Tribal boy Tatyunga being trained to fight against Maoists at the police camp in Dantewada, south Bastar. (Sankarshan Thakur)

Dantewada (South Bastar), Nov. 1: The sun hasn’t broken through the night yet but the camp grounds are already profuse with sweat and panting. Dozens of boys are out on drill, their instructor’s hard command tearing through the chatter of birds, their stomp-stomp on red earth powdering the dawn with a surreal haze.

They wear ragged shorts and shirts and standard-issue boots, and they all carry guns, with pride, and with varying degrees of unease. You can tell they are new to handling heavy metal, as well they might be. Many of them are barely in the mid-teens; they belong in a classroom, not in a weapons-training gig at a paramilitary base. But circumstances haven’t afforded them the luxury of such choices.

This is the Bastar wilderness, bereft core of a long-smouldering and mostly unheeded conflict whose relentless cascade has only lately alarmed the nation into urgency. And these boys are preparing to become the blistered frontlines of future battles — lead dogs of war with jungle pedigree.

In a few weeks, they’ll secure a fancy title — special police officer (SPO) — and jobs only few would fancy. Theirs will be to guide Green Hunt on its perilous campaigns, to track the trails and sniff out the enemy, to be the first ones to engage, and to die.

They come to police camps such as this one in batches of 50 to 70, get rudimentary warfare tutoring, and then are packed off to the many shifting frontlines in south Bastar.

“They are great material for the job,” says instructor Ram Chaturvedi, himself a Chhattisgarh policeman. “They are rough, well-built and obedient; just a little training and they become great fighters. Jazba hai inmein badi ladai ka (they have the passion for the big battle).”

Tatyunga, a young trainee, has no notion — nor any means of processing — the whys and wherefores of the lofty ideological objectives he is meant to soldier for. He has arrived here, like most others, driven by a variety of extant ills — revenge, the notion that the gun will best help him achieve it, perhaps even a callow sense of machismo that the machine in his hands gives him.

There’s something about the way he cleans the dust off the barrel after a gun-crawl on the grounds that tells you he’s enamoured of his weapon. “The Maovadis killed my brother and maimed my father last year,” Tatyunga tells you. “That’s when I decided. Most of the boys here are from families that the Maovadis have ruined. If you were me, you too would think you are better off in these parts with a gun than without. Without, you just wait to get killed.”

Alas, these would-be SPOs make up only half the horrid story of generations of Dantewada’s youth swept up in a ruinous confrontation that has already logged three decades.

The other half are those recruited to serve the Maoists’ revolutionary project, cadres, as one guerrilla leader graphically put it, that “thicken red fire at the front”. They begin to enrol and conscript them even younger, age being no impediment to the commencement of revolutionary life. Setting up “bal dalams” — children for revolution, if you will — is an institutionalised Maoist practice; the earlier you catch them, the better fed they are on doctrine and dogma.

Thereon, they graduate to the dalams (the militia), and the better ones to commanding ranks of the revolution itself. They serve quite the same sordid scheme as their brethren on the other side of the fence — they fuel these armies with their raw daring and son-of-the-soil insights, and they are their fodder.

Any age-profiling of the casualties of war in Chhattisgarh would reveal that the bulk of hits has been taken by tribal boys or boys barely turned into men — close to 200 of the 280-odd killed in action this year, according to one independent estimate. Officially drafted SPOs of a welfare democracy on one side, card-carrying cadres of the people’s revolution on the other, both dispensable means in pursuit of contrary ends.

“We are looped in a totally medieval and mindless war game,” says Kanak Tiwari, Gandhian intellectual and one of Chhattisgarh’s foremost lawyers. “I don’t approve of Maoists and I can’t defend the many omissions and injustices of successive governments. But I am a proud Chhattisgarhi who feels shamed and helpless, neither side is doing anything for the people other than hatching plots to kill. Guns will resolve nothing, they’ll only spawn more guns and more dead bodies. The government claims it has buried Salwa Judum, but its bloody strategies are alive, our generations are being poisoned and done to death.”

Slammed by the civil society and censured by the Supreme Court, the Chhattisgarh government officially called a halt to the controversial Salwa Judum — a programme that armed tribal clusters and set them against the Maoists — a year or so ago. So destructive — and futile — was the chain of revenge and retribution Salwa Judum unleashed across the tribal habitations of south Bastar that even fanatical advocates such as Congress leader Mahendra Karma are today a shade discomfited by the mission they helped launch.

“It was a phase of this struggle against Maoists,” says Karma. “Maybe some things went wrong, maybe we could not channelise tribal anger against Maoist excesses properly, but it is necessary to do so even today. We must erect opposition in some form, we have to crush them.”

The SPO production factories, sprouted in camps across the districts of south Bastar, are — by open and proud admission of politicians and policemen alike — a key pillar of the embattlement Karma strongly counsels, an unabashed vestige of the proscribed Salwa Judum.

“These boys are absolutely crucial to us, to the state and the entire system,” a top police officer in Jagdalpur, in the heart of Bastar, emphasises in the defence of their employ. “There is no way of fighting off the Maoists without them because they know these forests and its ways, we don’t. Brave fellows and unsung fellows, but in many ways they are critical to our idea of India; we can’t move without our SPOs.”

Tatyunga and his like are probably fortunate they have no intimation of such burdens on their fledgling shoulders; they’re in it to save their own skins. Welfare democracy — or people’s revolution — are only collaterals beyond their comprehension, though it’s theirs to bear the damages.