Pandu, head of the east Bastar chapter of the ‘Dandakaranya People’s Government’

Dandakaranya Forests (Bastar): A lugubrious full moon is weighing itself up behind the craggy hill and, the day’s work done, the “people’s government” of Dandakaranya is settling down to another night at the office.

Dinner must be cooked for the ranks, the ill and the battle-scarred taken care of, arms and ammunition secured, the night guard posted, the informer network whistled afresh into alert and the route to tomorrow’s camp headquarters mapped.

The roll call’s just over and the tasks handed out; it’ll be a long night like every other, and an early morning, everyone’s at their stations.

It’s an open-plan workplace, a bivouac scattered under a ragged forest canopy that defies address — somewhere in east Bastar, we are told, no more. We have no way of being wiser.

Shortly after we were picked up at our pre-arranged rendezvous on the highway, we became Hansel and Gretel in the hands of our changing guard — we had no notion of where we could be, much less of how to trace a path back.

A short dusk-hour break in a village courtyard, then a motorbike dash by dark deeper into the jungle, the rutted road having lapsed into a dirt track cutting through an obstacle course — underbrush and unploughed fields, causeways and riverbeds, sandy humps and troughs, even a precarious stretch of plateau. The bike leapt and dove, catching, at one point, a pack of rabbits startled by the headlights.

Another village, another walled courtyard, another halt, this time with a piping meal of rice and dal. A short nap and after that another change of guard and another stretch ahead, on foot. Deeper in, deeper through the dark amid the eerie howling of dogs, or were they jackals? Four hours later, a little past daybreak, we were delivered to the headquarters of a rival sovereignty — the bereft and nebulous empire of Bastar’s Naxalites.

Somewhere along the trek we had crossed an invisible line and entered the slipstream of a contrary world, another country. No passports asked for, no visas stamped, but the crossover was no less for the absence of those formalities. Allegiances had been reversed, legitimacies flipped, definitions turned on their head.

When Comrade Pandu, de facto head of the east Bastar chapter of the “Dandakaranya People’s Government”, talks of the enemy, he means police and the paramilitary; when he refers to imperialists, he is referring to the Government of India; when he talks about loyalty and commitment, which he does often, he talks about loyalty and commitment to the scrapping of the Constitution and the overthrow of the governance system it has ordained.

“Welcome to the people’s republic,” he tells us, fist clenched and raised, “It’s a sham democracy you come from, it works for 5 per cent of the people and kicks the rest where it hurts most, it must be deposed.”

Left to him, Comrade Pandu, gaunt and forever Guevara-like about his headgear, would have shot the “enemy regime” dead with a burst of his AK-47, a prize, he proudly tells us, from the lightning raid on the Nayagarh armoury in Orissa in the February of 2008.

But that’s a far fantasy and Pandu is no dreamer, even though he dreams an improbable dream — violent overthrow of the current system and the establishment of a “Federal Union of People’s Democratic Republics of India”.

“We are embryonic, we have no illusions about that, we are not strong enough to headquarter our government because we can’t defend it, we are weak compared to the might of the state we fight, but that is no reason to give up. Revolution will not be born if there is no embryo.”

The camp is thick with shadows shuffling about in the dark, guns slung over their shoulders. Some of the weaponry, like Comrade Pandu’s, is sophisticated, but most of it of dubious vintage and even more dubious ability. Shivlal, teenaged and barefoot, carries a single-bore that he says he has never fired. “Never needed to,” he says.

But what if someone takes aim at him? He bares a fine, full set of teeth. “They haven’t made a bullet with my name on it.” Utterly filmi yet utterly craftless, a confidence deeply swigged in the headiness of youth.

Women cadres at a camp

His leader may often sound equally intoxicated. Comrade Pandu’s exposition on eventual aims and objectives in this moonlit theatre might often tempt you into thinking you’ve entered the rehearsal rooms of an ultra-Marxist skit, a fanciful indulgence that can’t be for real. But little in this story is fictitious other than the names of characters that populate it — Comrade Pandu, for instance, isn’t the man’s real name, but he and his mission are real enough.

These are men and women who have forsaken more commodious — if also more ordinary — lives elsewhere in the pursuit of belief. They have lost — and taken — lives, thousands of them over the past decade of resurgence along the country’s famished eastern flank, right down from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh through Orissa and Chhattisgarh. They bear, as a collective, a formidable and ominous sounding title bestowed by the Prime Minister, no less — the “biggest internal security threat to India, a virus that needs to be wiped out”.

Comrade Rupi — it’s the name of a jungle bird, not a virus, she sharply reminds you — would gladly return the compliment. “It’s about how you view the world,” she says. “From up there we might look like a virus to the system, from down here, the system looks like a virus. What has it given the vast majority of this country? Sixty years after so-called Independence, nothing has changed for most, things have gotten worse.”

But for her guerrilla fatigues and her ease with guns, you’d mistake her for a schoolteacher — she’s thin as a reed, bespectacled and soft-toned. She is also, like most of the Naxalite vanguard in these jungles, from Andhra Pradesh.

“Long back,” she says, “Andhra was long back, at least eight years. I hear my mother cries for me sometimes, but that is all right, this is more important, the fight we set out to fight. I jumped off the fence and committed myself, I did not come here to go back.”

Is it getting anywhere, though, this fight, or is it just meandering about in this wilderness day after day, camp after makeshift camp?

“Again, it depends on the way you look,” Rupi counters, eyes focused on the far woods. “There is a fight to be fought for people who have nothing and someone has to fight it. If we were doing so badly and if this were so meaningless, do you think we would have earned that dubious description from the Prime Minister? If you like, that’s one of the things that keeps me going day after day, night after night.”