Inside Abujmarh The Mythic Citadel
Abujmarh was portrayed as the military HQ of the deadly Maoist insurgency. After an arduous week-long trip, Tusha Mittal discovers a totally different picture
In a world precision-mapped to an inch by Google and GPS, in a world where men have scaled the highest peak and dived in personalised submarines to its depths, it is difficult to imagine a place that has any mystery for the contemporary imagination. But until barely a few weeks ago, Abujmarh - the almost mythic citadel of the banned CPI (Maoist) in India - was such a place. For decades, no one from ‘mainstream’ India had ever been inside the forbidden grove: 6,000 sq km of forest, sudden streams and surging mountains. In that time, Abujmarh - which means “the unknown hills” in Gondi - had swelled in people’s minds into a place imbued with both fascination and dread. Be it the State, paramilitary forces, social activists or even seasoned journalists doing the conflict beat, everyone was accustomed to point in its general direction and speak of it in whispered tones. No one knew what to expect there. It was India’s only fully “liberated zone”. A place where the ‘writ’ of the State had ceased to exist altogether and the reign of the Maoists had begun.
So deep was the fear of the unknown that when the Indian forces stormed Abujmarh on 15 March in an assault codenamed Operation Hakka, they went in with sophisticated weapons like Swedish Carl Gustav rocket launchers and under-barrel grenade launchers. For several months before, the forces had sent drones to fly over the mountains and bring back satellite images. The dark patches in the hills that the machines brought back, they took to be armed fortifications and trenches: a citadel worthy of India’s “greatest internal security threat”.
It is a measure of both the complexity and the bathos of the Maoist-tribal crisis in India — and the inadequate narrative that has built up around it — that when Operation Hakka actually got off the ground, and the troops entered the great unknown, what they found in Abujmarh was not the military HQ of a deadly and well-organised insurgency but scraggly villages and forlorn clusters of leaf and bamboo huts. Their biggest recovery seems to have been an inkjet printer. “We had 13 encounters with vardiwale Naxal,” says Narayanpur SP Mayank Srivastav. In one, “a Naxal running away with a laptop” was possibly injured. “We could not get the laptop but we got the printer.
Both The Indian Express and The Hindustan Times, which reported the forces’ official account of entering Abujmarh some weeks ago, mentioned this contrast between expectation and reality. But it is not the irony of their misplaced idea of Abujmarh that seemed to have caught the forces’ attention. It is the psychological victory of having entered it. “Our most significant achievement is that we have reached a stage where we can deploy 3,000 troops and prepare them so well that they can return unharmed,” says TG Longkumer, Bastar IG. “There was a time when we lost 76 jawans in an encounter. We have grown since then. We are more secure now. We felt ready for such a challenge. There was always a view that the forces can’t enter this area. It was very important to dispel it. We wanted to break the myth of Abujmarh.”
But if the old bogey of an impenetrable military fortress is replaced only by a monochromatic idea of frail and helpless villages, the myth of Abujmarh will not have been broken: it will only have been replaced. The ambiguous story of the Maoist insurgency and India’s tribal crisis cannot be understood properly unless Abujmarh is really breached the way it needs to be: with layered understanding. For the truth is, Abujmarh is as much a physical place as a state of mind, a shifting line, a struggle for “area domination” between contesting stories. As Dada, a Maoist area commander in Abujmarh, says to TEHELKA, “We do not have a fixed military base. We carry everything on our shoulders. Wherever the party goes, that becomes our stronghold.” Where then is Abujmarh really?..
...Writing from the conflict zones of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Bengal, we have critiqued the Indian State; documented human rights violations; denounced the unjust takeover of tribal land and national resources and vociferously defended the right to dissent. We have also written of the plight of CRPF jawans, pushed into a deadly guerrilla war with inadequate preparation and battle-worthiness. But Abujmarh is proof — if proof were needed — that the Maoists have a lot to answer for as well. They may have catalysed attention to many right and just causes — and it is difficult for even their most bitter critics to grant them that — but clearly, in their own strongholds, they are replicating exactly that which they say they are combating...
For all its mythic reputation, villagers say that until 15 years ago, local thana police were seen at the fringes of Abujmarh. A village called Kokameta possibly had a police station and a government high school. It is only in the past decade that the party’s influence has spread. In areas we visited, people recall that in 2001, the Maoists first installed their own village head in a village called Iraqbhatti in Kachhapal panchayat. Three years later, they called their first meeting in the area. Villagers were mandated to attend. In effect, the Maoists’ area dominance of the Abujmarh story is only 10 years old. The Indian State had a 50 year head start. Why did it fail? In the final count then, Abujmarh is not an impregnable fortress. Nor is it merely an innocent landscape of flimsy huts and primeval people. It is most essentially a rebuke for Indian democracy. The real tragedy of the Maoist crisis is that it has been reduced to a competition of equally false stories. Stranded in the middle is an ancient people. Their fight is not about who will control Red Fort in some distant future. Their fight is about the patch of land they stand on and the dignity of the self-owned reed hut behind them..
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Ne120512Coverstory.asp
The two TEHELKA journalists who investigated this story lie in hospital. Tusha Mittal, principal correspondent, is recovering from high fever and severe stomach infection. Tarun Sehrawat, the photographer, is lying comatose in intensive care.
See also: The Outcastes of a Liberated Zone
In Abhujmaad, the choice Maoists offer is stark: confinement or exile
And: On Maoists, Capitalists and Communists
Normal logic suggests that business requires peace to flourish. However, the history of business in most of the mineral rich areas of the third world tell a different story - It is actually in the interest of the business to have an atmosphere of violence. The business of mineral or fossil fuel extraction actually thrives in a communally and ethnically vitiated environment. When the natives are busy fighting each other and when the focus of entire nation is fixated on violence, the multinational companies (largely from the west) quietly extract minerals. A very recent case is that of Iraq that lost one million people and most of its infrastructure just to make sure that Halliburton and its ilk could extract oil in tranquility...The 'maximum force aficionados', that include aggressive TV anchors, retired generals and terrorism experts who repeatedly assert the "inevitability of muscular and violent statecraft" are actually aiding the designs of all those who want large portions of central India to get entrapped in a perpetual cycle of violence.
In a world precision-mapped to an inch by Google and GPS, in a world where men have scaled the highest peak and dived in personalised submarines to its depths, it is difficult to imagine a place that has any mystery for the contemporary imagination. But until barely a few weeks ago, Abujmarh - the almost mythic citadel of the banned CPI (Maoist) in India - was such a place. For decades, no one from ‘mainstream’ India had ever been inside the forbidden grove: 6,000 sq km of forest, sudden streams and surging mountains. In that time, Abujmarh - which means “the unknown hills” in Gondi - had swelled in people’s minds into a place imbued with both fascination and dread. Be it the State, paramilitary forces, social activists or even seasoned journalists doing the conflict beat, everyone was accustomed to point in its general direction and speak of it in whispered tones. No one knew what to expect there. It was India’s only fully “liberated zone”. A place where the ‘writ’ of the State had ceased to exist altogether and the reign of the Maoists had begun.
So deep was the fear of the unknown that when the Indian forces stormed Abujmarh on 15 March in an assault codenamed Operation Hakka, they went in with sophisticated weapons like Swedish Carl Gustav rocket launchers and under-barrel grenade launchers. For several months before, the forces had sent drones to fly over the mountains and bring back satellite images. The dark patches in the hills that the machines brought back, they took to be armed fortifications and trenches: a citadel worthy of India’s “greatest internal security threat”.
It is a measure of both the complexity and the bathos of the Maoist-tribal crisis in India — and the inadequate narrative that has built up around it — that when Operation Hakka actually got off the ground, and the troops entered the great unknown, what they found in Abujmarh was not the military HQ of a deadly and well-organised insurgency but scraggly villages and forlorn clusters of leaf and bamboo huts. Their biggest recovery seems to have been an inkjet printer. “We had 13 encounters with vardiwale Naxal,” says Narayanpur SP Mayank Srivastav. In one, “a Naxal running away with a laptop” was possibly injured. “We could not get the laptop but we got the printer.
Both The Indian Express and The Hindustan Times, which reported the forces’ official account of entering Abujmarh some weeks ago, mentioned this contrast between expectation and reality. But it is not the irony of their misplaced idea of Abujmarh that seemed to have caught the forces’ attention. It is the psychological victory of having entered it. “Our most significant achievement is that we have reached a stage where we can deploy 3,000 troops and prepare them so well that they can return unharmed,” says TG Longkumer, Bastar IG. “There was a time when we lost 76 jawans in an encounter. We have grown since then. We are more secure now. We felt ready for such a challenge. There was always a view that the forces can’t enter this area. It was very important to dispel it. We wanted to break the myth of Abujmarh.”
But if the old bogey of an impenetrable military fortress is replaced only by a monochromatic idea of frail and helpless villages, the myth of Abujmarh will not have been broken: it will only have been replaced. The ambiguous story of the Maoist insurgency and India’s tribal crisis cannot be understood properly unless Abujmarh is really breached the way it needs to be: with layered understanding. For the truth is, Abujmarh is as much a physical place as a state of mind, a shifting line, a struggle for “area domination” between contesting stories. As Dada, a Maoist area commander in Abujmarh, says to TEHELKA, “We do not have a fixed military base. We carry everything on our shoulders. Wherever the party goes, that becomes our stronghold.” Where then is Abujmarh really?..
...Writing from the conflict zones of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Bengal, we have critiqued the Indian State; documented human rights violations; denounced the unjust takeover of tribal land and national resources and vociferously defended the right to dissent. We have also written of the plight of CRPF jawans, pushed into a deadly guerrilla war with inadequate preparation and battle-worthiness. But Abujmarh is proof — if proof were needed — that the Maoists have a lot to answer for as well. They may have catalysed attention to many right and just causes — and it is difficult for even their most bitter critics to grant them that — but clearly, in their own strongholds, they are replicating exactly that which they say they are combating...
For all its mythic reputation, villagers say that until 15 years ago, local thana police were seen at the fringes of Abujmarh. A village called Kokameta possibly had a police station and a government high school. It is only in the past decade that the party’s influence has spread. In areas we visited, people recall that in 2001, the Maoists first installed their own village head in a village called Iraqbhatti in Kachhapal panchayat. Three years later, they called their first meeting in the area. Villagers were mandated to attend. In effect, the Maoists’ area dominance of the Abujmarh story is only 10 years old. The Indian State had a 50 year head start. Why did it fail? In the final count then, Abujmarh is not an impregnable fortress. Nor is it merely an innocent landscape of flimsy huts and primeval people. It is most essentially a rebuke for Indian democracy. The real tragedy of the Maoist crisis is that it has been reduced to a competition of equally false stories. Stranded in the middle is an ancient people. Their fight is not about who will control Red Fort in some distant future. Their fight is about the patch of land they stand on and the dignity of the self-owned reed hut behind them..
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Ne120512Coverstory.asp
The two TEHELKA journalists who investigated this story lie in hospital. Tusha Mittal, principal correspondent, is recovering from high fever and severe stomach infection. Tarun Sehrawat, the photographer, is lying comatose in intensive care.
See also: The Outcastes of a Liberated Zone
In Abhujmaad, the choice Maoists offer is stark: confinement or exile
And: On Maoists, Capitalists and Communists
Normal logic suggests that business requires peace to flourish. However, the history of business in most of the mineral rich areas of the third world tell a different story - It is actually in the interest of the business to have an atmosphere of violence. The business of mineral or fossil fuel extraction actually thrives in a communally and ethnically vitiated environment. When the natives are busy fighting each other and when the focus of entire nation is fixated on violence, the multinational companies (largely from the west) quietly extract minerals. A very recent case is that of Iraq that lost one million people and most of its infrastructure just to make sure that Halliburton and its ilk could extract oil in tranquility...The 'maximum force aficionados', that include aggressive TV anchors, retired generals and terrorism experts who repeatedly assert the "inevitability of muscular and violent statecraft" are actually aiding the designs of all those who want large portions of central India to get entrapped in a perpetual cycle of violence.
