Every place that earns the description, ‘remote’, also earns the right to a certain mystery. The remoteness may be a gift of the administration’s policies or the lack of them. But in Lalgarh, as in some other parts of western Bengal, the mystery has come to be associated with one word, ‘Maoists’.

A sense of something elusive has surrounded Lalgarh since three boys and four men were arrested on November 4 from the area, in connection with the Salboni blasts that could have killed Bengal’s chief minister. The day after, policemen from the Lalgarh thana assaulted a group of women from the Chhotopelia village, seriously injuring one of them in the eye. Overnight, the Lalgarh villages were put out of reach of the nearest district town, Jhargram, and of the local police station by digging up roads or placing tree-trunks across them. Within a few days, the tribal agitation had made the administration sit up and take note. The reasons, of course, had less to do with the spontaneous outrage expressed by a wronged people than with the smelling of a Maoist rat.

The tribal-dominated cluster of villages in Lalgarh is an area in turmoil. The unrest has spilled over to Jhargram town and the district headquarter of West Midnapore. But it is not a familiar picture of political agitation that greets someone making his way to Lalgarh from Jhargram. No loudspeakers blaring out grievances against the administration, no marches spewing anti-establishment slogans, and no leaders trying to use the media to send their message across. It was only after the movement of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities gained enough momentum that one or two axe-wielding roadblock teams were spotted, or young men on motorbikes carrying word of their agitation beyond the borders of tribal villages. For the rest of the time, the movement spoke, quite eloquently, through the clandestine placing or removal of roadblocks, posters stuck on trees or crude placards, or the odd photocopy of a hand-written charter of demands that the police-administration was expected to meet for any scaling down of the agitation.

The people behind the ‘people’s movement’ took some finding. They had made their presence felt only when the police or administration tried to breach their fortress. On Monday in Kantapahari, however, they came in large numbers, from hundreds of villages, to attend a meeting called by the Committee. The meeting itself was a discovery of sorts; one was indeed supposed to take place, but in Lalgarh’s Dalilpur Chowk. There were speculations that Maoist squad leaders, supposedly remote-controlling the movement from the forests of Belpahari and Jharkhand, would be attending it. On reaching Lalgarh, it was clear that the meeting, assuming there was one, had been wrapped up long before the appointed hour. What Lalgarh was preparing for instead was a public meeting on the schoolground in Kantapahari.

It was this school that Buddhadeb Patra and Goutam Patra — the boys picked up by the police on November 4 — went to. The headmaster, Asim Ganguly, a genial man who wore a despondent look now, said that the school had been all but closed for the last ten days because hardly any of their 833 students and 16 teachers could turn up, with a virtual bandh in the area every day. The Madhyamik Tests were round the corner, and he saw little chance of them being held in any school in the area. But it was a just cause that the Committee was fighting for, so he would try to fix a date for the tests once the agitation was over.

About 300 yards from the headmaster’s room, a generator started off, and one of the first words that came out of the loudspeakers powered by it was a note of caution for the assembled journalists. They were to confine themselves to the school-building and to the road separating it from the grounds, and keep their cameras shut. Journalists and photographers complied with a readiness that was telling. I remembered roadblocks near Jhargram made of the thinnest of branches that would require no more than a kick or shove to be moved aside. Yet, not one was removed, either during the day or at night.

The props for the meeting were a long table with a dozen or so chairs, flanked by posters listing the demands. Interestingly, the posters were written in blue, a marked departure from the red used so far. People were coming in by two and threes, a steady trickle that flowed into the grounds and headed straight for the far end, behind the table and chairs, where the bare field gave way to a thicket. As more and more people gathered, the congregation seemed to recede deeper into the woods. After the initial instructions and the calling out of names, the generator was turned off. It was a strange spectacle, like a green room left open to the audience before the actual play began. Only, the audience was too far to get a clear view of things; besides, no one could say for sure whether the actual play was the one going on now or was about to follow.

In the Hari-mandir nearby, a village elder was reading from the Gita: “There is no goodness in this material world; everything is sinister.” At Deepak Pratihar’s house, his pregnant wife, Lakshmi, narrated how she was kicked and thrown to the ground by the police the day they arrested Deepak. He said that the the police targeted him because he was affiliated to the Jharkhand Party (Aditya), which is opposed to the CPI(M). It is common in these parts, before the polls, to round up opposition party workers and arrest them. In an incident a couple of years ago, when a group of villagers were held for making trouble in the BDO’s office, the CPI(M) supporters were segregated and later released, while the rest were put through unsavoury modes of interrogation. If the CPI(M) has been pushed to a corner now, Maoists or no Maoists, few in Lalgarh are complaining. If the Garbeta (East) MLA, Susanta Ghosh, has said that the CPI(M) knows which medicine to apply for an ailment like Lalgarh, then the people too claimed to know ways of showing him who was the patient and who the physician.

For a section of the people, the police are an extension of the CPI(M). For the others, mostly women from the more interior tribal villages, the police’s political colours are irrelevant. Policemen are those who attack, rape and kill. The fact that the assault of women by the police has emerged as a bigger issue in the present agitation than the illegal detention of men show that tribal women have suffered the excesses of the police for far too long.

But Lalgarh’s relationship with the police has not always been strained. Police camps like those in Kalaimuri, Dharampur and other places, which have been asked to be withdrawn immediately, were regarded with much pride by villagers when Ajay Nanda was the SP in 2003-04. But subsequent postings have steadily eroded the image of the force, turning it from protector to aggressor. It is no surprise that the punishments pronounced on the policemen by the agitators — holding their ears and apologizing, and crawling with their nose to the ground, all the way from Dalilpur Chowk to Chhotopelia Chowk — put humiliation above physical torture.

At the same time, it is difficult to believe that the simple, poverty-ridden villagers would suddenly muster the courage to issue threats and ultimatums to a force before which they have only learnt to bend low. Also intriguing is the precision and coordination with which the agitation is being directed and controlled, although there is apparently no supreme leader. Add to these the strategic appearance of posters bearing the words, “biplabi (revolutionary)” or “shashastra andolan (armed struggle)”, and the suspicions about ‘another’ force become difficult to ignore. Why is it that the Bharat Jakat Majhi Marwa is acknowledged to be the representative body of Lalgarh’s tribals, while its peace attempts are repeatedly foiled by the ‘people’?

Some have detected a Maoist ‘pattern’ in the Salboni blast. The masterminds would have caused a bigger blast if they had really wanted to kill the VIPs, goes their theory. The blast was the “action” meant to bring out a “reaction” from the administration that could be used to trigger off a larger armed movement. But this takes away attention from the twin terrors of government apathy and police excesses that have been the fate of this region.

Back at the meeting ground, some women from Bahardanga village had gathered on the edges of the open field, waiting for some more to arrive. One of them was saying, “I hope they come fast. If you don’t attend this meeting, you better not think of attending another.” Talking to the women is not easy; they have been trained in the art of silence. Two men came to me and started discussing how the media were putting a Maoist tag on the movement without reason. “So why aren’t you letting us speak to the arrested boys, and go into sensitive villages like Banshber?” I asked. “Why, you did go to a village, and you were sitting and talking to people at the Hari-mandir, weren’t you?” came the answer. Nothing, I realized, went unnoticed here.

The generator came back to life, and the gathering was asked to sit down in front of the table, men to the left and women to the right. The meeting began. While the movement had so far refrained from pointing fingers at the ruling party, a clear anti-CPI(M) edge marked this meeting. At the end, a few more demands were added to the existing eleven. One was that the money and cycles stolen from the Committee by CPI(M) goons in Garbeta on Sunday should be returned immediately.

The journalists and photographers were allowed to come inside the grounds and film and photograph these proceedings. But among the faces behind handycams and cameras, some were distinctly unfamiliar. Nothing must go unrecorded.