:: Antara Dev Sen

The Red Fort of broken promises, wilting lives

Antara Dev Sen

June.25 : For more than a week now, the Maoists have been giving televised speeches from what we cleverly call the "ramparts of the red fort" — literally! A curious "independence" had been declared there earlier — a lawless self-rule — in stark contrast to the dream Independence declared 62 years ago when Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled the tricolour. For West Bengal’s Lalgarh, literally the "red fort", is a symbolic antithesis to Delhi’s Red Fort. If Delhi’s Red Fort embodies dreams and promises, Bengal’s "red fort" embodies broken promises and wilted lives. It represents the abysmal failure of governance.

Tossed about among politicians, well-wishers and the media, the Lalgarh tale is turning from a human tragedy to a revenge drama to the theatre of the absurd. As the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) accused Mamata Banerjee of collaborating with the Maoists, she declared that the CPI(M) was hand-in-glove with the CPI(Maoist) and demanded that chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee be arrested as a Maoist. (Neither is entirely wrong — both the Trinamul Congress and the Left have flirted rather heavily with the Maoists.) Elsewhere, the police and Central paramilitary forces trying to "reclaim" Lalgarh are withering from hunger, thirst and the heat. A jawan died of sunstroke. Meanwhile, intrepid journalists desperate for soundbites and photo-ops get the occasional stick from hot and bothered cops. And defying the curfew, well-meaning Kolkata intellectuals rush in, led by Aparna Sen (dressed like a filmi terrorist herself, in black shirt, black pants and red bandana) to initiate a dialogue. They then even-handedly advise the Maoists and the police to lay down arms.

In the meantime, the existential question is to ban or not to ban. Will the West Bengal government ban the CPI(Maoist)? Is Mr Bhattacharjee snubbing Prakash Karat? All this after the Centre imposed a ban on the group. (Psst! It was banned all along — the CPI-Maoist is a merger of two banned organisations: the Maoist Communist Centre and the People’s War Group.) As if to stop such rubbish-rousing, the West Bengal government swiftly arrested its first post-ban Naxal — an elderly jholawalla who was studio-hopping, giving TV interviews as spokesperson of the CPI(Maoist). Gour Chakrabarty had been offering a ceasefire and dialogue if the police agreed to the same ground rules.

Was this the face of Maoist terror — this wiry, white-haired man in a white kurta, brandishing a jhola and theories of Marx and Mao? Mr Chakrabarty embodies the ageing of a revolution and the continuing failure of the state to look after its own people. This was not the revolutionary we saw elsewhere on television — Maoists who sat with their backs to the camera, flaunting automatic rifles, who talked of killing the class enemy, of assassinating the chief minister.

The original Naxalites quickly distanced themselves from this lot. Older and wiser, the veterans now oppose violence, swear by the ballot and emphasise the importance of dialogue. Kanu Sanyal, who had started the Naxalite movement with Charu Majumdar back in the 1960s and still lives at Naxalbari in North Bengal, has declared Lalgarh to be an extremist-backed ethnic revolt of the tribals and not a Communist movement. Santosh Rana has spoken up against the terrorising of villagers just because they are CPI(M) voters, and underlined the need for democratic freedoms. Asim Chatterjee has said this violence-driven movement was doomed to fail, one had to respect citizen’s rights. There is no alternative to democracy, they all declared, as they denounced violence and rooted for development.

"You can only predict things after they have happened," said Eugene Ionesco, master of absurd drama. Bengal had seen it all before. What makes Lalgarh cutting-edge absurd is that we have refused to see for decades in Bengal what we readily see in the so-called "Bimaru" states — dreadful poverty, lack of food, water, roads, electricity, education, jobs, brick houses. And the feudal raj of the local Left leaders.

Now, the Bengal government is forced to talk of development. But there is still no talk of police reform. Only an accountable police force immune to the ruling party can ensure good governance. And Lalgarh’s agitation was centred around police atrocities.

But it was not the boycott of the administration or the murder and mayhem by Maoists, but their brazen media interviews that made the government finally sit up and acknowledge the lurid lawlessness in Lalgarh. For months, Lalgarh had been ruled by Maoists. The police was thrown out and CPI(M) supporters attacked, humiliated, driven away or killed. Maoist bastions, as the Left government knows, are not built overnight. Decades of deprivation, ruthless domination by CPI(M) cadres and police atrocities had prepared the ground for revolt, and the Maoists gathered popular support and propped up a People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA). As more power flowed from the barrel of the unlicensed gun, the police withdrew, boycotted and terrorised, even barred from election duty. The feudal raj of the CPI(M) had been replaced by the feudal raj of the Maoists.

"This village is ours, we do all the work/So who is this dora?/Why is he great? What right does he have to rule us?" Gadar, the Andhra Naxal balladeer, sings against feudal landlords. Lalgarh’s sentiments exactly! Except that its anger was directed towards the state. The Left government that had ruled Bengal for over three decades on the strength of brilliant but long-ago land reforms and pro-peasant, pro-poor policies, was the new "class enemy".

And the Maoists are the new rulers. It is absurd to believe that the villagers, prodded by the gun, are deciding their own fate. Then they would not have left the body of Salku Soren, a poor farmer and CPI(M) voter killed by the Maoists, to rot in the open for days. Back in the fifth century BC, Sophocles’ Antigone flouted the diktat of King Creon and buried the corpse of her brother Polyneices that was left rotting for similar reasons — for defying local authority. "He has no right to keep me from my own!" she said. And after much personal tragedy, Creon recognised that truth. In Nazi-occupied France, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone went a step further: "I want everything of life, I do; and I want it all. Otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate!" That there was no Antigone — moderate or radical — to go against the Maoist diktat, proves that this was not a free, self-ruled village society. Once the Maoists are driven out, the Left government needs to make sure that the villagers do not pay the price for Maoist atrocities against the CPI(M) members. The cycle of violence and neglect must stop. For real power flows from development and good governance.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com