PLAY: (A) Interrogation

Dedicated to AGL Kaul, DySP/SCB/CBI

Interrogation: A one-act, two-character sketch.

Scene: A table, with two chairs facing each other. Hanging from above the center of this table, a bulb with a string switch to turn it on and off.

Curtains open.

The bulb is turned on.

Q- The Light?
K- Have you seen it?
Q- What?
K- The Light.
Q- Not the Light. A light, yes.
K- Any sort of light
Q- Flickering: I was far, it was drizzling. I couldn’t see clearly.
K- Well, did you or did you not see it? The Light?
Q- You mean: a light.
K- Damn it! A light, the Light! What difference does it make?
Q- Speaking from an epistemological perspective, yes: it does make one helluva difference. One might even go so far as to say: all the difference there is between omniscience and blindness.
K- Oh, shut up! You know as well as I do that this isn’t one of your sessions or sermons or seminars or soliloquies or whatever it is you call ’em.
Q- Pray tell, then, what exactly “this” is?
K- A bloody Interrogation. That’s what this is. And you bloody well know it. Now, don’t try acting smart with me.
Q- Do I need to act?
K- Act?
Q- Smart. I was under the impression that the reason why you’ve called me here, to this “Interrogation”, is precisely because you know it for a fact that I AM SMART. Perhaps a bit too smart for your palate.

K slaps Q.
Q wipes blood off the corner of his upper lip with a finger.

Q- Violence is the weapon of the weak. Who said that? Ah, you haven’t the faintest clue. Well, in that case: let it be I. Yes, I said that. You will remember it, won’t you? Violence is the weapon of the weak. Not Luther or Gandhi but I. I.

K leaves room.

Q- (looks lovingly at the blood on his finger, sucks it) Yummy. “The blood of Christ shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this as often as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me.” O, sweet, sweet Sacrilege. Behold, the Seduction of Sinners!

K returns. Sits down.

K- Like the sound of your own voice, eh? Now, let’s hear you sing.
Q- Care for a lullaby?
K- Only the truth.
Q- Truth is blind men looking at shadows dancing on the walls of a cave. Wait a minute. Blind men don’t see. Can’t see. Perhaps they weren’t blind after all. (screams) No! The Advent of Amnesia!
K- O what a drama-queen! Look we can go on all night like this. But it will be a whole lot easier for the both of us if you…
Q- Is it night already? So soon?
K- Does it matter? In here, it’s always night. One long unending night.
Q- Bravo! Could this really be…the Birth of a Poet? Come to think of it, I tend to have that affect on people: impregnating everyone with poetry.
K- You give yourself too much credit.
Q- Not enough for you, apparently. Admit it. Wouldn’t you be happier if I gave myself unadulterated credit for this…Crime? You know, took the entire blame on my head. Confessed. Isn’t that what this “Interrogation” is about?
K- All we want to know is what really happened.
Q- Oh! Is that all? A moment ago, you wanted to know ‘the Truth’. The point, which I’m glad you’re beginning to belatedly appreciate, is that you’ve got to be specific about things: what, when, where, how. Those are the easy questions. It’s the WHY that’s the Real McCoy!
K- So tell me: what, when, where, how?
Q- Turn off the light. Will you? I can see much better that way.
K- As you say. You can’t possibly run. There’s nowhere to run to.

K pulls the bulb’s string switch. Lights off.

K- There! Now tell me, very slowly, what do you see. Tell me everything.
Q- Oh, but I am not here. See for yourself.

K turns on bulb.

Q isn’t there.

End.

Raipur Gaol,
January 14, 2006.
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CASé-ßLANK-Ah!!! (sic): "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

ALL SINS FORGIVEN
"Prosecution closed": two words I've been yearning to hear for the past year. Well, it finally happened today, with the testimony of the investigating officer (IO) Mr AGL Kaul, Dy.SP/SCB/CBI, having been duly recorded. Afterwards, when the proceedings had been adjourned for the day, we met and shook hands, possibly for the last time, under the blaze of media. I gave him a pre-publication copy of my poetry, composed in jail. He asked me to inscribe it. I did: "for K., my persecutor & friend: with love, Amit". In another world, under different circumstances, on different frequencies- to paraphrase James Joyce from Ulysses- he and I might even have been friends: an idea that is at once a lament and a hope.

In any event, I am grateful to Mr Pankaj, press-photographer with the Chhattisgarh newspaper, for giving me the photograph that appears here.


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NAXALISM: (F) ERRABORE GENOCIDE: Breach of Faith

Faith, more than any other ingredient, forms the basis of the contractualist-premise between the Ruler and the Ruled, more so in democracies. When more than 70,000 tribals were uprooted, often-forcibly, from homes they have lived on for thousands of years, and packed-off like cattle into sub-human roadside concentration camps, the sole reason given was ‘protection of life’: state-sponsored SJ activists inform villagers that if they don’t abandon their habitats pronto, they will be killed. The illogicality of this argument stands exposed by the fact that tribal-genocide is an outcome of SJ, not its cause. According to the BJP chargesheet indicting my father’s government, 97 persons had been killed by the Maoists during the three of Congress rule (2000-03); in the two and a half years that Dr. Raman Singh has been chief minister, that figure has increased tenfold (2003-06). Be that as it may, implicit in this Faustian bargain, was the state’s admission of its inability to provide security to tribals in their homelands; it sought to remedy this by shifting them into six ‘base-camps’ specifically constructed for this purpose.

As a rule, these ‘base-camps’- such as Errabore- are situated adjacent to a police station (thana) on the national highway. Drawing inspiration from the historical antecedent of displacement of Kashmiri-pandits from the Valley, Mr. Mahendra Karma, the SJ leader, terms this ‘phase’ in SJ as ‘unfortunate but necessary’. Well, could the same ‘derangement of epitaphs’ be applied to the massacre at Errabore?

Facts about what really transpired on the night of July 17, 2006 are sketchy, at best. What is undisputed is this: between about 1:00-3:00 am, 100 armed persons of the CP (Maoist) launched a full-fledged attack on the Errabore base-camp, situated adjacent to the police station on the Sukama (Anjeram)-Konta segment of the national highway. 20 tribals were butchered to death with hard-edged weapons (knifes etc.); 2 were shot dead at point-blank range; 3 were charred to death; over 250 are missing, of which 32 are confirmed to have been abducted; and at least 500 houses were burnt down. [These are official figures of course, and the actual figures are likely to be much higher.] Not one policeman was killed, for the simple reason that not one of them left the safety of the thana. A local agency-chief tells me that had it not been for the timely intervention of the CRPF personnel, who rushed to the spot in a bullet proof vehicle, the entire camp- with its total population of 3500, and over 1000 houses- would have been annihilated. This is the first time that a base-camp has been attacked.

In the aftermath of the Errabore massacre, the state home minister’s response to protesting ‘refugees’- a term used by him to describe displaced tribals during an Assembly debate- is enlightening: confronted with belligerent family-members of those killed, he challenged them ‘to go back’. This statement, made no doubt in frustration, reflects a fundamental change in the government’s thinking: it is an explicit recognition of its failure to guarantee tribal life, even in base-camps. Evidently, the continued existence and proliferation of base-camps has little, or nothing, to do with the protection of tribal-life: SJ’s sine qua non for their being setup in the first place. After Errabore, that justification no longer exists.

Why then isn’t SJ called-off? In a previous article, I had postulated a three-pronged reason for the mushrooming of ‘base-camps’, which I quote below:
• POLITICAL: Come election-time, and there will be no polling stations in evacuated villages. Instead they will be set-up well within the guarded perimeter of these 6-7 concentration camps. And it doesn't take a psephologist to predict the electoral outcome under such 'free, fair and impartial' conditions. Does it? Think about it. Had elections been 'conducted' in Auschwitz, wouldn't the National Socialists (Nazis) have swept the polls? Thankfully, unlike der Fuhrer- who didn't consider his refugees worthy of the vote- this regime views the tribals as- and only as- a votebank. And SJ, as it happens, is the surest way to encash this votebank en block.
• CULTURAL: Concentration of vast tribal populations in the controlled environment of camps provides an easy assembly-line for the Sangh troika and its affiliates to work overtime in order to factory-produce indoctrinated specimens: a people repeatedly told that they are worshipping 'false' gods, eating 'polluted' foods, following 'promiscuous' practices and 'anachronistic' customs; and systematically made to feel ashamed about their (former) 'primitive and barbaric' way of life; thus slowly but surely falling in line with the (pseudo) 'hindutva' pogrom of the RSS. Much more than the geopolitical displacement, it is this sense of 'cultural displacement', which will come from living in camps, that worries me. Henceforth, camp-inmates will be permanently scarred by a false sense of 'inferiority-complex', and adapted to a type of doggish existence where they will be always told what to do and feel and think. Free will has been the greatest casualty.
• ECONOMIC: As with all tribal-targeted government schemes, SJ camps have given birth to their own peculiar industry. Tens of millions of rupees spent daily by the state-exchequer to provide housing, food, health-care and schooling to the over 70,000 tribals is being siphoned off by a clique of middlemen, in cohorts with their bureaucratic and political patrons. Put simply, it is not in their interest to wind-up such an enormously lucrative & profitable business.

At the risk of validating some of the more discredited inferences of Social Darwinism, it appears that institutions, more so bureaucratic-systems, evolve their own peculiar bases for survival, which grow increasingly divorced from the purposes- objectives, goals- for which they had been established in the first place. Evidently, the same now holds true for SJ ‘base-camps’: protection of tribal-life has become secondary to the above-mentioned factors that are now fodder for their monstrous, parasitic existence.

Be that as it may, in the ultimate cost-benefit analysis, the costs of keeping SJ alive far outweigh the so-called benefits (unless of course, tribal-life doesn’t count as cost). Monies and resources allocated for the subsistence of camp-inmates is being systematically siphoned-off (already reports are filtering in about famine-like conditions in Dornapal, the largest of the six concentration camps); instances of gross abuse of power by SPOs (Special Police Officers)- recruited mostly from among surrendering-Maoists and armed with an almost blanket ‘license to kill’- are growing more rampant; censorship, as espoused in paragraph (10) of the ‘Pisda-proposal’ and now enshrined in the draconian Chhattisgarh Public Safety (Special) Act, explicitly prohibits the media from telling the truth, even as certain journalists more critical of government-policy have begun to be personally harassed under its new provisions; total ineffectiveness of the armed-forces, many of who haven’t even joined their posts, and the intelligence-infrastructure, in protecting tribal-life, has become only too evident in Darbaguda, Devarpalli and Errabore; Brigadier Ponwar’s ‘guerillas’ and Naga-battalions continue to be confined to roadside ‘base-camps’, and plans for a coordinated counter-offensive are sketchy, at best; and most disturbingly, the fact that SJ has vertically split a formerly harmonious tribal society, especially between the Gothikoyas seen as pro-Maoists and the Koyas and Dorlas, who constitute a majority of the camp population, resulting in tribe v tribe warfare that might well last across generations.

Not surprisingly, the state Home Minister, DGP, LOP, and the three-member CWC delegation, to mention a few, were gheraoed by angry protestors at almost every district, block, village from Raipur to Errabore- Mandir Hasaod, Kurud, Dhamtari, Charama, Kanker, Keskal, Kondagaon, Jagdalpur, among others- demanding an immediate closure of SJ. Lamentably, the delegation’s progress to Errabore was halted at Jagdalpur because of the state police administration’s expressed inability to guarantee its protection. Editorialists- most powerfully in the form of a Nishant Hota-caricature depicting a human skeleton sitting in a dharna, with the caption “so long as the sun and moon remain, SJ will live” (Navbharat, 18.06.2006)- have unequivocally joined in this statewide denunciation, reflected in the total response to the Congress’ call for a ‘Chhattisgarh bandh’ on 22nd July, five days after Errabore. Yet, for some reason it appears that this almost universal popular demand for putting a stop to SJ isn’t having any impact on the leadership: the DGP, if a widely-circulated SMS is to be believed, nonchalantly proclaims that ‘such incidents are bound to happen’; both the Chief Minister and the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs (MHA) announce unconditional support to Mr. Karma’s movement; and most surprisingly, the PCC President has, in the aftermath of Errabore, arguably SJ’s greatest failure, extended his ‘moral’ support to it, preempting even his national President, who continues to await the report of the 3-member CWC delegation before taking a final view on the matter.

The almost-Utopian fact that the state-sponsored movement is led by the state’s Leader of Opposition (LOP) seems to be indicative of an apparent bipartisanship, but it is a solidarity forged at the very top levels (MHA, state PHQ and CM, and the Congress LOP), with the elected-representatives- of both major parties- having little or no say. In many ways, this vertical unity among the political leadership signifies much more disturbing horizontal splits operative at multiple-levels: between the tribes of Dantewada & the local district-administration; the Congress Legislative Party (CLP) & its leader; BJP MLAs and MPs & the state government; and of course, between the people of the state, including the intelligentsia, & their governments. Post-Errabore, these voices of dissent- of which my father’s is only one- are finally beginning to be heard.

There is of course another more obvious reason why it is becoming increasingly difficult for governments- both the state as well as the Union- to heed to these voices: wouldn’t a closure of camps signify a victory for the extremists, who are presently engaged in an existential fight, and even more shamefully, the defeat of the nation-state itself? The thing about politicians, irrespective of party-affiliations, is that its one thing for them to be wrong and totally another to admit to being in the wrong. It takes a statesman to make that sort of leap: Mahatma Gandhi did it when he called off his movements, not once but twice: the Non-cooperation after Chouri-Chaura, and the Civil Disobedience before accepting Lord Irwin’s invitation to participate in the Second Round Table Conference. Errabore, in my opinion, is SJ’s Chouri-Chaura; now, what is required is the invitation- both to the tribals as well the Maoists- to participate.

My father has suggested that should the current trajectory of failures continue unabated, it might well warrant the imposition of the dreaded Article 356. I have often wondered what is the 'brink-point', to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term, at which the imposition of this anti-federal provision can be justified in the name of national-unity: what measure of anarchy (lawlessness) validates President's Rule? Personally, I believe that what’s happened in Errabore doesn't necessitate dismissal; yet, it would also be wrong not to take the government to task for its shameful breach of faith: what reason other than protection of life was there for the often-forceful eviction of over 70,000 tribals from homes they had lived on for thousands of years? Infact, given the state BJP government's failure to protect tribal-life, the time has come for the Congress, as the principal party in opposition, to distance itself from this lamentable human-tragedy. Frankly, if it doesn't, it would have failed in its moral duty as the state's Opposition.

The other solution- something which the CLP including its leader have demanded- is the CM’s resignation. There are those of course who suggest that Dr. Singh ought not to resign, and yet be held accountable in some way. Are they suggesting we spank him? I beg to differ. Very recently, I had a fairly extensive discussion with members of a non-political tribal organization. There was an overwhelming feeling among them that the principal reason why incidents like Errabore, Darbaguda and Devarpalli are becoming rampant is quite simply because despite 30 of the 51 BJP MLAs being tribals, they don't have much say in either the state government or the party organization. This has been confirmed, off-the-record of course, by some prominent BJP MLAs including one or two ministers. Infact, the Bastar MLAs- those belonging to the BJP- feel that more often than not, they end up playing second fiddle to the Congress LOP-cum-SJ leader. I'm sure that this is not entirely correct. Still, in public life, it is the perception of the thing rather than the thing itself that matters. To illustrate further, the belated response of the CM in personally going to comfort those who have lost their loved ones at Errabore is in sharp contrast to what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai bombings: is this because tribal-life isn't quite as important as Mumbaikar-life? That's one of the inferences being drawn, anyway. It is in this limited context that the demand for this CM’s resignation is justifiable: not so much for what he has done as for what he has not done. Perhaps, the time has really come to let someone who is, or at least appears to be, more sensitive to the sentiments of the tribals- this government’s biggest support-block in the Vidhan Sabha- takeover?

In my opinion, the solution- any solution- has to be three-pronged: one, surgical counter-strikes against Maoists, for which the state-machinery will have to strengthen manifold its intelligence-infrastructure; two, more roads, schools, hospitals, irrigation, industry, electricity, even internet, in tribal areas, for which the 1980 environmental-legislations (Forest Protection & Wildlife Conservation Acts) will have to be replaced pronto with the Tribal Bill, now pending before Parliament; and three, the 'Prachanda-solution', for which it is necessary to bring something- a lot more- to the table in order to get Maoist leaders involved in the political process. Quite simply, there is no other option. But what needs to be done immediately is to stop SJ: enough tribal-blood has been spilt for this madness to continue.

Needless to say, stopping SJ will only be the first step in what I hope will be a long-overdue reconciliation process, aimed at restoring the faith of tribals in the democratic state.
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NAXALISM: (E) In Response to Eminent Journalists

Note: This article was translated into Hindi and published in HARIBHOOMI (10.07.2006)


At the risk of subjecting their reportage to falsification, Mr. Sunil Kumar, Mr. Ramesh Nayyar et al have been more honest than they should have about their visit to Dornapal camp: (1) the Chief Minister, no less, asked them to visit the camp-site and report about it; (2) consequently, they were, individually as well as collectively, taken there, in 'Maina', the state-helicopter christened ironically after that loquacious mimic of his/her-master's-voice: the Bastar Maina; and (3) their interaction with camp-inmates was supervised directly by the twin-heads of the local district administration. Clearly, the state government took more than the requisite precautions to ensure that these eminent journalists saw exactly what it wanted them to see: that tribals have taken refuge in state-run gulags to fight- or more likely, flee from- Maoist violence. Be that as it may, certain discrepancies continue to disturb me:

(1) History- indeed biology- speaks of evolution as punctuated. It takes a catastrophe of astronomical proportions to force an entire people out of homelands they have lived on for thousands of years. This would apply more to tribals, who- because of the peculiar symbiotic interdependence they have with their habitats- tend to think of land as 'Mother'. As things stand, there is no record- proof, report, statistic- of any such incident(s) which could have forced tribals into the illusory safety of makeshift camps. Infact, evidence paints a contrary picture: SJ has led to a geometric rise in tribal casualties; not vice-versa. If anything, the chances of tribals being abducted, blasted or shot-dead in villages was far less in the pre-SJ days. The fact of collaterality between the conception of SJ- as outlined in Mr Pisda's 'proposal for a people's movement against naxalites'- and the change of government at Raipur provides a much more plausible explanation for its 'spontaneous' emergence.

(2) No spontaneous movement has a prior blueprint. The Pisda-proposal, as mentioned above, preceded SJ. This document- and the date on it- is a dead giveaway. Infact, it has taken total state involvement- the wholesale committing of its resources at multiple levels- to sustain the so-called movement on a day-to-day basis. Also, unlike other 'spontaneous people's movements', SJ has failed to produce its leaders. A pre-existing leadership has been grafted over it, again with full state-backing. Without this continuous state-backing required now in increasing proportions, this leadership would be washed out in less than a day. One need only compare the SJ leader's election-result from his assembly segment during VS (November 2003) with that of LS (March 2004): in barely four months time, he went from a lead of about 5000 to a loss of over 17000.

(3) Further sustenance of SJ is based on its own three-fold logic, and has nothing to do with tribal-interests:
(a) POLITICAL: Come election-time, and there will be no polling stations in evacuated villages. Instead they will be set-up well within the guarded perimeter of these 6-7 concentration camps. And it doesn't take a psephologist to predict the electoral outcome under such 'free, fair and impartial' conditions. Does it? Think about it. Had elections been 'conducted' in Auschwitz, wouldn't the National Socialists (Nazis) have swept the polls? Thankfully, unlike der Fuhrer- who didn't consider his refugees worthy of the vote- this regime views the tribals as- and only as- a Votebank. And SJ, as it happens, is the surest way to encash this votebank en block.
(b) CULTURAL: Concentration of vast tribal populations in the controlled environment of camps provides an easy assembly-line for the Sangh troika and its affiliates to work overtime in order to factory-produce indoctrinated specimens: a people repeatedly told that they are worshipping 'false' gods, eating 'polluted' foods, following 'promiscous' practices and 'anachronistic' customs; and systematically made to feel ashamed about their (former) 'primitive and barbaric' way of life; thus slowly but surely falling in line with the (pseudo-)'hindutva' pogrom of the RSS. Much more than the geopolitical displacement, it is this sense of 'cultural displacement', which will come from living in camps, that worries me. Henceforth, camp-refugees will be permanently scarred by a false sense of 'inferiority-complex', and adapted to a type of doggish existence where they will be always told what to do and feel and think. Free-will has been the greatest casualty.
(c) ECONOMIC: As with all tribal-targetted government schemes, SJ camps have given birth to their own peculiar industry. Tens of millions of rupees spent daily by the state-exchequer to provide housing, food, health-care and schooling to the over 70,000 tribals is being siphoned off by a clique of middlemen and their bureaucratic and political patrons. Put simply, it is not in their interest to wind-up such an enormously lucrative & profitable business.

(4) The fourth problem with SJ is that it puts LWE squarely within the bracket of a 'law & order' problem. Its socio-economic component is not so much washed-away as it is wished-away. A rather convenient way for the state to get rid of its guilt in having fostered the problem in the first place: it was, after all, due to abject apathy on the part of the welfare-state that Maoists found such eager receptacles among tribals for their cause to overthrow that very state. Be that as it may, the fact is that the 'law and order' component deals merely with LWE's symptom; the cause- which is necessarily socio-economic- is totally overlooked. What is needed, therefore, to overcome the LWE challenge is not more guns, more helicopters, more bombs, more forces and more bullets but instead more roads, more schools, more electricity, more irrigation, more primacy health care centers, more industry and more internet. Provide the latter and by God, there wouldn't be much use for the former. To enable this, we need to replace double-quick the two environment legislations of 1980 with the Tribal Act (now pending before Parliament), thereby making tribals masters of their homelands once again, and guaranteeing- again by means of a separate legislation, if need be- that a minimum proportion of tribals find gainful employment in each of the sectors in all industries/businesses that have been- and will be- set-up in this region.

(5) Any 'final solution' has to be political. Comrade Prachanda has shown the way in Nepal; and it would be best if his Indian counterparts in Vizag follow suit. India can not- and will not- compromise on what Pandit Nehru described as the first of the 'non-negotiables': the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of the nation. So, the CRZ- 'red corridor' or whatever it is called- has got to be totally ruled out. What should instead be put on the cards is incorporating- through constitutional means- the Maoists in what Khilnani has described as Humanity's third and greatest experiment ever: the colorful pagaentry of Indian Democracy. To accomplish this, governments will have to bring a lot more to the table.

(6) One more thing before I part, living in far-off urban centres, it is only too easy to view tribal casualties as an unfortunate statistic. Every so often, the human 'angle' of the unfolding tragedy is forgotten. That needs to change. SJ is a movement run from Delhi and Raipur; the people of Bastar have had very little to do with it. To put a stop to this madness, it is necessary for the people of these cities- especially those who are in a position to take decisions- to be sensitized about this aspect.

(7) Popular media has a choice: either it can be reduced to Noam Chomsky's 'bludgeon of democracy', seeing and saying what the state wants it to see and speak about (something this state government has ensured through the Chhattisgarh Public Safety Special Act); or it can give voice to a people who have been silenced long before the bullets and the bombs ever will be.

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