EK CUP CHAI

I was thirteen or fourteen when I happened to talk to a group of naxalites! Yep, naxalites! I was visiting a marriage of a political figure of a very remote village! They had come to collect food! As I worked out sitting alone in a white ambassador car, working out Hindu crossword (stylishly, though I couldn’t fill one correct word), somebody came to the window.

Call it a typical teenage innocence or arrogance, I wasn’t afraid nor was I excited…it was just another bunch of villagers asking me questions. Of course I recognized them; there was lot of naxalite movement then in that region, and DD and newspapers were full of encounters! All of them had some guns (which I thought were AK-47s then) and they all looked normal (this normal look is what surprised me).

The questions they asked me included were about my parents, about who came in the car, and why was I alone. One of them also asked me whether I would join their group when I grew up. I said I wouldn’t and quoted a reason, showing that in their fight, only normal people suffered (fresh from viewing a movie called ‘Police Encounter’ on TV)! They tried to tell me what is that they aimed, and looked and sounded happy about it!
It was a funny meeting, and the meeting abruptly ended after I was ‘carefully’ taken back by one of the marriage party members! As soon as they left my family, along with an Officer drove out of the village as fast as we could. I only realized the seriousness of the issue as we drove away!

Almost ten years later, working with Revenue Department, I happened to witness the failure of group called Maoists (or naxalists)! Leaders who mattered were killed, and those who didn’t were drove away. Even villagers wouldn’t respect naxals, and these low cadre naxals didn’t even have enough food to eat!

Governments has promised loans, and other benefits for those who left the movement! Few would give me their petitions, when no one took them, to meet the District Collector! Sometimes people around me asked why they joined the movement – the answers were most times silly, some talked about caste discrimination, some talked about promise of food(!) and some didn’t like to discuss.

Dissatisfaction in the society and how it worked made them join the movement. Today the movement is no better than the society. Some say that is it run by the high funda politicians who use the movement as a force to gain money in the name of anti-naxal movements!

The State Police had rounded up a meeting of very important Government of Andhra Pradesh could have killed the most important member of the group, the Government backed off for some strange reason!

As the Maoist movement slowly dies, there are still some incidents of a fake encounters or of innocent people being killed by Maoists. But then, Chhattisgarh Director General of Police, O.P. Rathor, said in a Conference, “Statistics of incidents never give a real picture of the ground. Whatever is visible is only the mere tip of the iceberg. Unless caution is exercised, volcanoes can erupt.”

It looks as bleaker as the future of an Indian farmer. You never know when he will kill someone big or when he will kill himself! But one wonders if naxalite movement holds any importance in a country like India! Lets hope there is no more killing, and no more fake encounters.

But “how did these normal looking people turn maoists?”, is a question which neither the leaders of their groups or political groups would like to answer!