handwritten notes with couriers who arrived at our Ranchi hotel in the middle of the night, we made a breakthrough: Finally, a rebel spokesman by the nom de guerre of Gopal offered the prospect of visiting a Maoist camp. It would involve being whisked deep into the jungle on the back of a motor scooter and then camping out there for several days, waiting for the rebels to make contact, blindfold us, and take us the rest of the way to their outpost. We were ready to do it, but monsoon rains and a Green Hunt military offensive eventually scotched the plan.
Since then, the Maoists have kept busy. In addition to the May bus explosion near Bailadila that killed 35 people, the passenger-train derailment that same month killed almost 150 people, bringing total casualties to more than 800 so far in 2010 alone. The central government has responded by dispatching even more military resources to the area.
In a sense, however, India has already lost this war. It has lost it gradually, over the last 20 years, by mistaking industrialization for development -- by thinking that it could launch its economy into the 21st century without modernizing its political structures and justice system along with it, or preventing the corruption that worsens the inequality that development aid from New Delhi is supposed to rectify. The government is sending in Army advisors and equipment -- for now, the war is being fought by the Indian equivalent of a national guard, not the Army proper -- and spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects in the districts where the Maoists are strongest. But it hasn't addressed the concerns that drove the residents of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand into the guerrillas' arms in the first place -- concerns that are often shockingly basic.
In the town of Jamshedpur we visited Naveen Kumar Singh, a superintendent of police who can boast of a string of hard-won victories over the Maoists, which include demolishing training camps, confiscating weapons, and racking up a double-digit body count. But Singh is also responsible for winning his district's hearts and minds. When we stopped by his office, 10 petitioners were lined up in front of his desk. They were mostly poor men and women from rural areas, their clothes dusty from long bus rides. One woman in a purple sari arrived with a limp, leaning heavily on her son's shoulders. She asked Singh for help moving forward a police investigation into the car that hit her. Everyone in the room knew that without his signature on her crumpled forms, nothing would happen.
But Singh looked bored and sifted idly through the woman's handwritten papers. Finally, he waved his hand in the air and told her to go find more documents, ushering her back into the endless bureaucratic loop that is India's legal system. Most of the others received similar treatment.
Later, we asked him what the police were doing to combat the Maoists. When the police go on missions now, he told us, they pass out literature to the mostly illiterate peasantry and staple on every tree slogans warning people away from Maoism. "We don't only go into the forest to kill people," he bragged. "We also hang posters."
Source - Foreign Policy
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/05/2010 11:58:00 AM
[Naxalite Maoist India] CPI(Marxist) sets up Bunkers and Harmad Camps in Jung...
CPI(Marxist) has started importing mercenaries from neighboring states to crush the adivasi rebellion in junglemahal. Thousands of arms have been distributed and bunkers setup under the direct supervision of the senior party leaders.
Harmad Camps in Junglemahal
The word "harmad" has been incorporated recently in Bengali vocabulary, thanks to CPM. It means armed forces of CPM constituted by hired goons. Icore Ekdin (2 Sept 10), a Bengali daily reported that in Junglemahal CPM runs 52 harmed camps with 1620 goons hired from Bihar, Jharkhand, Arambag, Keshpur etc.
After establishing its domination over a locality CPM shifts their harmad camps to another area. The schools, CPM party offices and houses of CPM leaders are used as camps. According to the daily, central intelligence branch has also mentioned these harmad camps in their report.
Source: Icore Ekdin 2 Sept, 2010.
Source: Icore Ekdin 2 Sept, 2010.
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/05/2010 11:32:00 AM
[Naxalite Maoist India] Convention Against Operation Green Hunt at Chandigarh
Himanshu Kumar on his Cycle Yatra to Punjab
Himanshu Kumar Addressing Chandigarh Convention
Sh. Gursharan Singh (noted peoples Dramatist), Convener, Democratic Front Against Operation Green Hunt, Punjab, addressing the Convention
A section of the Audience
A section of the Audience
Sh Gursharan Singh in wheel chair, blessing the Cycle Yatra
Beginning of Cycle Yatra
Sh. Gursharan Singh coming to Convention venue at Chandigarh
Sh. Gursharan Singh, Prof Ajmer Aulakh, Prof A.K.Maleri presenting the poster issued to commemorate the beginning of the Democratic Front's compaign against Operation Green Hunt
Source - Lok Morcha
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Posted By Cpi Maoist Naxalite to Naxalite Maoist India at 9/05/2010 11:27:00 AM
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