From a distance, it looked like a tribal ritual in progress. A small group of men, with axes, tangi, ballam, bows and arrows, had gathered on the state highway No. 6, between Jhargram and Dahijuri. In a field on the right sat men enjoying a session of handiya. Three men were playing the dhamsa and the madol as another danced to their heady beats. But a closer look revealed that there was nothing festive about the occasion. Another tree — this time an arjun — was being felled to block the motor-links between Jhargram and Lalgarh more securely. Three young men sat in front of the cut branches writing posters, dipping sponge-tipped sticks into bottles of alta.

The number of trees sacrificed at the altar of the people’s movement in Lalgarh would be close to a hundred. They were mostly date-palms, but there were some sals and arjuns as well. This is something of a paradox, for tribals are known for their symbiotic relationship with the forest and its resources. V.K. Yadav, the chief conservator of forests in West Bengal, denies that the trees being cut off to block roads are the property of the forest department. “They belong to the PWD,” he said, adding that the forest protection officers in his department would have taken immediate action had there been any mass felling of trees in the forest area.

Yadav takes pride in the fact that his department is one of the few government offices still being allowed to function in the disturbed area: “It is only because they have faith in us.” Surai Kisku of Dharampur certainly does. She received training from the department to bind sal leaves and stitch them into plates.

Paresh Tudu, among those who assembled at the tree-felling site, claimed that they were doing the PWD a favour, since the latter was supposed to cut the trees anyway to facilitate the construction of roads. So who gets all the wood once the agitation runs its course? Yadav insists that the tribals are so honest that they would hand over the trunks to the authorities straightaway. But in front of the Lalgarh police station, a group of men talked about how much money each trunk would fetch and how it would go to fund future Maoist “operations”.

Make no mistake, even the tree blockade had its uses. It made roadies out of journalists, though many of them ended up nursing aches and sprains. Till then, “bike-bahini” was a term associated with the malevolent cadre of the ruling party, which had put the fear of god into the minds of people in Nandigram not so long ago. But here in Lalgarh, a different bike-bahini was taking shape. The fleet looked valiant when the riders had to walk their vehicles across sandy banks of the Kangsabati and then over the flimsiest of bridges. And it looked comical when the pillions tried to do their Roger Kingdom act on trees sprawled across the road. Perhaps it is true, as remarked by one of the riders, that “motorbikes are the future of journalism in Bengal, just as the spade is the future of political agitation here”.