Book review: 'Hello Bastar: The Untold Story Of India’s Maoist Movement'

Book: Hello Bastar: The Untold Story Of India’s Maoist Movement

Author: Rahul Pandita
l Tranquebar
l Rs250
l 202 pages

A significant chapter in India’s history is the peasant uprising in Naxalbari in the late sixties spawned by CPM leaders Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar, who became disillusioned with parliamentary political processes.

The Naxalite movement itself was ruthlessly crushed but its ideology proved to be a hydra, springing various people’s movements and struggles, such as the CPI-ML (Liberation), CPI-ML (New Democracy), the MCC or PW. Loosely labelled as Maoists, these various factions — active in the in the jungles of Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal — have become what the Indian state calls its gravest internal security threat.

Who make up the Maoist leaders and cadres? What is their alternate vision of development? How do they continue to exert a powerful influence on Adivasis, Dalits and the disenfranchised?

This is a subject that has scarcely been touched upon in mainstream publishing. The entry of a book like Hello Bastar therefore raises great expectations. Unfortunately, promises are belied.

Hastily produced and written, it suffers from a lack of focus and clarity of thought. The chapters make disconnected jumps, from subjects like a scenario on ideologue Kobad Ghandy’s arrest (constructed, we are told, by inputs from intelligence sources), a brief history of the struggle in Andhra, the entry of the Maoists into Abujhmaad, an account of the Maoists’ urban agenda, and a sketchy account of the courtship of Anuradha Shanbag and Kobad Ghandy and their rise in Maoist leadership, which doesn’t seem to quite fit in with the title of the book.

Undoubtedly, the story of how Anuradha with her urban background went on to win the hearts and minds of adivasis in the
remote jungles is fascinating and poignant.

But perhaps the biographical details and the afterword by Kobad Ghandy should be part of another book and not in one that purports to be an account of a movement.

This inchoate and fragmented approach is evident throughout the book and prevents a real exploration of ideas or progression in thought.

Quotes from various books and writings are picked up at random but not thought through, and vague generalisations abound. For example “As compared to PW the MCC was considered to be a less disciplined party.” Who is making this observation? Pandita himself? Or ideologues and Maoist leaders like Ganapathi whom he has met?

Or what can we make of this observation, “In this part of the country, I think, there is hardly any difference between a mongrel and an adivasi. Upon being kicked by the woman, the mongrel ran to the Maoists just as the adivasis ran to them after being kicked by the State.”

There are several instances when the book attributes something to Ganapathi but we are never given any reference frame. Was this part of a conversation with Pandita, a quote from a document, or just something mouthed by other cadres?

The book is most interesting in the brief chapter of embedded journalism when Pandita spends a day or so with the Maoists.
These vignettes and the photographs of people like woman commander Tarakka, or 14-year-old Suresh of Chetna Natya Manch (the cultural wing of the Maoists) provide some tantalising glimpses of a people we know so little about. But these nuggets are simply not enough to sustain a book.

If only the editors had not rushed to press and urged Pandita to expand and enlarge upon his research into the fascinating but far too brief accounts of local personalities, incidents and anecdotes of the Maoist movement, the book could have been an invaluable one.