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THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW
Beyond the Red Corridor
Sudeep Chakravarti began his career in journalism with The Asian Wall Street
Journal. He subsequently worked at Sunday, India Today, and Hindustan
Times and is presently Editor-at-large with Rolling Stone.
Following his debut novel Tin Fish (2005), Mr Chakravarti has recently
published Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, an itinerant description of
Maoist realities in India that exposes individual apathy, bureaucratic farce,
endemic corruption, armed rebellion, and state sponsored atrocities. Mr
Chakravarti 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 movement
of the 1960s and early 1970s, and various subsequent extreme-Left
incarnations through the 1980s. But besides the occasional writing and
display in media around the time of major skirmishing between rebels and
security 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 great
lack of telling the human story about the present play of Left-wing rebellion.
Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessed
and the dead are not numbers; they were ~ and are ~ people. With Red Sun I
have attempted to humanise a very tragic conflict, one of a country at war with
itself. There is no "foreign hand", no xenophobia to feed on, no fingers to point
anywhere but at ourselves, at the abysmal failure of governance, stunning
apathy and callousness of our rulers and administrators, and the indelibility of
how badly we treat our own people. A third reason is that learned writing about
Maoism in India (it continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) is
generally restricted to academic journals and analysis by think tanks. There is
a 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 diminish
the delusions of grandeur of India's lawmakers.
To certain disaffected, Maoism provides a structured process for armed
rebellion, not a strategy of rule. What could be the ramifications of this if
Maoists were to increase areas under their control?
History shows us that it's usually easier to rebel than to rule. It has happened
in every ancient civilisation and nearly every modern one-barring, possibly and
notably, the United States. Mao is as good an example as any. He brought off
a stunning rebellion, ruthlessly united a country, and then ruled it at whim.
Nepal is today dealing not merely with the absence of war, but the chaos of
peace, reconciliation and a scheming monarchy. But history moves on, as it
has in Russia, China, and it will in Nepal. In India, Maoist rebellion ~ indeed,
any rebellion, conceivably even a Dalit one ~ is and will surely continue to
provide impetus to change. The wise ought to see the writing on the wall and
ensure socio-economic, administrative and judicial delivery so that Mao and
his principles needn't have to show the way in India. Until this happens,
rebellion in India is a no-brainer. We have asked for it.
With the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2006, and the Unlawful
Activities (Prevention) Act, 2004, the arms of the state have put a gag on
human rights voices and media. Dr Binayak Sen still languishes in jail. Why is
the state government eliminating the middle ground, i.e. people actually
providing essential services to the local population?
To my mind, Dr Sen's imprisonment is nothing but a paranoid reaction of the
state. It's a classic tactic of retaliation to focus on "soft" targets in order to
divert attention from real failures ~ of governance, administration, policing, and
socio-economic development. In addition, there is the grinding exploitation of
tribals and the poor that no amount of finessing or propaganda can hide. The
government of Chhattisgarh is now engaged in denying legitimate NGOs space
to function in rural areas. It's a stupid, knee-jerk strategy that will bring
immense harm. Besides further fracturing society, it will only serve to escalate
the conflict. The Chhattisgarh government is quite obtuse; even looking at
things from their point of view, they do not appear to realise that the longer
they incarcerate Dr Sen, the more people who normally would not be
empathetic 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 only
restricted to Chhattisgarh?
The truth about Salwa Judum is that it is not spontaneous. It is a monster
created cynically from a real grouse that some tribal people and farmers
harboured against the heavy-handedness of Maoists in the area. The
government tapped into this partial resentment and created Salwa Judum with
state support ~ financial, logistical and moral. But by setting brother against
brother, Chhattisgarh has created a situation of mutually assured destruction
of tribals. Homes are razed, lands are lost, livelihoods are destroyed, and
futures erased. The chaos that Salwa Judum has caused is perhaps the only
reason that has kept other states from employing similar methods as strategy.
Senior policemen, intelligence officials and security experts have told me
Salwa Judum is a no-hoper. But Chhattisgarh can't retract it; it has become a
prestige issue, a noose.
Is government reaction in Chattisgarh a realisation of people's deprivation or a
desire to wrest back areas rich in resources? In other words, are we
witnessing another instance of "disaster capitalism", i.e. accelerating a crisis
with violence, to weaken the control of local populations over resources, in
order to ultimately privatise the same?
Absolutely. And I say this as a person, journalist and writer with no left-wing
credentials whatsoever.
Are surrendered Maoists a reality?
Yes and no. In certain states ~ Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh ~ it is a
partial reality, where Maoists come above ground for personal reasons, which
could range from illness to intimidation to plain battle fatigue. It's happening a
bit 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 or
even, 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 being
oppressed."
In states such as Chhattisgarh, surrender is mostly a cynical farce, as is
much the case with just about everything in that state related to Maoism. Even
BJP legislators have trashed the claim of the state government on surrendered
Maoists as being little more than hogwash. In one famous instance from a
couple of years ago, a BJP MP claimed he personally knew some of the
"surrendered" Maoists as they happened to be BJP cadres! Each state to
one's own, evidently.
The time of shokher Naxals has passed. What are the present realities of
inequality, disaffection, and Maoism in Bengal?
The shokher Naxals, as well as the present-day Maoists, are driven by similar
things: outrage against state apathy and grotesque inefficiencies in our
society. Perhaps the government of West Bengal needs to consider that the
districts most affected by Maoism in the state are also the ones fairly
untouched by land reform measures ~ a key reason for the success of CPI
(M)-led political domination of West Bengal. Having said that, and also
accounting for the fact of the recent capture of Somen, the CPI (Maoist) leader
in West Bengal, the state could, in the near to medium term future, see an
upsurge in Maoist violence. This is expected in and around Kolkata, as well as
the districts from north to south bordering Bangladesh. In the throes of new
flyovers, condominiums and a handful of info-tech campuses, perhaps the
masters of West Bengal need to consider a brutal truth: there is wretched rural
and urban poverty and inequity in the state. And this time around, a far more
deliberate group of rebels are preparing to leverage these infirmities. The intent
isn't shokh, but shock.
Your book on continuing subversion, and violence, against and by the state, is
now 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 bookstores
as well as small ones, places where the elite and the not purchase books. The
story of Red Sun is for everyone to read, and should ideally be available
everywhere. I sincerely hope it is translated soon into various Indian
languages; that would be appropriate ~ perhaps even necessary. The story
needs 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 shame
that India carries today, a country of stupendous economic growth and verve,
and equally, overwhelming poverty, oppression and corruption. A country
where common people are driven to take to the gun for justice and redress that
is their constitutional right but is denied to them by the state machinery. I
would urge the "elite" to read Red Sun, if only to realise how much further India
needs to travel for even a semblance of spreading equity in development. It's
what corporations practice as a matter of routine for its shareholders; why
can't a country, for its citizens?
(The interviewer is a Special Representative of The Statesman, Kolkata)
