In the eye of the storm !!!!

Long back in the year 1979 I had my (then) tiny feet touch the soil of the land of a nondescript town called Jagdalpur. Many hadn’t heard about it till 2008-2009, a majority confusing it with Jabalpur the marble rich historic city in Madhya Pradesh, a tiny spot on the map of India which made me proud every time I spotted it on any map and sad when I couldn’t find its mention in even the basic government diaries which used to have pin codes against names of cities mentioned in the first few pages. I grew up surrounded by the small town charm, green surroundings where spotting a deer, bison, leopard or even a tiger once in a while was only a few kilometers away. I grew up on regular instances of tigers wandering into the town outskirts and how people named them on mythological characters, so we had a tigress named Ganga accompanied with three cubs that were named Shiv, Ganesh and Laxmi on one occasion. The life was simple yet exiting, covered with trees, rivers, gardens, waterfalls and tiger reserves; pollution, traffic jams, job stress, recession etc were big foreign words limited to the oxford dictionary we compulsorily needed to have as part of our books to school. I studied in a convent run by nuns; strict yet gentle, speaking in English was compulsory for us as we belonged to the only English medium school in the town and were treated like kings/queens at social gatherings. One of the few indications of a man’s status in the town was wether his son/daughter studies in Nirmal Vidhyalaya. People used to turn and give a look of appreciation on hearing one speaking in English, so depending on what your personality was you either felt the centre of attraction/ embarrassed / alien to your surroundings. The first group of students who went to Pune/ Nagpur/ Hyderabad/ Delhi or the most favorite spot Bangalore was looked at the same way America looked at Obama when he championed the term change. I joined the latest fad of going to Bangalore to study and have been in Bangalore ever since, 1997 to be precise, but something in me always missed Jagdalpur, though its not my birth place {I was born in godhra (Gujarat)}, I still consider Jagdalpur my birth place and take the same or even more pride in calling myself a Bastaria rather than a malayali which Iam by the basis of mother tongue.

Today every news channel, NGO, Speakers, Social Worker, Writer, citizen of India knows Bastar as the bad land where Maoists are playing havoc with security personnel, in discussions when they talk about Bastar one feels like he is being taken back into the history where people used to narrate stories about chambal and its dacoits and the complete lawlessness prevailing there. Today who so ever feels like takes the responsibility on his/her shoulders to explain to the world the cause of Maoism, or the ways to eradicate it in Bastar, ironically these are the same people who a few years back didn’t even know ‘Dantewada’ existed on the map of India. Dantewada for me is the shrine of Maa Danteswari the local deity of Bastar, where every navratri people used to walk bare footed from Jagdalpur 87 kilometers to seek her blessings irrespective of the religion or caste they belong too, it is the biggest symbol of religious harmony in Bastar which has turned today into a battle ground between Maoists and government forces. Hardly the kind of image I wanted Bastar or Chattisgarh to have.

The history of Bastar is vast and of historical and mythological importance. Chitrakoot in Chattisgarh is considered the place where Lord Ram spent some years of his exile from Ayodhya. The large former princely state of Bastar offers an instructive example of the combining of elements of Rajput, orthodox Hindu and tribal Gond tradition. Modern scholarship claims a date of 1323 for Annam Deo, founder of the Bastar dynasty, to have fled Warangal in Telengana (Andhra) following the collapse of Kakatiya rule after the invasion of the Tughlaq of Delhi sultanate. Oral tradition had suggested that the advent of the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan had precipitated his flight a hundred years later, in about 1425, and there is evidence that small Rajput kingdoms did survive the first Muslim invasions of the south.Annam Deo is said to have taken the family goddess Sri Danteshwari Mai with him into Bastar, creating a temple for her at Dantewada. As personal goddess of the ruling family, this aspect of ferocious Kali/Durga has long taken centre stage in the affairs of Bastar, which in previous centuries had been ruled by scions of the Nagvansh line. The new Bastar rajas, with a fully fledged Rajput heritage of the Chandra (Moon) line, ruled a forest population of different religious traditions, who, while acknowledged the raja as their ruler. To embellish their spiritual status, the Bastar family over the centuries introduced many other purely Hindu and Brahmanical elements, especially from neighboring Orissa. The major festival and tourist attraction of the Bastar calendar, Dashehra, owes nothing to the northern tradition associated with events of the Ramayan. Here, giant chariots are built and pulled by the tribals with the local deity astride is borrowed from the Jagannath tradition of Puri, and devotion that had more in common with the Durga Puja of Bengal, the festival became a reaffirmation of the ruler's position and the temporal fidelity of his subjects. The last ruler in direct descent from the Kakatiya line, Prafulla Kumari Devi, passed away in 1936. She had married into the Bhanj Deo house of Mayurbhanj in Orissa and her son and heir, Pravir Chandra, last ruling Maharaja of Bastar, perished in a police firing in the Jagdalpur Palace in 1966, championing to the end, the rights of Bastar's tribal people to their lands and forests, Ironic isn’t it ??

There is nothing far from truth on the way channels today are painting Bastar with. The tribals of Bastar were self sufficient and happy with their simple lives and limited aspirations. They were easily cheated by the traders who bought their produce on much lower rates than the market rates. The main source of income came through farming and tendu leaves (leaf used for rolling beedis) and the tribal walking into banks with notes concealed in bamboos were a common sight. Bastar shares its borders with Andhra Pradesh and Orissa in the south. Maoists came into Bastar from Andhra Pradesh using the dense forest as a cover to cross border. Once they were in Bastar they realized it’s the best place they can be, the simple tribal of Bastar doesn’t even know what exploitation means and the rich mineral deposits would ensure that the govt in Delhi would take them seriously, add to this the popularity provided by the PR of NGO’s and social thinkers this place would be a gold mine, so the means of livelihood was taken away from the tribal by forcing them out of farming and complete ban on tendu leaves plucking and the blame for the same was put on the government, the tribal with no other means to live picked up the gun and thus the balance so beautifully maintained for hundreds of years was disturbed, the Maoists started by raising the native versus outsider issue which couldn’t take off as the much respected ruler Raja Pravir Chandra was himself responsible for inviting people from all over India to come and settle down in Bastar. My father still recalls the crowd of tribals in front of Sardar Pola Singh’s house as he was the first Sardar a tribal had ever seen in Bastar. So the issue of native and outsider died its natural death. So suddenly one started hearing on how the tribal was worried about the effect on the environment and biodiversity of the jungle being disturbed if minerals were extracted, mind you these are the same tribals who as part of their yearly festival ‘aakhet’ went hunting in the jungle and killed hundreds of deers, leopards, tigers or which ever animal they sighted on a single day. So how did this transformation happen or did somebody knowingly fed them with false stories on how the govt was their biggest enemy. The govt of MP and the central govt ignored the initial signals as Bastar was too small a place for them to be concerned and with only 3 Vidhan Sabha and one Lok sabha seat it was not something to waste time and effort on. The bureaucrats were frustrated playing hosts to ministers and their families on vacation in Bastar.

The focus came back the moment the state Chattisgarh was carved out of MP in November 2001 as Bastar became strategic from the election point of view. Suddenly the govt in charge realized it had a big problem in hand, by then the Maoists had extended their reach to the deepest parts of Bastar and the local politicians had started using them to win elections in Bastar. The change in regime brought with it the idea to do something different from the previous govt so Mahendra Karma a local Congress MLA came up with an idea of ‘salwa judum’ a local militia to fight Maoists, actually the idea itself came because certain sections of tribals were frustrated by the whole Maoist exploitation, Vanvasi ashrams had turned into places for sexual exploitation of tribal girls, NGO’s centers for converting black money into white of the rich and famous but the idea failed miserably because the state had no means to arm and train the hundreds of tribals and there was no guarantee of the same militia turning their guns on the govt.

Today the Bastaria in me empathizes with the situation my tribal brothers are in, they have no where to go, either the Maoists will kill them or the police will kill them. I have heard hours and hours of intellectual debate and seen days of prime time discussions on Bastar, but ironically no body understands Bastar leave alone coming up with a solution. The Bastaria finds himself in the same shoes that his beloved King was when he was executed by the Government of India. To understand Bastar and Bastaria should be the first step towards eradicating the naxal menace, we give two hoots to people like Arundhati Roy for claiming the exploitation led to Maoism, she came to Bastar only after it acquired prime time space on national television its actually the opposite the exploitation came after the Maoists came.

I always wished that Bastar became famous so that I don’t have to explain everybody I meet on exactly where Iam from, but I never wished that Bastar be known as the bad land where Maoists play havoc, instead I wished Bastar to be known as a prime tourist destination where a normal city dweller can still experience tribal way of living and experience the nature at its best. Please leave Bastar alone we have been dealing with our problems for hundreds of years and Iam sure will still manage to do it better than its been done.