REVIEW: RED SUN: TRAVELS IN NAXALITE COUNTRY (SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI)

         

 There is an old saying, ‘Do not judge a book by its cover’, and a later perhaps humorous addition, ‘Judge it by its title’. The title of a book is meant to be short, succinct, revealing without giving away much, interesting without developing too much infatuation and, while ensuring that the reader finds it sufficiently invigorating, be general enough so that every theme explored in the book can relate to it and specific enough so that other books in the same genre are excluded from its ambit. The title of this book confirms to these above characteristics and as the dictum goes, ‘Well begun is half done’, much more information is to be gleamed by analyzing the title. The ‘red sun’, a phenomenon of tremendous historical significance, is examined in two situations described below, to gain an understanding of its usage in the title of this book.

            The first is in the context of the bombing of Hiroshima. It was a day like any other for the people of the quaint little city of Hiroshima on the east coast of Japan. A busy morning, the employed going to work, the unemployed lazing around, milling about, the children going to school, teenagers waking up to bad hangovers, in short a routine morning. What happened next is as they say history. A streak of white in the sky, a B-29 dropping its lethal payload, the nuclear weapon streaking towards the ground, explosion, the trademark mushroom cloud, mayhem, severed limbs, fires, chaos, dead bodies. After this act of terror, darkness and abject misery, nature treated the survivors the next morning to an awe inspiring sight. A red sun shone in the heavens, mocking them, tantalizing them, welcoming them to the beginning of a new age. This red sun, quite possibly a result of the unsettled debris in the aftermath of the explosion was first reported being seen, years ago, in AD 79 when a volcano, Mt. Vesuvius in Italy erupted, burying sixteen thousand people and the towns of Pompeii and Herculeaneum under tons of ash and rubble. This volcano destroyed everything from homes and cattle and changed the geography of land, thus forcing the survivors to re group and rebuilt. Born under circumstances such as these, the red sun has come to represent the dawn of a new world, a world that has liberated itself from the shackles of its past by a powerful force. This book traces the development of such a force, a force based on a belief so potent that when the common people embrace it and the rulers shun it, sparks fly, violence ensures and governments are toppled by a bloody revolution, and this belief being at the core of the Naxal ideology, makes it an apt title for the book.

            The provoking subtitle: ‘Travels in Naxalite Country’, (underscore country), is meant to do just that, shock people out of their everyday routine lives in which Naxals are seldom discussed, their literature seldom studied, and counter measures seldom taken. Identifying and recognizing their sphere of existence as a country, a bubble that every so often interacts with our own bubble, and when this happens there are heated discussions over ideologies in universities, isolated acts of violence in forgotten little villages, counter maoist operations in lush-green, serene forests, but as it happens once in a while, the thin veneer of separating layer between the two layers bursts, spilling their world into ours, their world of anger, oppression, neglect and under-development into ours of well to do, soap watching, law citing, democratic citizens with high disposable incomes, low violence levels and even lower sense of political responsibility. When this happens, riots break out, ammo flows like water, ugly mass killings take place, news channels shriek out statistics, politicians give long speeches, and newspapers are painted red with the news of the dead. Then there comes a lull in Naxal activities, they return to the gloomy depths of the tropical forests, their perennial hideouts, news channels find other issues to shriek about, newspapers move to matters of celebrities, sports and government scams, all is forgotten, Zindagi Migzara, life goes on. This pre-2004 phase of the Naxal movement is outlined beautifully through a collection of news articles, selected to absorb the reader’s attention, horrific tales of violence to scare him, eye witness accounts of brutality faced by the adivasis, the tribal people when made to choose between the law protected, democracy preaching police and the AK-47 wielding, Maoism preaching Naxalites. Damned if they do doomed if they don’t. As one character in the book puts it, ‘The war is between the government and the naxals, the adivasis just happened to get caught in the cross-fire’.

            The post-2004 scenario, the post merger (formation of CPI-M) period is earmarked by an increase in violence, spread of Naxalism to hereto safe places, creation of new guerilla zones, and this being the time period in which a part of the travel is based, the story takes on the characteristics of a thriller. Description of journey to different remote areas, absence of mobile network, the perennial rickety red bus, pot holed village roads, and the omnipresent chaiwala transport the reader into the prejudiced, pristine, virgin, undeveloped Indian village, and then the introduction of Naxalism in the background, the ever present fear, palpable tensions, threats of violence, yank him out of his daydream and implore him to pay heed.

            This travelogue, written by Sudeep Chakravarti, a journalist, consists of five books, every book has a theme and the chapters in each book develop on this theme. Little digressions from the theme are forgivable because they add a unique flavor whenever the story starts getting a little drab. Written in the first person, it allows the reader to re live the author’s travels, inspect firsthand the lives of naxals, appreciate and perhaps sympathize with them. That said, the first person account gets a bit tedious at times, and this combined with the need to preserve the identity of those involved,(The author’s naming scheme: A,B,W,X and so on) leaves the reader wondering, “Did A live in Delhi, or was it B? Perhaps it was W”.  This need to preserve identity takes us to the question of authenticity. To grant credibility to his story and to prove that A, B, X and others are not the figments of his imagination, the author gives information about their work, a little of their background history, a little of his relationship with them, just enough to pass them as bonafide gentlemen/ wimmin but not enough to reveal their identity.

            The account (all the five books) in general has two broad themes running in parallel, the travels in the foreground and the approximately forty year history of Naxalism in the background. Both themes are taken forward by interviews with government officials, naxal leaders and people with various capacities serving in other relevant positions. These themes merge together in interviews with veterans of the movement, Kanu Sanyal, the founder of CPI-ML, people who have fought against them, B.K.S. Ray, Additional Chief Secretary (Home), government of Chhattisgarh and others, and are flung apart when the reader is introduced to reviews of newspaper articles. This intermixing of the two themes has an effect of transporting the reader across time to gain an understanding of various disjoint events, all of which when combined, present a bird’s eye view, the big picture of the entire situation. This realization comes out quite exquisitely thanks to this specific style of writing. The pros and cons of both sides are brought out. The development activities undertaken by the government, passing of various schemes, the corrupt delivery system are compared to the development activities undertaken by the Naxalites, conducting lok-adalats for providing swift justice, abolishing liquor, bringing in other social reforms. Use of violence by naxals to kill the police, by the police to kill naxals, by the Salwa-Judum (a village protection council, comprising of armed tribals, legalized by the government) to kill naxals and by all the three to torture and kill adivasis for revenge, information or to just make a point in a state of anger and helplessness is depicted. The conflict of interests many officials face, both in the government and naxal ranks, arresting childhood friends who are naxals, killing innocent villagers suspected of being police informers just to send across a message of terror, using police force to stop adivasis from taking back their forest, total up the real picture this book presents. This dilemma, all these questions of right and wrong, violence and non-violence, reforms and revolution, democracy and socialism are summed up in this moving confession, in one of those rare moments in which a person’s words reflect his traumatized heart, all the pretense and rationalization washed away, Mr.M, talking to the author about the problems faced due to corrupt ministers, MLAs and deceitful government officials says, “These Naxal chaps, they break the law, for which I will fight them and kill them. But they are fighting for the right things. Isn’t it?”

            As we near the deadline set by the United Nations Development Program for realizing the millennium development goals (widely accepted as reasonable social indicators), we are nowhere close to fulfilling them. This combined with the increasing demographic dividend, increasing awareness and widespread unrest over government policies will decrease general satisfaction, increase unemployment and subsequently attract youth to Naxalism with its cult status, swift violent judgment, romantic ideals and a promise of revolution. In times like these, the value of books like this, that talk to your heart, impartially, giving facts, both sides of the coin, allowing you to choose, to make a decision, cannot be underestimated. I do not make a claim that reading this book will teach you most of what there is to know about naxalism, but just that every person needs some place to start from, some book as a base over and above which specialization can be acquired, and for that purpose this book is the best.