prabir chatterjee <prabirkc@yahoo.com> wrote:
194113
THE SATURDAY INTERVIEWBeyond the Red CorridorSudeep Chakravarti began his career in journalism with The Asian Wall StreetJournal. He subsequently worked at Sunday, India Today, and HindustanTimes and is presently Editor-at-large with Rolling Stone.
Following his debut novel Tin Fish (2005), Mr Chakravarti has recentlypublished Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, an itinerant description ofMaoist realities in India that exposes individual apathy, bureaucratic farce,endemic corruption, armed rebellion, and state sponsored atrocities. MrChakravarti spoke to SHIV KARAN SINGH.Excerpts:What made you decide to write Red Sun?
Three key reasons. The first is that, Red Sun was a story waiting to be told.There is a fairly large and excellent body of writing on the Naxalite movementof the 1960s and early 1970s, and various subsequent extreme-Leftincarnations through the 1980s. But besides the occasional writing anddisplay in media around the time of major skirmishing between rebels andsecurity forces, there isn't a book on the movements of today as driven by CPI(Maoist) that attempts to demystify it. The second reason: there is a greatlack of telling the human story about the present play of Left-wing rebellion.Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessedand the dead are not numbers; they were ~ and are ~ people. With Red Sun Ihave attempted to humanise a very tragic conflict, one of a country at war withitself. There is no "foreign hand", no xenophobia to feed on, no fingers to pointanywhere but at ourselves, at the abysmal failure of governance, stunningapathy and callousness of our rulers and administrators, and the indelibility ofhow badly we treat our own people. A third reason is that learned writing aboutMaoism in India (it continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) isgenerally restricted to academic journals and analysis by think tanks. There isa crying need to mainstream the discussion, tell the lay reader, as it were,about what is going on, shake Middle India out of its mall-stupor, and diminishthe delusions of grandeur of India's lawmakers.To certain disaffected, Maoism provides a structured process for armedrebellion, not a strategy of rule. What could be the ramifications of this ifMaoists were to increase areas under their control?
History shows us that it's usually easier to rebel than to rule. It has happenedin every ancient civilisation and nearly every modern one-barring, possibly andnotably, the United States. Mao is as good an example as any. He brought offa stunning rebellion, ruthlessly united a country, and then ruled it at whim.Nepal is today dealing not merely with the absence of war, but the chaos ofpeace, reconciliation and a scheming monarchy. But history moves on, as ithas in Russia, China, and it will in Nepal. In India, Maoist rebellion ~ indeed,any rebellion, conceivably even a Dalit one ~ is and will surely continue toprovide impetus to change. The wise ought to see the writing on the wall andensure socio-economic, administrative and judicial delivery so that Mao andhis principles needn't have to show the way in India. Until this happens,rebellion in India is a no-brainer. We have asked for it.With the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2006, and the UnlawfulActivities (Prevention) Act, 2004, the arms of the state have put a gag onhuman rights voices and media. Dr Binayak Sen still languishes in jail. Why isthe state government eliminating the middle ground, i.e. people actuallyproviding essential services to the local population?
To my mind, Dr Sen's imprisonment is nothing but a paranoid reaction of thestate. It's a classic tactic of retaliation to focus on "soft" targets in order todivert attention from real failures ~ of governance, administration, policing, andsocio-economic development. In addition, there is the grinding exploitation oftribals and the poor that no amount of finessing or propaganda can hide. Thegovernment of Chhattisgarh is now engaged in denying legitimate NGOs spaceto function in rural areas. It's a stupid, knee-jerk strategy that will bringimmense harm. Besides further fracturing society, it will only serve to escalatethe conflict. The Chhattisgarh government is quite obtuse; even looking atthings from their point of view, they do not appear to realise that the longerthey incarcerate Dr Sen, the more people who normally would not beempathetic to the cause of left-wing revolution would be drawn to it.If Salwa Judum is not a spontaneous uprising, what is it? Why is it onlyrestricted to Chhattisgarh?
The truth about Salwa Judum is that it is not spontaneous. It is a monstercreated cynically from a real grouse that some tribal people and farmersharboured against the heavy-handedness of Maoists in the area. Thegovernment tapped into this partial resentment and created Salwa Judum withstate support ~ financial, logistical and moral. But by setting brother againstbrother, Chhattisgarh has created a situation of mutually assured destructionof tribals. Homes are razed, lands are lost, livelihoods are destroyed, andfutures erased. The chaos that Salwa Judum has caused is perhaps the onlyreason that has kept other states from employing similar methods as strategy.Senior policemen, intelligence officials and security experts have told meSalwa Judum is a no-hoper. But Chhattisgarh can't retract it; it has become aprestige issue, a noose.Is government reaction in Chattisgarh a realisation of people's deprivation or adesire to wrest back areas rich in resources? In other words, are wewitnessing another instance of "disaster capitalism", i.e. accelerating a crisiswith violence, to weaken the control of local populations over resources, inorder to ultimately privatise the same?
Absolutely. And I say this as a person, journalist and writer with no left-wingcredentials whatsoever.Are surrendered Maoists a reality?
Yes and no. In certain states ~ Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh ~ it is apartial reality, where Maoists come above ground for personal reasons, whichcould range from illness to intimidation to plain battle fatigue. It's happening abit in Orissa. The key really is to ensure effective rehabilitation in these cases,or there will inevitably be a backslide into cynicism, resumption of arms oreven, sending out a signal to Maoist cadres that the state is not serious, and"surrender" is just an euphemism for "give up your arms and go back to beingoppressed."
In states such as Chhattisgarh, surrender is mostly a cynical farce, as ismuch the case with just about everything in that state related to Maoism. EvenBJP legislators have trashed the claim of the state government on surrenderedMaoists as being little more than hogwash. In one famous instance from acouple of years ago, a BJP MP claimed he personally knew some of the"surrendered" Maoists as they happened to be BJP cadres! Each state toone's own, evidently.The time of shokher Naxals has passed. What are the present realities ofinequality, disaffection, and Maoism in Bengal?
The shokher Naxals, as well as the present-day Maoists, are driven by similarthings: outrage against state apathy and grotesque inefficiencies in oursociety. Perhaps the government of West Bengal needs to consider that thedistricts most affected by Maoism in the state are also the ones fairlyuntouched by land reform measures ~ a key reason for the success of CPI(M)-led political domination of West Bengal. Having said that, and alsoaccounting for the fact of the recent capture of Somen, the CPI (Maoist) leaderin West Bengal, the state could, in the near to medium term future, see anupsurge in Maoist violence. This is expected in and around Kolkata, as well asthe districts from north to south bordering Bangladesh. In the throes of newflyovers, condominiums and a handful of info-tech campuses, perhaps themasters of West Bengal need to consider a brutal truth: there is wretched ruraland urban poverty and inequity in the state. And this time around, a far moredeliberate group of rebels are preparing to leverage these infirmities. The intentisn't shokh, but shock.Your book on continuing subversion, and violence, against and by the state, isnow available in elite bookstores. Would you not describe this as apt,considering the nature of the issue?
It is entirely apt, and entirely natural. Red Sun is available at large bookstoresas well as small ones, places where the elite and the not purchase books. Thestory of Red Sun is for everyone to read, and should ideally be availableeverywhere. I sincerely hope it is translated soon into various Indianlanguages; that would be appropriate ~ perhaps even necessary. The storyneeds to go beyond English. The point to remember is that Red Sun is not"elite". It's the truth about today, a reality check, a story of the great shamethat India carries today, a country of stupendous economic growth and verve,and equally, overwhelming poverty, oppression and corruption. A countrywhere common people are driven to take to the gun for justice and redress thatis their constitutional right but is denied to them by the state machinery. Iwould urge the "elite" to read Red Sun, if only to realise how much further Indianeeds to travel for even a semblance of spreading equity in development. It'swhat corporations practice as a matter of routine for its shareholders; whycan't a country, for its citizens?
(The interviewer is a Special Representative of The Statesman, Kolkata).