Donate NowBy Arun Venugopal
Jason Motlagh, a roving journalist who covers South Asia, has written an extensive piece for the Virginia Quarterly Review on insurgencies that persist across India, despite the country's record economic growth. Motlagh's 9,562 word piece (you read that right) involved months of reporting, and took him to remote areas of Assam, Chhatisgarh, Orissa and Kashmir. His work — including the photographs he took — was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
In response to a few questions I had, Jason emailed me about what motivated him to undertake this project:
My editor for the VQR piece was Ted Genoways, who heads it up and is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. As for the coverage of the Maoists, I decided to dig deeper upon realizing the striking dearth of coverage -- both in the Indian and international media. To date there's a lot of vague assertions and sensationalism in the Indian media on the Maoist issue, and I think the reluctance of local journalists to go the extra mile on the story is troubling. Kashmir and Islamist terror still dominates coverage, as far as internal conflicts go. The rest of the mainstream press, with some notable exceptions such as Tehelka, are more willing to feed the hype surrounding India's rise as an economic power. When leftist extremism does make the news, scant attention is given to the root causes of the insurgency. It is this sort of narrow vision — among media and the government — that the Maoists are trying to exploit.
From "Maoists in the Forest: Tracking India's Separatist Rebels":
It was dark by the time we reached their village. At Chandan's request, a rooster was killed with the quill of one of its own feathers, plucked, and boiled. The village leader came to meet us. Instead of shaking hands he gazed at us with a kind of dumb suspicion. We presented our ID cards and equipment as evidence of our profession. It was clear he could not read. He told us that the last teacher had fled the village a year ago. Then he announced that he would meet us at first light with "a decision."
Two hours after sunrise, we came to understand that his decision might involve our lives.
Nothing stirred around us. The village leader never showed up. With a lump in his throat Chandan started singing. Arvind tapped his feet. The heavy silence was broken by the ring of alarm gongs on all sides. We watched as every able-bodied man in the village streamed up the hillside across the ravine, carrying machetes, hoes, axes, and other homemade farm tools. For what reason, none of us wanted to guess.
"Ram, Ram, O Ram," Chandan's songs had turned into whispered prayers. In a final effort at hedging our fate, he instructed me to invoke my God. I said I would, double-knotted my boots, eyed a hefty stick, and prepared for the worst. The village men reappeared, streaming single file down the path they'd earlier climbed. Weapons in hand.
"Back of the beyond," a friend had joked before my first trip to Bastar, bugging his eyeballs for effect. "It's savage where you're going." At the time, the comment rang of the casual disdain many youngish urbanites have for the India they like to call "backward," a swamp of ignorance most would prefer not to see or acknowledge. I thought I knew better. Seated on a tree stump two days' trek from the nearest telephone, I braced myself for the sharp end of the unknown.
And a little further down:
Women cadres began coordinating the evening meal with some of the younger male recruits. Comrade Sunil leaned against a haystack and told me he'd joined the cause a couple years ago after his older brother was killed by SPOs. Exceedingly polite, Sunil took great pride in his appearance: his camouflage shirt was crisply pressed and tucked in, his brown plastic Bata loafers spotless. He admitted he'd never seen combat, but he swore with the earnestness of a schoolboy that he was ready to fight to the death. "I am prepared to stay out here and fight like this for the rest of my life," he said, to the nod of a dozen other fighters. "And so are all the comrades of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army."