Field Notes, Part One: Chhattisgarh

I am finally here! The trip I have dreaded making after my longish stint in the northeast. Back to the underground, back to the brass tacks of dissertation writing. The process of not sitting in country capitals, but getting messed up and dirty, tromping in the back of beyond. Where people go to find stories and glamour and come away with a dissertation committee pronouncing them ‘experts’ on something.

I woke up in Delhi at 3 am on Oct 11 after two hours of sleep, to take a 6:40 am Jetlite flight to Raipur, read some troubling emails on the way to the airport, sobbed a bit at the ironies of life and my newfound lack of faith in people. Got a 6 am text from a friend who said the world could be so much worse. She was worried that I was not going into the field with the right composure and peace of mind.

She was right. I wasn’t.

And here I am without the composure and peace of mind.

Yesterday I got a glimpse of a Chhattisgarhi jungle, while driving to Border Security Force (BSF) encampments outside Raipur (that I cannot disclose publicly), the state capital. It was green, dense (like most forests) with trees, bushes, shrubs; tangled and snarled in a manner reminiscent of elaborate traps. These are not ordered redwood forests, or the type you see in Bollywood movies, where one can run and dodge around trees in elaborate clothing. This is a forest. Period.

What I saw was a patch of forest by the side of a highway. Now imagine vast expanses of such forests, populated in small cleared patches by tribal peoples. Also imagine thin, small trails where little vegetation exists because Maoists and tribals have walked there silently for many years. Many such trails are still undiscovered by the state forces because the enterprise of the coercive state apparatus, which privileges a ‘boots on the ground’ approach, is loud, noisy, unwieldy, unsympathetic to the importance of small trails, focusing on where large roads and trails exist. Yes there is a fight between the Maoists and the state and right now the Maoists are more adept at seeking the state out.

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We finally arrive at the Border Security Force (BSF) HQ at Bhilai. The BSF has temporarily set up office in the Bhilai Steel Plant. The white Innova with a ‘lal batti’, with tinted glasses and the amusing license number ‘0007’ (yes I may be one zero cooler than James Bond) drives into the dusty compound. Constable L opens the door, grabs my bag and ushers me into the offices of the BSF. I am taken hurriedly to one of the senior BSF officers. I have to wait five minutes before he can see me.

Officer D is pleasant and dressed in a light blue shirt and navy blue blazer; a uniform popular with many ‘faujis’ in India. His eyes are light and he has a warm smile as he greets me. I greet him and take a seat across the desk. Officer D is one of the officers in charge of BSF’s counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Chhattisgarh. During our hour-long meeting, he transmits several bits of information to the CGO complex in New Delhi that houses the BSF headquarters. This is important. Home Minister, Chidambaram is being briefed by the BSF and local cops today in New Delhi. CGO needs to have the latest information on the Maoists. The Home Minister wants 32 more companies to be deployed to tackle the Maoists.

Officer D rings a bell to summon an orderly. He orders tea and biscuits to be brought in. I briefly outline why I am here and what I am doing.

“They eat grass, you know.”

“The tribals?” I inquire.

He nods his head.

“Grass and forest items. They have no money to survive. Everyone looks at the problem differently. This is not an insurgency.” He pauses. “This is a revolution.”

“The problem is this. In this area there are mines and forests. The economy is solely extraction based. Tribals have a totally different way of life than this. They have no education, no money. Even though schooling is cheap, they have no money to eat. So forget about schooling. Schooling costs money. You need to buy uniforms, shoes, books. Also they don’t want to disrupt their way of life. If any development takes place, it is dominated by outsiders. All these industrialists are outsiders. There is tons of machinery but there is need for labor. Consequently, because of the lack of education, the only job available for tribals is labor intensive. Digging. Extracting. The mines at Raoghat, 30 kilometers from Durg are exhausted. So now the mining is shifting to the interiors. Maoists also operate there. Now they allow the mining to occur after they have collected some money from the mining organizations.”

He pauses as the tea is brought in. There is a Tetley teabag in the porcelain cup. We add milk and sugar.

“We (the BSF) have been providing security for about one year. In this one year there has been no development work. State government has not undertaken one project. So now the BSF is doing civic action. We are providing resources. Tribes have no medicines. Their average survival age is 40 years at the maximum. They still go to local “jhad-pooch” wallahs (witch doctors). We have been distributing medicines, clothes, essentials, food, blankets, seeds for farming, utensils, sports items to children, school supplies. We have even given local panchayats and tribal leaders TV sets and DTH facilities. They need to have some information about the outside world.”

“ We have been providing security to the contractors, saying now get the work done. But no development has happened. We provide security, but no one carries out the job. This is the problem with our system. The Naxals are fighting this system. Their final target is the politician.”

I have been thinking about the larger implications of what is being said. First, it is evidently clear to me that there is a consensus around the ‘development fix’. Think tanks, politicians, bureaucrats, common citizens and even the security forces believe that fundamentally, development, of the large industrial variety, can save India from the Maoists. Dissenting voices against this point of view in the establishment are few. But even the dissenting voices have advocated ‘buying off’ the Maoists to impose a shaky peace.

Second, there seems to be consensus in Delhi and Raipur that Maoists also fund their operations through marketplace extortion and extortion from mining companies. In what may soon closely resemble the activities of the NSCN (I-M) in Nagaland, the extortion, or ‘tax-collection’ may soon be a widely acknowledged and routinized affair.

Third, one of the crucial points that emerged from this conversation is the idea that local economies dominated by ‘outsiders’, are bound to exacerbate locally rooted grievances and resentment. Coupled with this is the type of economic development, which is extraction-based, surely disruptive of local economic traditions, resources and ways of life. The tribes are not skilled enough to be integrated into this economy in any long-term, lucrative way. In fact the manner of their integration, through labor contractors, adds to their exploitation and dislocation.

Finally, what the BSF officer describes as apathy at the level of the state government, could easily also be seen as an absence of basic state institutions that can carry out this development. This has created a situation where the only avatar of the state that appears before locals is uniformed and weaponized. Gone are the local bureaucrats, contractors and smaller clerks and peons that actually push the paperwork and implement development projects. The uniformed and weaponized avatar of the state, tries to perform its security keeping role to enable the other parties to perform their tasks, but in the absence of the other local state institutions, this wing of the state now certainly wears its uniforms, carries its weapons, but also hands out public goods.

I am still thinking about the various levels of cognitive dissonance this process must create in the minds of the locals.

The BSF here was given 90 lakhs by the Home Ministry to distribute public goods to local tribals. 45 lakhs has been promised over and above this amount. Officer D believes the BSF has been more efficient in allocating these resources to the locals. If the state government and bureaucrats had done it, at least 20 per cent, he thinks, would have been skimmed off.

Initially the Maoists used country made, front-loading rifles called “bharmars”. Now with their consistently aggressive attacks on the CRPF, the BSF and the state police; they have amassed sufficiently advanced and efficient assault weapons that are a step up from the “bharmars”. These country-made rifles are, however, still routinely recovered from forests; sometimes found abandoned in sacks.

Officer D has served in seven sensitive, insurgent-ridden zones of India, including the northeast.

I quiz him about the Salwa Judum. The Salwa Judum (purification hunt) was the supposed brainchild of Mahendra Karma, a local MLA, who organized local tribal villagers to fight against Maoist ‘terror’. The state decided that the Judum would be trained at the Kanker Counterinsurgency School and a special rank of officers called “Special Police Officers” were created and trained and released into society. Over time, the Judum clashed with the Maoists on several occasions, but also indulged in various indiscriminate acts of killing. The Maoist response to the Judum was equally brutal and hostile. In one incident in 2008, a bus containing SPO’s was ambushed by the Maoists. SPO’s died, but so did over 32 civilians. The Salwa Judum was officially disbanded after it was seen that it was not being adequately controlled by the state police. Today, the SPO’s are loosely called the ‘judum’ and continue their policing duties.

The Officer shrugs. He does not think the Judum experiment was unique to Chhattisgarh.

“Several such things have been floated in Jammu and Kashmir and in the northeast to fight insurgent groups. In Manipur, the PLA was raised with state support to fight the NSCN (I-M). This is not new. The PLA, however, is now also against the state and collects illegal taxes from Marwaris and others. The Salwa Judum no longer exists, but the Special Police Officers trained for it are still around.”

He cannot be pressed anymore on the matter.

Officer D says that there is no administration in most regions where Maoists operate. He offers the case of Maliguda as an example. A small stretch of land loosely connected to the mainland by a thin strip of land, it is technically on Andhra Pradesh’s border, but Orissa has overlapping jurisdiction over it too. This blurring of administrative lines leads to a situation where no state exercises local civic authority. It is this precise area that, according to Officer D, that is completely controlled by Naxals (Maoists).

In 2009, about 35 Greyhound commandos died in an attack in the Balimela reservoir in Maliguda. On a routine, Maoist hunting operation, they were crossing the reservoir by boat and were ambushed. Most died by drowning, some swam away. The BSF has now established a presence at Chitrakorda and is loosely deployed at Janbai and Maliguda.

Malkangiri is the most affected area in Orissa and making inroads as a COIN force is proving to be challenging. The Naxals have been around for 20-25 years in these areas. They have a clear head start.

“This is a revolution that started with bows and arrows, then “bharmars” and now assault weapons.”, Officer D says.

It is believed that the BSF’s civic action is paying off. The CRPF and the BSF, which have suffered because of the lack of human intelligence and have found it extremely difficult to gather such intelligence, are now being informed by villagers who say, “aaj gadbad hai, bachke jaana.”

There is something wrong today. Go carefully.

Several BSF officers agree that the Maoist problem in India is deprivation related and this is made acute by “increasing class distances”, as one officer commented in Delhi. While they buy into the logic of the ‘development fix’ and are quick to empathize with the condition of the tribals, they are yet unable to comment on their paradoxical role as individual sympathizers, but collective quashers of the rebellion.

They say they are simply doing what they are ordered to. It is highly interesting to me that the same officer can empathize with the condition of the tribals and understand why they would choose to pick up weapons, critique the state; and in the next breath also say he has to follow orders.

In my mind the Naxals are displaying a degree of stateness.

My interviewees tell me that the tribals go to the Naxals for justice, pay taxes and that the Naxals also offer protection and policing. The Naxals also grant licenses and legalize pattas with the signature of one Naxal Commander. They are, in this manner, also establishing property rights.

These are functions that states typically undertake. The Naxals are creating institutions, where state institutions are weak, absent or lack legitimacy.

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I am told the tribal mind here is very different. When a tribal is arrested for a crime or felony, he/she readily accepts the action and owns up to it. The idea that there is punishment attached to this action is not completely understood. They own up and cannot understand why then they have to pay bail, or be in jail for lengths of time.

This simplification of the ‘tribal mind’, the absolute reductionism of their undifferentiated manner of thinking is problematic and at this point I cannot know if this is credible.

On the other hand, the Naxals offer collective, swift, immediate justice. Someone steals something and he is thrashed in public. There is no comment forthcoming, or perhaps little information on the gender dynamics of such mechanisms of justice.

To the BSF the bigger issue seems to be the enforcement of law, which is still a civil affair. The security forces apprehend a Maoist, but he has to be handed over to the local police. Since Chhattisgarh is technically not been declared as a ‘disturbed area’ the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act is not applicable. This may be a blessing in disguise, given the problematic history of military action in zones where this Act has been used, like in Kashmir and the northeast.

There is some indication that the Maoist map of control would have looked a bit different had the BSF been called in many years earlier. In its training, functioning, the BSF is more like the army than any other paramilitary force in the country. And it seems to be definitely more efficient than the CRPF.

The anti-Maoist operations began with a badly funded, equipped and trained state police. When the police and the Salwa Judum seemed incapable of handling the Maoists, the Central Reserve Police Force was called in. It didn’t fare any better. The CRPF did have better weapons (which the Maoists needed) and became routine targets since their deployment was always linear and along one road/highway/path, at intervals of 15-20 kms. One local journalist claims this made the CRPF easy targets, because all the Maoists needed to do was place two IEDs, cutting off one pack of CRPF men from its closest reinforcements on both sides.

The BSF deployment operates on the basis of grids and sectors. In case of an ambush, reinforcements can come in from several sources at once.

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The constable L., who is now my protector and shadow, has begun to talk a bit more openly about the Maoists. They are well trained and sharp, he tells me. The leaders are from Andhra. He wants to know why I study them. I tell him about research and he asks me if I am scared being a woman in this territory. I have been asked this question by some senior officers too. I think about all I have been through in the last two years. I tell him I am scared but if my time comes to die, I must embrace it. It is kismet. He is pleased with my answer. He understands kismet.

In one of our very long drives in the interiors, he talks about going on leave in a few days and how he has to buy a jacket for his son. He is from Aligarh.

I still have a tenuous relationship with his AK-47. He doesn’t even notice it. It just rattles at his feet as we drive.

Tomorrow I will be driven in a vehicle with fake license plates to Kanker to meet Brigadier Ponwar at the Counterinsurgency and Jungle Warfare College. This is the man Arundhati Roy dubbed “Rumplestiltskin”. I will then also go to another deeply located BSF camp and talk to the commandant there, who has graciously asked me to lunch with him.

I’ll keep the notes coming.