Disquiet on the Deccan Front

Not only has the government fumbled and lost the first round on the negotiating table, it is giving up its advantage on the ground. In the 144 days of ceasefire, the Maoists have recruited, collected money and rearmed themselves for the next round of what they call the People’s War. A war that cuts a swathe across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, right up to Nepal and even Bhutan. A war that is snowballing into the biggest terror threat in south Asia.

Married to the ‘Movement’
IT’S dusk and R. Sasikala (40) has just walked into her house in Anantapur after a long day at college. Tired but wearing a big dimpled smile, she introduces herself as a gold medallist in Sanskrit literature, and a coordinator of four educational institutes. Her husband, Professor S. Seshaiah (50), teaches law and is still at work. Their 18-year-old son is 300 km north in Hyderabad, studying engineering with his sights firmly on Cyberabad.

The small family would have been an example of the typical Andhra dream of living simple and achieving big, but for the Revolution. The professor is one of the key mediators in the talks between the united Maoists and the Congress government.

‘‘I was inspired by Professor Madhusudan Rao in SV University, Tirupati, back in the early 1980s. When I married my husband, Madhusudan Rao was the master of the ceremony. With our marriage vows, we made a declaration to go with the Movement,’’ she smiles, sitting in her husband’s book-lined workspace in the verandah.

What is the Movement? ‘‘It’s the injustice in the villages. India got its Independence and there was all that hope, but we got no benefit of the land reforms. The Movement is the blood of the labourers and the martyrs who have died in police encounters fighting for the cause,’’ says Sasikala, the smile is gone and the eyes have begun flashing.

A member of the 100-strong Revolutionary Writers Association, she is a poet. One of her Telugu compilations, published under a symbol of the hammer, sickle and sword, is a slim volume priced at Rs 35, called A Disturbed Nest. In the preface, she writes about conflict as the inspiration of all art. One of the chapters, titled ‘‘Uncertain Future’’, is about the family of Somi, a stone crusher.

It’s begun to rain, and at eight in the night a tired Somi asks his pregnant wife for dinner. There is none and she gives him and the two children water for dinner. There are 10 other families like them in the village. Most have moved to the big cities for work.

For her delivery, she goes to the government hospital so that at least her meals are taken care of. She goes in for an operation to tie her fallopian tubes, just so that she can get the government cash incentive. On the day she is discharged from the hospital, she gets only half the amount. The rest has been taken by middlemen. Later in the night, Somi’s wife dies.

And the police is sent on a long holiday
IT’S for people like Somi that Sasikala defends the Naxals’ bull run — planting red flags over the past two months to occupy over 5,000 acres of forest and agricultural land of big farmers. Left petrified by the local groups or dalams, the farmers have given up on their land.

Sasikala insists it’s the landless beneficiaries who are scared. ‘‘In Uravakonda village (in the north of Anantpur district), tens of acres owned by the local MLA have been given away. But none of those poor people has stepped forward.’’ The fact is the MLA hasn’t gone near his land as well.

Every day, Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy and his cabinet issue empty warnings and threats to the Naxals to stop — or else the talks will stop. Reddy’s statements read like snatches from a bland political science lesson: ‘‘If the Naxals attempt to distribute land among poor by the strength of their weapons, the result would be anarchy.’’

The reality on the ground, however, is clear: the police has been told to register cases of trespass, but no arrests.

TALK to seasoned police officers and constables in the districts and the state capital (except for the state police chief, none is officially allowed to talk to the media) and the first thing they will tell you is the talks are great and they are enjoying the holiday.

‘‘For a decade we lived a nocturnal life. It was very tough, to always be out on a combing operation, not knowing which day would be your last. Now, we go to Hyderabad, let down our guard, we enjoy the socialising and spend time with our families. They had almost stopped recognising us,’’ one police officer laughs.

Push a little and he says the talks are just a smokescreen, this holiday will prove to be very expensive. The Naxals are pushing Chief Minister Reddy to the breaking point, and are using the ceasefire to make a big comeback.

‘‘PEACE is just an illusion,’’ says one officer, adding that the government has pushed back the anti-Naxal effort by at least four years. And you don’t need intelligence reports to tell you that. The Naxals admit it themselves — they have held thousands of meetings in villages, recruited and almost doubled their numbers.

The new recruits are undergoing training. They are stocking up arms. Cases of explosives are disappearing from the Singreni coal mines into the forests, say officials.

Constables bring in reports of how the Naxalites are making country-made weapons. ‘‘They go across the border to Karnataka and shop for weapons in Chitradurga and Tumkur,’’ says an officer.

Andhra’s Anna equals Mumbai’s Bhai
IN Secunderabad, sitting on the dining table with a view of a gorgeous garden, retired army officer S.K. Rao admits he used to like the Naxals. ‘‘They were asking the ration shop owners to return the unsold rations and not sell it at market price. I remember thinking, ‘Wah, at least someone is trying to stop the corruption around us.’ ’’

Then, the red flags started to crop up. Rao’s pride and joy are the 10 acres of orchards outside Hyderabad owned by his daughter, married to a techie in California. ‘‘The takeover of land is pure goondaism. The government is totally helpless. They can do nothing to stop it.’’

Now, Rao is getting worrying calls from relatives in Warangal. ‘‘They are doctors and own a maternity home. Two men come at the beginning of every month and ask them for something for Anna.’’ Let alone the police, the victims are trying to keep a lid on it even in the extended family.

MUMBAI’S system of hafta collection by the mafia has crept into Andhra. The police says anybody and everybody is getting calls. And they are all quietly paying up. Intelligence officials reel off the background of some of the people being targeted: bus owner, lorry contractor, liquor contractor, civil contractor, beedi contractor, cable operator, doctor, factory manager.

‘‘They just take a percentage of the contract. It’s a sort of a tax or goodwill hafta. Last year, when the Naxals were down and out, the visits for Anna had lessened. Now we are receiving confirmed reports of collection of arrears,’’ says a police officer.

In smaller towns and villages, ordinary criminals have jumped the bandwagon. The fear of the Naxals is so strong that nobody bothers to even check. On October 28, 100 km south of Hyderabad in a drought-wracked village of Tankara, three men wearing Naxal uniforms, monkey caps, carrying toy guns were lynched.

Two of them, Kavali Munimokksham and Vannada Thirupathaiah, were from the village. The third, an outsider, was the one who ambushed a dozen villagers walking back to the village in the evenings and threatened them to pay up … or else. So many paid up but none wants to talk about it.

Revolution comes with a ransom note
A reticent sarpanch, M. Srinivas, says: ‘‘They would sit in the fields and send a message. They robbed 12-13 people. I don’t know who they are.’’ Sitting outside the village temple, head constable Rama Laxmaiah says the sarpanch was one of them; he coughed up Rs 10,000. ‘‘They targeted the milkman, the vegetable vendor, the ration shop owner and the toddy seller paid Rs 20,000 just a couple of months ago.’’

Then their cover blew. The caretaker of headmaster Prasad Rao’s land, Telugu Krishnaiah, was being harassed for a month. They wanted Rao to pay up and donate an acre of land to build a stupa or memorial for slain Naxals.

(Since the ceasefire, stupas are cropping up across the length and breadth of Andhra. For a state that loves memorials on each square, in some places the full-length statues of policemen who died in Naxal action stand right across a stupa.)

Village Tankara, however, hasn’t had a real Naxal visit in over two decades. Krishnaiah got suspicious and asked 10 of his cousins and relatives to come along with him for the rendezvous.

‘‘WE jumped on them and pulled off the masks. These were our own people and then we gave them a sound thrashing,’’ says Jehangiraiyya (30) sitting on the hospital bed in Mahbubnagar town, surrounded by his family. His foot is in a bandage, where one of the fake Naxals brought down an axe.

The police have registered a case against the villagers, but SP Vikram Singh Mann approves: ‘‘The villagers showed extraordinary bravery.’’

At the houses of the dead men, there is grief and defiance. Thirupathaiah’s older brother Venkataiah says: ‘‘My brother went to guard the fields in the night and never came back.’’. The women in the family begin yelling and ask him to shut up.

Mao in Cyberabad. Where Genome patri meets Red Book
THE last day of October in Hyderbad is a cool Sunday morning. On the lawns outside the ballroom of the Taj Krishna Hotel, around 200 people mingle over lunch to network and lay the ground for India’s next big leap — biotechnology.

An animated Kiran Mazumdar Shaw of Biocon, holding her Louis Vuitton bag, is speaking to a group of attentive younger professionals. R.A. Mashelkar, director-general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and big names in venture capital firms like Steven Burril are somewhere in the crowd. Back inside the ballroom with enormous red chandeliers, the light dims and there are presentations on how India can score with stem cell research.

Behind the speaker, one of the names on the stage is Genome Valley. It also figures in the Naxals’ list of demands. Not many in the room know, and the ones who do, choose to ignore it. There is one speaker who thanks the Andhra Pradesh government for promoting the sector.

The Naxals want the 600 sq km Genome Valley in Cyberabad, which is to house Andhra’s biotech cluster, and tens of other properties including the Film City, Microsoft and GE offices, the Indian School of Business, to be given back to the ‘‘farmer’’ or be resold at market rates.

Their logic is simple: the companies can afford it. The argument of industry incentive — in fact former chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s entire Vision 2020 — cuts no ice with them. Naidu, who almost stamped out the Naxals after an attack on his life in 2003, has declined to comment. After his landslide defeat, his office says every time he opens his mouth, they kill one party worker.

SOME distance away, at a restaurant called Chutneys, a group of Andhra professionals have brought an American colleague out for lunch. As he downs the hot food on the thali and gradually turns pink, talk drifts to Naxals.

It’s been two weeks since the first round of talks got over, but the newspapers still devote a page-and-a-half to the Naxal issue every day. He listens awestruck as one of them tries unsuccessfully to explain what Naxals want.

An anti-terror squad is given mere lathis
‘‘WHAT the Naxals want is exactly what other political parties want,’’ says a veteran police officer, who lost three of his colleagues in a landmine blast on his first day in the service. Leaning back on his chair, he rattles off the list: ‘‘Uplift the poor, help the farmers, stop the caste injustice, land reforms. Every political party wants the same.

‘‘In a democracy, they can go fight elections, then come to Parliament, throw chairs at each other, and that is acceptable to me. People wanted change, so they threw out Chandrababu Naidu. People don’t need this war to bring change. So why do we need Naxals?’’

He doesn’t think the talks will succeed and points to the motto of the People’s War Group (PWG): Power through the barrel of the gun.

‘‘They won’t give up and we (the police) have been made to shut up,’’ he says, shaking his head.

TILL now, it’s true. Before the June 15 talks, the government said lay down your weapons. The naxals said no, not now. During the first round, the PWG’s negotiators struck it off the agenda.

After the month-end cabinet meeting to discuss the future of the talks, the chief minister said: ‘‘Laying down of arms will be top of the agenda during the second round.’’ The next day, the Naxals had a clear answer: ‘‘No.’’

‘‘There are more urgent issues to discuss. The government has to show that they are taking action on the points they have discussed like land reforms,’’ says Varavara Rao, the PWG’s emissary, sitting in his spartan flat east of Hyderabad’s Charminar.

RAO moved to Mumbai for four months till January to help successfully organise Mumbai Resistance (MR) 2004, across the road from the World Social Forum in Goregaon. With spooks lurking in the shadows, MR participants argued that talk of social justice is fine, but let’s bring about change with the gun.

‘‘For the first time, the party in power did not take up issues of the rival political party, but that which is boycotting the elections. They have said Naxal agenda is our agenda. The referendum has been against Chandrababu Naidu’s World Bank model of development, against viewing Naxals as a law-and-order issue to be finished with encounter killings.’’

Rao is referring to the Greyhounds when he talks encounter killings. Reddy has got the state police to pull out the 3,000-strong batallion of silent, lean Greyhounds from the Naxal-infested districts, bring the anti-terrorist squad back to Hyderabad.

Not far from Rao’s house, their latest assignment is to curb a communal riot with new fibreglass lathis.

THE united Naxals are now thinking of setting up a permanent office in Hyderbabad. The poet smiles as he watches his year and a half old granddaughter play. He named her Aman (Peace), after America attacked Iraq.