Indian Scene

Children of War
Nirmalangshu Mukherji

Two recent articles—Arundhati Roy’s “Walking with the comrades” and Gautam Navlakha’s “Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion”, both based on extensive travels in Maoist territory in Bastar—throw significant light on Maoist operations there. The articles themselves are polemically designed to portray the Maoists as “Gandhians with guns” and as champions of tribal welfare. However, rhetoric aside, a very different picture emerges from the facts reported in these pieces.
The Maoists have been operating in that area for close to three decades. Roy reports that the authority of the Maoist party now ranges across 60,000 square kilometers of forest, thousands of villages, and millions of people. These are Maoist numbers as told to the visiting intellectuals. Assuming, in the absence of contrary evidence, that these numbers are not inflated to impress the outsiders, we can now ask what the Maoists have achieved for these millions of people.
Consider the health situation in Bastar. The articles do not mention even a single health centre initiated by the Maoists in that vast area in all these years. All we are told repeatedly is that people have been advised to drink boiled water. Navlakha reports that lately the “revolutionary people’s committees” have initiated a scheme of “barefoot doctors” in which some tribals are trained to apply some medicines (distinguished by their colour) for afflictions such as malaria, cholera and elephantitis, the three most dreaded illnesses. We are not told about the extent of these efforts.
We get a more concrete picture from the reports of a doctor Roy met; incidentally, a doctor was visiting that area after many years. The doctor said that most of the people he has seen including those in the guerrilla army, have a haemoglobin count between five and six (when the standard for Indian women is 11). There is extensive tuberculosis caused by more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young children are suffering from Protein Energy Malnutrition Grade II. Apart from this, there is malaria, osteoporosis, tapeworm, severe ear and tooth infections and primary amenorrhea—malnutrition during puberty causing a woman’s menstrual cycle to disappear, or never appear in the first place. “It’s an epidemic here, like in Biafra,” the doctor said. “There are no clinics in this forest apart from one or two in Gadchiroli. No doctors. No medicines.” Gadchroli is in Maharashtra, not in Bastar.
Notice that most of the severe conditions are caused by acute malnutrition—especially in women and children. Words like “famine” and “sub-Saharan condition” are frequently used in the articles. The words are of course polemically directed at the state: ‘Look, what the Indian state has done to the tribals’. Any index on quality of life certainly brings out what the Indian state has done to its people, not just the tribals. But the area at issue concerns essentially the Maoists “with a history of more than two decades where the party has been able to create an alternative structure, virtually uncontested”, as Navlakha observes.
An even more sinister picture emerges from facts about Maoist armed forces. Even if we set aside earlier, unconfirmed reports of children being snatched away from tribal families at gunpoint, the documents provide a range of evidence about extensive involvement of children in the war. Roy describes a young boy, Mangtu, who appears to be one of the conduits between nearby towns and the guerrilla army. Next, she describes another “slightly older” person, Chandu, with a “village boy air”, who actually belongs to a militia and can handle every kind of weapon except an LMG. Then, of course, there’s this much talked about (and photographed) young girl, Kamla. At the time of reporting, she is 17, and is already a hardcore member of the guerrilla army with a revolver on her hips and a rifle slung on her shoulder. We can only guess about her age when she joined the armed forces.
These are not isolated examples. Roy’s narrative and the accompanying photographs furnish the distinct impression that most, if not all, of the people in the militias and guerrilla army are aged between mid-teens to early twenties, and most of these have been part of the armed forces for several years. Roy’s motherly instinct wells up as she prepares to sleep in the forest amidst hundreds of armed guerrillas: “I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal”.
Recruiting children for warfare seems to be an established practice in the Maoist scheme of things. Comrade Madhav, who has now risen to be a commander of a guerrilla platoon, joined the Maoists at the age of 9 in Warangal in Andhra Pradesh. The entire thing is carefully organized. While the general tribal child has no school to go to, Maoists have initiated Young Communist Mobile School (or, Basic Communist Training School) that host select groups of 25-30 children in the age group 12-15. These children receive intensive training for six months in a curriculum consisting of basic concepts of Marxism Leninism and Maoism, Hindi and English, maths, social science, different types of weapons, computers, etc., Navlakha reports. Roy writes that, once they pass out, “they trail the guerrilla squads, with stars in their eyes, like groupies of a rock band”.
Navlakha also reports that, as with any regular army, recruitment drives are frequently conducted with meetings and leaflets. One of the leaflets, directed at “unemployed boys and girls of Bastar”, says “you will not get any salary but food, clothes, personal needs will be fulfilled and your families would be helped by the Janatam Sarkar”. Elsewhere in the essay, Navlakha reports on the food supplied to the guerrillas: breakfast can vary between ‘poha’, ‘khichri’, etc., mixed with peanuts and followed by tea. Lunch and dinner consists of rice with dal and subzi. Once a week they get meat. Sometimes more than once if fish is available or there is pork, which is provided by the Revolutionary People’s Committee. Even with this impressive food intake, most of the guerrillas have less than half of the normal count of haemoglobin, as noted. One can only imagine with horror the condition of these children when they joined the forces. 
With no schools to go to, no opportunities in hand, and with sub-Saharan conditions prevailing in their families, which able-bodied tribal child can resist the temptation of assured food, clothes, peer company, and the ability to roam the forests with a rifle slung on shoulders? Naturally, when the state attacks and the economic lives of tribals are further disrupted, enrolment for militia and guerrilla army increases sharply. The more the repression by the state, the bigger the “people’s army” of starving children.
The total strength of the militias and guerrillas currently adds up to about 60,000, with many more in the waiting. Assuming as above that most of them joined the forces when they were children, it follows that the Maoist leadership—consisting of Ganapathi, Koteshwar Rao, Kobad Ghandy, Azad, and others in their polit bureau and central committee—deliberately planned to deny normal chilhood to a vast number of tribal children. They never went to school, never learned about life outside the forests, never glimpsed the pluralistic complex of Indian society, never acquired the skills to become a participating citizen, never allowed to make up their mind. All they know is how to fashion an IED, how to clean and fire a rifle, how to ambush, how to kill. They form the frontline—and get maimed and killed—when the police, the greyhounds, the CRPF and special operations forces encircle them. As for Kamla, Roy observes that “if the police come across her, they’ll kill her. They might rape her first. No questions will be asked”. Kamla won’t be the only one.
The basic picture is abundantly clear from these documents. Taking advantage of the historical neglect and exploitation of the tribals by the state—the “root cause”—the Maoist leadership ensured the support of hapless tribals with token welfare measures while directing most of the attention secretly to construct guerrilla bases. In the process, they lured a large number of tribal children with assurances of food and clothing. These children have now grown into formidable militia and guerrilla forces. After committing atrocious crimes in the name of “revolutionary violence”, these youth brigades are now facing the wrath of the mighty Indian state.  It is reasonable to infer that millions of tribals continue to side with the Maoists largely because their children are with them.