Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti; Penguin Viking; Price: Rs.499; 352 pp
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Described as “India’s single biggest internal security challenge” by prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2004, the silent Naxalite revolution is one of India’s worst kept secrets. Although the Naxalite footprint — indeed raj — now covers 165 of the country’s 630 districts, middle class India preoccupied with page 3 society, cricket and sham democratic politics, seems to be unaware of the power and ambitions of the Naxal revolut-ionaries, estimated to have an armed strength of 12,000 fiery cadres.
In this book journalist-author Sudeep Chakravarti beams a powerful spotlight on the steady progress of the Naxalite insurgency, which draws support from the ‘other’ India, where desperately poor people in the neglected hinterland have strong grievances, especially over land disputes and corrupt, malfunctioning administrations. Frustrated and deprived, they are increasingly turning to extremist leaders — the only people willing to lend them an ear and fight for their causes.
Red Sun is a beginner’s guide to the Maoist movement in India, a collection of the author’s observational essays as he travelled through India’s “red corridor” of Naxalite-infested districts. The Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), an armed Maoist group in India, joined forces with the People’s War Group, an underground communist party, to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004.
Chakravarti’s research into the origins of this radical movement takes him to its birthplace — Naxalbari in Darjeeling district — where the Naxals launched their struggle in 1967. He meets the new generation of rebels — Abhijit Majumdar, Naxalite movement founder Charu Majumdar’s son and old war horse Kanu Sanyal. In Chattisgarh, he comes across members of the dreaded Salwa Judum (the state government’s counter-revolutionary citizens’ force, to fight the atrocities of the Naxals). But evidence suggests that it is essentially a government sponsored programme with the state government press ganging tribals to turn on their own people.
Right at the start, the author makes it clear that his intent is to report rather than analyse the causes and effects of the brewing Naxal revolution. Therefore this book is a travelogue that faithfully records conversations, observations and encounters with people directly or indirectly associated with the movement. Chakravarti’s quest takes him to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi where he encounters student Naxalite leaders; to Hyderabad where he meets with veteran Naxal leader P. Varavara Rao; to Shantiniketan (near Kolkata) where he persuades his ex-Naxalite father-in-law to recount his experiences with the police, government and conflict management officials.
The downside of this labour and travel-intensive narrative is that although Chakravarti traverses the length and breadth of the country, the reader is denied a real encounter with even one foot soldier of the Maoist revolution. The nearest the author comes to a committed Naxal who has heeded the call to arms, is when he accompanies a local contractor into the Saranda forest which covers parts of Orissa and Jharkhand. But the author is ditched by his prospect and forced to satisfy himself with a walk in the forest. Though Chakravarti attempts to remain neutral, he doesn’t quite succeed in concealing his admiration for the idealists of the Naxal movement and their taking to arms against the sea of troubles engulfing India’s most neglected regions.
“There is little debate that the spread of Maoist influence is at its core the consequence of bad governance — or plain non-governance — and crushing exploitation in the world’s next superpower. There have been instances in Bihar and Jharkhand where illiterate tribals have been told that they own just six inches of their land; what lies below the six inches belongs to others, the state, the local trader, the local moneylender — now established via-media for mining interests. Such reality makes the congratulatory data and conclusions about today’s India, much of it true, seem a little hollow,” he writes.
Meanwhile, like the Russian nobility until the Marxist revolutionaries came knocking on their doors in October 1917, the great Indian middle class keeps partying.
Amrita Bose