In this column we will be featuring the writings by award winning women journalists in India found in the collection of the book ‘Making News Breaking News Her Way. It is a publication by Tranquebar Press in association with Media Foundation, New Delhi which instituted the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1980.
Rupashree Nanda
Jangal mahal: the twilight zone
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n a warm June night we were asleep on the terrace of an incomplete building in Rameswarpur village in Jangal Mahal, West Bengal. We were there to cover the escalating tension between the Maoists and the central and local administrations. As bodies piled up on all sides, questions were raised both about the violent means of the Maoists and the feasibility of government strategy. Access to this conflict-zone was almost nonexistent and we had managed to get in after trying to establish contact for nearly two years. Suddenly, someone nudged me hard and shouted in my ear, ‘Rupashree, get up, the joint forces are here.’ My team and I rushed down the stairs and, within minutes, we were at the tea shop strategically located at the entrance to the village. We saw villagers, bare- bodied, barefoot and afraid, fleeing their homes towards the forest.
It wasn’t yet five in the morning but the joint forces or Jotto Bahini, as the villagers called them, had already thrown a ring around Rameswarpur. This was the search-and-cordon operation we had heard about in Shalboni. Snigdhendhu, the reporter from Hindustan Times, and I started walking towards the jawans of the lotto Bahini. But, before we could reach them, a senior officer who, we learned later, was leading the operation, appeared on the main mud path cutting across the paddy fields.‘Is this Mathurapur?’ he asked us.
‘No, this is Rameswarpur,’ I said.
‘We have information about Maoist training camps for children in Mathurapur and have come to investigate,’ he said.
That was news to us. Like any reporter eager for a shred of information, we rained the officer with questions, but he gave no answer. I asked if he would give us a byte. He replied, ‘We will take you to the Pirakata camp, madam, and we will give you a good byte and breakfast!’
In Shalboni, the nights were marked by intermittent sounds of gunshots and bombs. The ground beneath one’s feet constantly shifted. One moment, one could see people building a community tank, and the next, a trial being conducted in a Jana Adalat, or people’s court.
The previous day, we were at a village some distance away from Bada Kalshibhanga. Dusk was falling and it had started to drizzle. Almost four hundred villagers, half of them women with lathis, gathered at a field outside the village. The focus of all eyes was Sricharan Chalak who, with hands tied behind his back, sat on a bamboo, his head bowed, looking miserable in his tattered clothes and bloodied, swollen lips. A prisoner of the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities or the PCPA, he was accused of being a member ofBuddho Babu’s Harmad- PCPA’s name for the CPM’s (Communist Party of India- Marxist) armed cadre. A man, his face covered with a thin green towel declared, ‘We have caught a doshi. He joined the Harmad, bumt our villages, and gave information to the police. The Jana Gana will judge him today.’ Soon, villagers started hurling questions at him.
Jana Gana: How much did they pay you? Rs 25,000? For that? To destroy your own people?
Sricharan Chalak: No …no …
Jana Gana: Tell us what happened in Basaguda?
Sricharan Chalak: I went there, we found a dead body, we burnt it. Give me whatever punishment; beat me, I’ll accept.
But please don’t give me mrityudand (death penalty).
Jana Gana: What do you know about Katapahali?
Sricharan Chalak: Someone gave me a box of matches.
Jana Gana: Where are the Harmad, CPI(M) camps? Who is there?
Sricharan Chalak: There is the Inadpur camp. There are Mussalman and adivasi chele (boys) there.
Jana Gana: How many people?
Sricharan Chalak: Eight in the Inadpur camp.
Jana Gana: Who leads it?
Sricharan Chalak: Goiranga Kolla, Uttam Mahto, Amiya Mahto.
Jana Gana: Do they accompany the joint forces on their operations?
Sricharan Chalak: Sometimes they do go with the joint forces.
As the questioning continued, we could sense the rising anger amongst the people gathered there.
Jana Gana: Were we all guilty that you put our lives in danger? What about the Women? Did you not care about them? How would you feel if someone looted your house, burnt your village? If we let you go today, you will bring the police, the Harmad. How can we trust you?
The moment of judgement was at hand. When Jana Gana asked for the people’s verdict there was an uneasy silence. Then one or two voices said, ‘Mrityudand’. But the majority was quiet, uncomfortable with this form of instant justice and unwilling to carry the moral burden of killing a man. Sricharan begged for his life with folded hands.
Srichalan Chalak: You can cut off my hands and legs. But please don’t give me mrityudand. They lured me. I’ll leave the Harmad camp. I promise I’ll leave the camp. I’ll migrate to Mumbai. I have four children to bring up. My wife doesn’t even know I was with the Harmad. She does not know you have caught me.
Jana Gana: Why didn’t you think of this when you betrayed your own people? What should we do with you?
Srichalan, a daily-wage earner, had three bighas of land. He was hired, he said, to do odd-jobs like chopping wood and was paid Rs 80 a day. He awaited his fate as darkness slowly enveloped the village. As the crowd began melting, Sricharan was led away into the darkness, his fate hanging in balance.
I asked the man leading the questioning what gave Jana Gana the right to run such people’s courts. Were they not scared of the government? Why didn’t they approach the courts for redressing grievances? His answer was ready: they were neither scared of the government nor did they have faith in the police, the adn1inistration, the coutts or the joint forces. For them, all these instruments and institutions of the state served the rich and the powerful few.
In Rameswarpur, the search-and-cordon operation had begun. Each person was asked to identify himself. One jawan even photographed my press and visiting cards on his mobile! I was encouraging Debashish, our video journalist, to keep the camera rolling but was told to stop and ‘cooperate’. The first target of the jawans was the tea shop where we were sitting, right where, shortly before, Manik Mondal had been singing a Baul song. Some jawans went inside and shouted, ‘Look, sir, MMwadi leaflets.’ They also claimed to have found some CDs. ‘Isme in logon ka gyan (i.e., Maoist propaganda) hoga’, they declared. ‘Sir, this is a Maowadi shop!’ As simple as that!
Slowly the rounding up began. The forces entered the village, picking up all the men and teenage boys they could find, lining them up in front of the tea shop, segregating men and boys, fathers and sons. The men were asked to squat on the ground. Teenagers were made to huddle together across the road. The women and children stayed in their huts. Everyone, including us, remained pinned to our positions, tense, wordless, waiting and watching. Not a question, not a murmur of protest. The deafening silence was broken only once by a defiant mother when her son was picked up by the jawans for questioning.
By eight am, some sixty-five men were rounded up and asked to produce an identity proof. Knees and elbows were examined for bruises. Such bruises could be interpreted as a sign of Maoist guerrilla training.
No one had any marks. A group of nine men, looking haggard, were made to squat separately near the tea stall. A CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) jawan approached them with a tin of orange paint and a brush and marked a cross on their backs and hands. The shirtless men had the marks painted on their bare backs. The reason? jungle me chhup rahe the.’ I did not see the jawans unearth any arms, ammunitions, weapons, etc.
Distrust is palpable in a Shalboni so polarised that a knife used to cut bamboo can be seen as a weapon, and a cellphone can raise suspicions of a Maoist link. Mukut Mahato of Bada Kalashibhnga says, ‘My mobile was taken away because they say I talk with Maowadis …but I only use it to talk to my family in Andhra and Mumbai …it is wrong to think every villager in every village is a Maowadi.’
Latika needs one thousand sal leaves to earn Rs 80, but entering the forest is dangerous. The conflict has cut into her meagre earnings. And if more than five women go to the forest together to collect salleaves, they violate section 144! She recalls the day the Jotto Bahini took away her teenage son, ‘I ran after them, pleading. What crime has my son committed that you are taking him away?’
‘Every time the forces come, we run into the forest,’ cry Manjura and Urvai. ‘But how much can we run. ..? Sometimes I think we should stay in the BOO’s (Block Development Officer) office.’ But if going to the forest is not safe, manning a shop isn’t either. Budheswar Mahato, who shuts his shop whenever the joint forces arrive, says, ‘They ask me lots of questions. ..where are the Maowadis? Where have the meetings taken place?’ For many months now, the school bliilding has turned into a refugee camp at night. All the men from the seven neighbouring villages find comfort and safety in numbers and prefer to sleep there rather than in their homes.
We asked West Bengal’s top cop, Director General of Police Bhupinder Singh, why villagers remained fearful of the forces. He said, ‘Our instructions are clear. Raids are a necessity. We ensure that we are careful in our behaviour. ‘Efforts are made by the PCP A to malign the forces. One or two persons may go astray, but by and large they have to work with the local police.’
Despite the anti-Naxal offensive of the 1970s, Naxalism has remained a latent force in West Bengal, eating into the margins of the state. Today, encouraged by the Maoists, people in Jangal Mahal seem to be taking things into their own hands, throwing up an alternative, almost, to the state. Dilip Simeon, noted historian and writer, sums up the situation: ‘There will always be people with an extremist ideology. …The problem lies not in the ideology but in the fertile ground we provide for that ideology to grow and take root. It grows because genuine grievances are hardly ever addressed.’ Colin Gonsalves, lawyer and human rights activist says, ‘We are heading towards a failed state. ..this is a full- fledged civil war …the middle classes will realise only when it is too late. ..’
Sometime between nine and nine-thirty am, seventy-five men, three journalists and three civil society members were asked to walk in a line towards the CRPF camp at Pirakata. We, too, were asked to march with the others. ‘You walked with them,’ they said, ‘now you walk with us.’ A long line of half-naked, barefoot, skeletal, unarmed villagers trod silently through the densely forested, hilly Jangal Mahal, flanked by hundreds of heavily armed security personnel. Just before the march began, one villager reached out for a broken plastic bottle in the tea shop. There was not a drop of water in it.
The nine men marked with orange paint were made to walk separately. After an hour and a half, we reached a motorable road from where we were taken in a vehicle to the Pirakata camp.
Most of the women from Rameswarpur reached Pirakata camp, demanding the release of their men. We were then taken to the Shalboni police station in an anti-landmine vehicle. Sensing danger for the first time and the limits of my ability to negotiate severely diminished, I called my office. The conflict- zone, as I learn, for all practical purposes is also a no-rights zone.
In Shalboni police station, we were all interrogated separately. The door closed behind me the moment I stepped in. The introductions were over quickly. I sensed that the police was desperate for information. I requested the officer not to violate a reporter’s code. I’ll never know what it was; maybe he was tired (I was the last but one to be questioned), maybe it was the calls from my office, but I had a short session with him. He informed me that sixty-five men have had already been allowed to leave, that we had violated Section 144, that I would get a call from Manoj Mahato the next day (surprisingly I did) and that Arundhati Roy deserved to be behind bars for walking with the comrades. He was a young, intense man, living in the shadow of death. For a fleeting moment, I wondered about his family and kids. I asked him what could be done to build bridges. As I walked out of the room, I saw a poster with pictures of ‘Wanted Maoists’. I asked if we could take a picture. He refused. He then asked us to show some of the stuff we’d shot, which we did. But the young officer was also a proud man. How could we have any information that he did not? He didn’t probe us any further.
Around six-thirty in the evening we were allowed to leave, thirteen-and-a-half hours after the search-and-cordon operations began. Civil society activists were behind bars for the next forty-two days. The man singing the Baul song at the tea stall ended up sharing a room with Chhatradhar Mahato. And the nine villagers with orange crosses on their backs were also taken into custody. .
Rupashree Nanda is a journalist with CNN-IBN. She did her Masters in English from Utkal Unversity, Bhubaneshwar, and Masters in Mass Communication from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Right after college, she devoted all her energy to making a film, Harvest of Hunger, sponsored by Actionaid. It won two national awards: Best Investigative Documentary and Best Editing. Rupashree Nanda has reported extensively on the dispossessed, rural development, poverty, human rights and agriculture. Rupashree Nanda won the Chameli Devi Jain Award in 2007.
