Aheli Moitra
It is rare to hear of Chhattisgarh, or the people who inhabit it. A catastrophe a year brings it back to our psyche, its jungles more remote than here, its people more alienated. They are so peripheral to our world, for when they strike us on their land, we retaliate with anger.
Growing up in a Bengali household, there was always some space for the Maoist movement in India, their warriors called Naukshal (Naxal, if you fancy). Elders, at some point, actually discussed Naxal politics. But later, for us, the non violent classes, the Maoist movement became of stereotypes. Question big business ethics or talk of the poor, and there it was, “Naukshal naki?”
Three of our generations grew up with them. Our grandparents strived to keep their children at a light year’s distance from any form of the movement. Resistance was futile—everyone knew of the revolution and wanted to be in it. Through the 1970s, upper caste Indians spent sleepless hours hoping their wards had not forgotten their caste privileges and crossed over to the other side. Some did; a friend described how he and his friend fought a bitter battle with his parents in their palatial home. Both of them “left” for the “jungles” in the middle of the night to join the “revolution”. Chaos and mosquitoes brought them back to Delhi pretty soon.
Our parents repeated the act though we had no such exposure. Of significant and questionable age, our questions ran loose nonetheless. Who lives in central India? What is so precious about their land? Why is the government taking this away? Where to? How can they mine it, for what, for whose profit? Will they be employed in the factories? How come we have never met anyone from there? Why do they need to fight? Who is Naukshal?
Shush! Focus on your academics, the country’s economy needs you. The high-end schools we went to told us nothing about the people of many parts of what they called India. It was not just the North East that was missing. The questions, thus, came at a later stage when we had already reaped the benefits of our caste and class privilege without a struggle more than for grades. In these circles, it is simple enough to be born and to die with this notion of a struggle.
So, when they started raising a hue and cry about Naxalism, Maoism, or whatever that was, since Manmohan Singh made that statement about the big internal security threat thing, we asked him to Shush! It made no difference to our lives (replete with cash, entertainment, technology and fun) if the tribal source of livelihood, their forests, were being razed, if they had never heard of this thing called a government till it came to attack, if women there were raped by the dozen or if chemical pollution from the factory next door was killing them. They were they, out there. We are us, right here.
And as us we lent support to the increasing violence that the people of central India live with. We pushed them into aggression through our silence, through the violence we never saw. Yet, it hurts us only when Arundhati Roy pricks our bottom. It irks us when our congress man is hurt, our democracy shattered only when one of us bitten. To this, we respond with more violence, the kind we practice but refuse to see. Non violence for us, injustice for them—that, sir, is the biggest internal security threat.
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