Naxalites in the Bastar jungles. Telegraph picture

Dandakaranya Forests (Bastar): Every day is a mission trek for Bastar’s Maoists and every night a temporary station. This is not merely a journey without maps, it appears woefully lost on destination too.

For the third night in a row, the camp’s Red helmsmen have evaded addressing issues of where and how: What do they want to be? How will they get there? What happens if and when they do? “Charcha karenge,” (We’ll talk) — but that’s a promise forever postponed to the exigencies of wandering on in the jungles.

“Things are happening all the time,” Comrade Kunju tells us assuringly, “The surest sign of that is that the government is worried and it does not know what to do.” Kunju is a nondescript little man, stubbly, balding and reticent, but from what he has to say, he is evidently high in the Maoist scheme.

Any suggestion that he is on a march to nowhere sets his little round eyes afire. “So why are we such a huge problem for the government? Why is the State having to mount offensive after offensive? And still we have power to stun and run, you can’t say that’s getting nowhere,” he argues, a little agitated.

Kunju has a set of blistered datelines to certify success: the Jehanabad jailbreak of 2005; the chilling Manikonta massacre of Salwa Judum activists in 2006; Rani Bodli and the beheading of 77 policemen in 2007; the raid on the Nayagarh armoury last year; and recently the gory — and profitable — ambush of a police party in Gadhchiroli.

“Want more?” Kunju asks, fishing out a wad of stapled sheets from his shoulder bag, “There is lots more about the progress of our war in this, it would not have been so thick if we were getting nowhere.”

Little can take away from the significance of the Maoists’ spectacular expansion down the eastern flank of the country, which is also socio-economically the most exploited and backward. But it is equally apparent — and pertinent — that they are far from proving themselves a sustainable solution to problems they tear into. Naxalism is grand on principle and end — an egalitarian society — but deeply flawed in method and tactic.

It has often lost its way so grievously, even its articulate patrons in the civil liberties and human rights movement have stepped back to fault them. In the jungles of Bastar, as elsewhere, the Naxalite project has run into roadblocks it cannot negotiate. It is not powerful enough to overthrow the State, it is not resourceful enough to carve a constituency of its own — call it a parallel government — and sustain it.

Eventually, somewhere, Naxalite strategy came up against avowed Naxalite intentions. Naxalites stopped tribals from picking tendu leaves, a key occupation, because contractors would not up wages. Naxalites stopped tribals from picking contract jobs — roads, bridges, public buildings — because, again, the wages were not good enough. Eventually, there were no wages coming in.

The Bastar tribal has a reputation for requiring little more than his daily dose of mahua (a fermented drink off the fruit of the mahua tree) but that’s fable. How long would he go without work and money? How long would he pay for a war that nobody was winning? What good was the flaming red slogan of pride when there wouldn’t be a body to house that pride?

That is how Salwa Judum arrived sometime in 2005. At an angered meeting of starving tribals in Dantewada in southern Bastar. Defy the Naxalites, they said, defy and earn a wage. Counter-revolution. It didn’t have a name to begin with, nor any shape. But they were on the way. Mahendra Karma, Congress leader and himself a Gond tribal from Bastar, saw the possibility of a chink in the Naxalite ranks and rushed into it with gusto.

Within weeks, Salwa Judum had been institutionalised. And Karma wasn’t alone in this. BJP rival and chief minister Raman Singh was equally keen. This, after all, was an Establishment job, a front against a common enemy, the faceless menace who had stuck in the side too long.

Here was a ready instrument to fight a battle the State had only half-heartedly fought; here was a chance to finish. Use the anger. Set tribal against tribal, let them settle it amongst themselves. Bands of villagers — mostly young men but also, in some cases women — had been formed into vigilante groups. They had been funded, armed, assured of support and assistance.

The fires of Salwa Judum were lit and a devastating civil war unleashed. Hundreds have been killed in fratricidal battles Salwa Judum started, more than a hundred thousand tribals have been forced out of their moorings and packed into insecure camps. Bastar became an anarchy bleeding between deadlocked armies who regularly make dubious claims of victory.

East Bastar is a calmer theatre, less periled by the Salwa Judum fires than Dantewada in the south, and Kunju can make more realistic assertions of ascendancy. Even so, he won’t be drawn into discussing the future beyond tomorrow.

The Maoists claim they run more than a dozen local governments in Dandakaranya but they all remained headquartered in the knapsacks of mobile cadres. “True,” says Kunju, “We do not have the wherewithal to settle down, but that does not mean we never will.” For the moment, though, they must just walk on with no roadmaps at hand.