The Burning Forest

India’s War Against the Maoists

Nandini Sundar

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788731454
• eBook ISBN: 9781788731478
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Burning Forest is an empathetic, moving account of what drives indigenous peasants to support armed struggle despite severe state repression, including lives lost, homes and communities destroyed.

Over the past decade, the heavily forested,mineral-rich region of Bastar in central India has emerged as one of the most militarized sites in the country. The government calls the Maoist insurgency the "biggest security threat" to India. In 2005, a state-sponsored vigilante movement, the Salwa Judum, burnt hundreds of villages, driving their inhabitants into state-controlled camps, drawing on counterinsurgency techniques developed in Malaysia, Vietnam and elsewhere. Apart from rapes and killings, hundreds of 'surrendered' Maoist sympathisers were conscripted as auxiliaries. The conflict continues to this day, taking a toll on the lives of civilians, security forces and Maoist cadres.

In 2007, Sundar and others took the Indian government to the Supreme Court over the human rights violations arising out ofthe conflict. In a landmark judgment, the Court in 2011 banned state supportfor vigilantism.

The Burning Forest describes this brutal war in the heart of India, and what it tells us about the courts, media and politics of the country. The result is a granular and critical ethnography of Indian democracy over a decade.

Part I

The Landscape of Resistance

1

Burnt Rice

From before the time of human life, in the heart of Gondwana, as the earth pushed and pulled itself into shape under heat and pressure, Archaean granite metamorphosed into gneiss. The plateaus thrust upwards, while water flowed from the rocks to form the landscape familiar to us today as Bastar, clasped between the rivered boundaries of the Sabari and the Godavari, which separate the states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Telangana–Andhra Pradesh.

The Indrawati cuts across the district, flowing south-west from its origins in Kalahandi in Odisha, past Jagdalpur, the former capital of Bastar state, before joining the Godavari near the Chhattisgarh–Telangana border. To the north of the Indrawati ascend the unmapped hills, the Marh, and to its south lie the districts of Bijapur and Dantewada.¹ Each night the moon rises on the sandy banks of the river, reflecting in the water, before disappearing as the mist settles over silent, forested tracts. But the Indrawati is dying, its waters flowing backward into a former tributary, the Jaura nala, a symptom of all that has turned upside down in this part of the world.

For those whose bearings depend on roads rather than rivers, two old trading routes, now national highways, run south and west through Jagdalpur, taking in wooded hill passes, before descending into the hotter, less shaded, plains. These roads connecting Chhattisgarh to Maharashtra and Telangana form the arteries of both commerce and state control.

The plateaus are ancient, but the first geological phenomena in the region, older even than the gneiss, are the Dharwar rocks formed over 500 million years ago. These form three distinct ferrous hill ranges each running north to south: the Chargaon–Kondapakha–Hahladdi hills and Raoghat in the north and the Bailadilla hills in the south. It is from here that iron entered the soul of the nation, hardening it to all human emotion, from here that the origins of time return to haunt the present.

In these hills, there once lived a civilization. Over the centuries, people here named the gods on the mountains and the mountains for the gods: Raoghat for the horse-riding Rao who guards the entrance to the Marh, Omalwar for the Kunjam clan god, Orko Marka Datto. They etched the landscape with stark and simple names: Biere Metta or Big Mountain, renamed by outsiders as Bailadilla for its bull hump shape, Inda referring to the wide water of both river and sea, now Sanskritized as the Indrawati. The Savada became the Sabari, and the entire region came to be known as Dandakaranya, or the forest where Rama was exiled, in an attempt to fit the region into a national epic imagination, where the locals were fierce and savage, and fair-skinned Aryans brought civilization.

For the adivasis, the forest was an intimate, if also dangerous, home. They battled the tigers and the wild boars to collect colourless gum from the white dhaora tree, pressed the yellow tora fruit for oil and learnt to peel away the round red skin of the tendu fruit to eat the sweet, pulpy flesh beneath. They found that the bija tree bleeds red like a human being when hacked. Where they had to clear the forests, they left mahua and toddy trees to mark the bunds, and planted tamarind trees to shade the village. In empty forest fields, the clap of a wooden trap blowing in the wind reminded humans and animals of each other’s presence. ‘If you peer into the deep caves,’ said Dulsai, in a village north of the Indrawati, ‘you can see the marks of tigers.’

In the cities, however, these forms of life find no favour. The gods that live in the mountains are signed away to mining companies, whose infra-vision does not see the splendour of the forest, the flower tucked behind the ear, the feather in the dancing headgear, but only the minerals beneath.

The colonial-era principle of eminent domain, which gives the state the right to acquire all land, has no room for local notions of property. In Bastar, the Earth, known as Bhum, Jaga or Mati, was sovereign, giving permission to certain lineages to settle; if the Earth was unhappy, people fell sick and had to leave. The first founders gave land to others, interceding on their behalf with the Earth. Every village knew where its forest began and that of their neighbours ended; they made sure that each forest spirit got its own due. The Mother Goddesses – every village has at least one – love, fight and visit each other, just like their followers.

The central Indian forest tract out of which Bastar is hived is peopled by several Gondi-speaking groups, who refer to themselves as simply koi, koya or koitor, meaning human. The major scheduled tribe (ST) or adivasi communities of Bastar include the Halbas, agriculturists who worked as soldiers guarding small forts like Chote Dongar or Hamirgarh; Bhatras in north-east Bastar whose language is a mixture of Halbi and Oriya; Dhurwas (formerly known as Parjas) who occupy the areas surrounding the Kanger forest; and the Dorlas of the southern plains bordering Telangana/Andhra. The best known are the southern Madia, whose distinctive bison horn headgear embellished with tassels of cowrie shells has been appropriated by the government to showcase tribal diversity, and the northern Muria famous for their ghotuls where youth were initiated into work and life. Among the other communities who make up the special character of Bastar are several classified as other backward classes (OBCs), such as the Dhakads, Marars (gardeners), Rauts (cowherds), Gadhwas (bell metal specialists), Kumhars (potters) Kallars and Sundis (distillers). The scheduled castes (SCs) – Maharas, Pankas and Mrigans – were the traditional weavers and musicians. There are several other OBC and SC communities who have come in from neighbouring states like the Telgas and Mahars from Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra respectively, now settled in Bijapur district.

But political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of immigrants who have come in the last century, especially in the last five decades: traders and businessmen from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Punjab; those working in the Bailadilla mines and the lower state bureaucracy; and Bengali refugees from the 1971 war, officially called East Pakistan Displaced Persons, settled by the government in what it saw as the empty forests of Koraput and Bastar.

When I first visited Bastar in 1990 as a PhD student researching colonialism and resistance, the newspapers occasionally reported ‘Naxalite incidents’ such as police–guerrilla encounters, along with accounts of murders and human sacrifices. But all these were ‘far away’, in places like Bijapur or Golapalli or Kistaram at the western and southern extremities of the state. In the Dhurwa belt where I lived, the Maoists were still exotic. There was little in the newspapers then about who the Naxalites were or what villagers thought about them. This kind of reporting that obliterates, even as it names, has remained constant over the decades.

From the bureaucratic redoubts of Delhi and Bhopal (Bastar was still part of undivided Madhya Pradesh), the government ruled over a vast tract in principle if not in practice, replacing the ritualism of the old kingdoms of Bastar and Kanker with an indifferent administration. The main problem I saw was exploitation by immigrant traders, mostly Thakurs from Uttar Pradesh, who ran the trade in minor forest produce and illegal tin mining. Together, the traders and local officials devised ways in which they could profit from government schemes meant for adivasi welfare. But thanks to the parliamentary Communist Party of India (CPI) which had been active in this area for a few years, the days when the forest guard or the patwari (revenue agent) would demand chickens and free labour from the villagers had gone, and land was still mostly in the hands of adivasis. Across the region, children went to village schools, regularly if the teacher came, and irregularly when the teacher absconded; government health services were few and far between, and people’s only hope – both then and now – was the wadde or local healer. On soundless summer evenings, the wadde’s long, low incantations can be heard from afar, rising suddenly to a crescendo and then falling again to an intimate mutter, as he implores the Mata, the Mother Goddess, to spare the patient she has infected.

I was young then, and divided my time between other young people and village elders, learning to speak Dhurwa and discovering the intricacies of village politics. I remember it as a time when I laughed a lot. My days were spent carrying out a household census and collecting genealogies, attending rituals, chatting to women as they husked grain or cracked tamarind pods, and watching the Panka weaver at his loom. Returning home on full moon nights, I would pause by the fields to see how brightly each stalk of grain was lit. Friday, the weekly market day, was like a mini festival when nobody did any work, coming home happy and exhausted after a morning negotiating with traders and meeting friends.

I made occasional trips further afield, for instance to a small village haat at Bade Karkeli near Kutru in Bijapur where we drank landa or rice beer and my friend Kala bought baskets of small dried fish. Near the dilapidated mansion of the former zamindar of Kutru lay the grave of a Parsi shikari, Peston Naoroji Kharas, gored by a wild buffalo in 1948. The Elwin Cooper Company of Nagpur used to organize hunting expeditions in the area. By 1998, the grave was in disrepair and the wild buffalo were no longer so plentiful in the Indrawati National Park. My field notes spoke of barricaded police stations: ‘Fortified police camp at Kutru with barbed wire all around. Police shining wary torches at night at all passing vehicles and calling out to find out who is there.’

The war had already begun, though I did not know it. What I remember more vividly is the everyday humiliation and loss, of friends dying suddenly for want of a doctor, the tense silence of village elders before a visiting policeman. It was hard not to feel angered by the casual racism of outsiders: bus conductors kicking elderly adivasi men and shoving women off the seat to make way for some minor official, a constant litany of complaints about how adivasis did nothing but drink and did not want education or modern medicine.

I recall occasional delirious nights of dancing during fairs and weddings, and tense moments at the cockfights, but voices were rarely raised. Village disputes involved extremely complicated negotiations, such as one in which the priest made off with an entire pig rather than just the head, which was his customary due. But arguments usually ended with the male elders drinking together and laughing.

In 2005, all this suddenly changed for the villagers living in the Maoist strongholds of Dantewada or South Bastar district, when the government began its devastating counter-insurgency operations. My life, which had taken me on to new research interests elsewhere, changed too, as news of violence began to trickle in from Bastar. My first encounters with the Salwa Judum were through human rights investigations or ‘fact-findings’ in November 2005 (with a PUCL/All India Fact-finding team, henceforth All India Fact-finding team) and May 2006 (with the Independent Citizens’ Initiative, henceforth ICI). After that, over the past decade, I have made repeated visits alone or with different friends. In 2007 three of us from the ICI, Ramachandra Guha, E.A.S. Sarma and I, filed a petition on human rights violations and state-sponsored vigilantism before the Supreme Court. Litigation reduced the licence I had as a sociologist to travel freely and talk to every side. But in the beginning, when I saw what I saw, I could not sleep, and a permanent ache entered my heart.

Chronicles of Counter-insurgency

In telling the story of counter-insurgency, where do I begin – with the flame or the candle snuffer, with the dream or the death, with the living forest or the hardened iron?

I have learnt from my lawyer friends that the first page of any petition must contain a ‘timeline’, a narrative of dates and events relevant to the issue, to help the judges understand and contextualize the matter. But what are the relevant dates here that the reader should know about? Should one start with 1910, with the Bhumkal, when the adivasis of Bastar rebelled against the colonial administration, asking for their lands and forests to be left alone, whose memory is invoked in the songs and tracts produced by the Maoists? Or 1947, when independent India promised a new democracy but sold the adivasis short by keeping several old colonial laws? Some might want to start with 1967, when a small village in West Bengal, Naxalbari, became synonymous with hope, and young men and women took to armed struggle against oppression; or the 1980s, when the first Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI [ML]) People’s War squads left Telangana for Bastar; or 2004, when the CPI (Maoist) was formed by the merger of the People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCC), signalling a higher level of strength. One could also reel one’s historical timeline close and start with 2005, when the mineral-rich hills of Bastar suddenly became the most valuable piece of real estate in the country, and those who stood in the way of their exploitation – like the Maoists – became, in former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s words, the ‘Biggest Internal Security Threat to the Indian State’.

The Biggest Security Threat contains many smaller stories from across the country, of both individual lives and community sorrows. In writing a history of the Indian Maoists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, appropriate space must be given to the desperate struggle of the dalits or SCs of Bihar against upper-caste landlords for wages and dignity; the corruption introduced by the faction-ridden, extortionist gangs of Jharkhand which call themselves Maoist but are propped up with police support, like the ‘Tritiya Prastuti’ or the People’s Liberation Front of India; the police-atrocity-induced Lalgarh movement in Bengal which flared briefly and ran its own health centres and schools before it was appropriated and betrayed by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC); the tragic story of the Kuis of Odisha, whose entirely constitutional agitation for land rights was labelled Maoist by the state and repressed; and the virtual overground disappearance of the Maoists in Andhra Pradesh, following aborted peace talks in 2004, repression, and new economic and political opportunities.

My account is focused on Bastar or the southern part of Chhattisgarh, where, over three decades, the Maoists established what is almost a parallel state, distributing land, settling disputes, taxing contractors and entering into the minutiae of intimate relations. But my story is not about the Maoists, though they inevitably figure in it. My narrative is really about Indian democracy, when it reduces what are essentially political contests over rights, distributive justice and alternative visions of the good to law and order problems, and when it would rather fight against its poorest citizens than talk to them.

Unlike insurgency, which has many local characteristics, counter-insurgency draws on a global repertoire. The political histories of places like Malaysia, Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia, or even Sri Lanka, Algeria and Kenya, the kinds of movements (nationalist, Marxist, Islamist), and the kinds of regimes in power (colonial government, authoritarian regime or democracy) may be quite different, but the software of counter-insurgency that circulates through manuals and military training colleges across the world is common.² The basic aim is to exhaust and coerce civilians into abandoning support for insurgents. The similarities are especially stark when it comes to indigenous people dreaming of a Marxist revolution.

To borrow a term from the historian Ranajit Guha who wrote on the elementary forms of peasant insurgency in colonial India,³ one might discern certain ‘elementary aspects’ of counter-insurgency. The counter-insurgency may be conducted directly by the police or army; cloak itself in the guise of popular anger against rebels; or employ vigilantes, including death squads, with the state claiming it is helpless to identify and act against criminals. Most counter-insurgencies, however, officially deploy a combination of state and state-supported non-state actors against insurgents. Former insurgents turned pro-government mercenaries are organized as ‘home guards’, ‘special police officers’ or paramilitaries who work as informers and also serve as the first line of attack. Often, villagers are also armed and conscripted into ‘civil patrols’ or ‘village defence units’ to fight against insurgents.

In addition, counter-insurgencies have similar consequences for civilians. Looting and/or burning of villages is standard as are murders, rapes and widespread arrests of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Prologue: Dandakaranya, the Forest of Exile
• Part I: The Landscape of Resistance
• Part II: Civil War
• Part III: Institutions on Trial
• Epilogue: A New Compact
• Notes
• Appendices
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Index