Peace has apparently returned to Jungle Mahal, however tentative, amid the retreat of the Maoists, the growing presence of the government and the domination of the new ruling party, Trinamul.

The guns have fallen silent, mutilated bodies no longer spring from the fields and bushes, and CRPF convoys are less visible on the jungle roads. Local people throng the tea stalls in the evening and chat under anaemic lights, a situation unthinkable a few months ago.

But the talk stops when a stranger approaches even with a friendly grin.

The veneer of normality peels off further as one visits the remoter villages where residents are as hesitant to talk to outsiders as they are to travel back through the forests after sundown.

Drivers turn jittery when suspicious-looking motorcycle riders tail them or stop them to ask who they are and where they are going.

The mine-clearing vehicles parked inside the fortified CRPF compounds, protected by barbed wires and gun-totting guards with their steely gaze, are a reminder of the spiral of violence that had gripped the forests and their inhabitants in the recent past.

Caught between their latent fear and an eagerness to share their views, people here cautiously reveal their mixed feelings about the Maoists and the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities.

Men and women in Chandipur, Shirsi, Koima and adjoining villages near Jhargram town spoke positively of the Maoists’ anti-liquor campaign, free health clinics and small developmental initiatives, but expressed horror at the bloodshed they carried out.

“The women were happy as the Maobadis stopped the men from blowing their income on alcohol and beating their wives when they objected. They also insisted that parents send their children to schools, and opened a coaching class in the village,’’ said Putul Mahato, a young housewife in Shirsi.

Others cited how the Maoists had partly funded the construction of a road connecting the village to the main road.

Monorama Mahato, Putul’s neighbour, said Maoist armed squads visited the villages and held meetings urging them to resist the Centre-state joint forces. “They never misbehaved with us or forced us to feed them,’’ she said.

In Chandipur, people recalled the free treatment and medicines they would receive at a clinic manned by local quacks and doctors from Calcutta, who had come at the rebels’ initiative. A Rs 5 registration fee was all that the villagers needed to pay.

It was a godsend for them since the Mohonpur block health Centre and the Jhargram subdivisional hospital, located at the opposite ends of a 25km stretch, were too far away. The joint forces closed the clinic after the government reclaimed the area.

If such initiatives had endeared the Maoists and the People’s Committee to a sizeable number of villagers, their summary killings of political rivals and suspected police moles --- sometimes even without the verdict of a kangaroo court --- appalled them equally.

“Tapan Mahato, a CPM worker in our village, was killed by the Maoists. No people’s court was held. We came to know from Maoist posters that Tapan was accorded ‘capital punishment’ for being a police mole,’’ Ratan Mahato said.

Also, the Maoists’ extortion and the way they and the People’s Committee forced men and women to join their rallies at odd hours and walk mile after mile had made the people sick of them, said Gurucharan Mahato.

Almost 50km away, at the tribal village of Chhotopelia in Lalgarh, residents said they too had joined in the Maoists’ parallel developmental initiatives during the rebels’ heyday.

“We had volunteered our labour in widening and levelling a bumpy village road to nearby Dalilpur Chowk, where the People’s Committee was formed in November 2008. A coaching class for village children was opened, too, but it could not be sustained after the organisers were arrested,’’ said Daktar Mandi.

At Chakadoba in Belpahari block, the People’s Committee used to run a health centre but construction of the building was stopped after the forces reclaimed the area.

The Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and the CPI-ML (People’s War), which merged in 2004 to form the CPI (Maoist), had begun their groundwork in the late ’80s, mainly among the tribals in the Belpahari-Simlipal area.

Initially, they had joined hands with the Jharkhandi groups, most of which were opposed to the CPM, which controlled some of the panchayats and held the Binpur Assembly seat with Congress support.

The rebels made common cause with them on issues such as the tribals’ forest rights, a hike in the collection price for forest products, and the police and foresters’ highhandedness, especially against women.

Majhi Marwas, a social organisation of the Santhals, became close to the Maoists and many of its members were arrested on the charge of acting as the rebels’ front men.

“The Maoists became a rallying point for people opposed to the CPM as the mainstream Opposition had failed. Trinamul had never been a force to reckon with in our area,’’ said Subrata Bhattacharya, a Belpahari-based state Congress committee member.

At Sijua panchayat, run by the Jharkhand Anusilan Party (JAP), its supporters said 37 of them spent three months in jail after a clash with CPM supporters during the 2008 panchayat polls.

“We joined the Maoist-led People’s Committee to survive the onslaught by the CPM and its partisan police,’’ Dasmat Murmu said.

But relations between the Jharkhandis and the Maoists soured after the rebels accused the Majhi Marwas and Jharkhandi leaders of capitulating to the government’s pressure and colluding with the CPM and the police in killing Maoists.

JAP leader Manoranjan Mahato and the Congress’s Bhattacharya, however, said the Maoists alienated themselves by killing suspected police moles and CPM collaborators irrespective of the their class and caste, and by refusing any space to other anti-CPM political forces.

“They killed many leaders of the Jharkhandi factions, from Sudhir Mandi to Babu Bose,” Manoranjan said.

“In contrast to their earlier habits, particularly that of the MCC, the Maoists stopped caring about public opinion after they gained control of a large swathe of Jungle Mahal and lumpen elements got the upper hand in many areas,” Bhattacharya said.

“Kishenji (the slain Maoist top gun) compared the killings to the use of pesticide to save crops. But I told him they had failed to differentiate between good and harmful pests and ended up ruining the crops.”

Bhattacharya, who had “good relations” with the Maoist ranks, said he had been instrumental to the “surrender” of 68 rebels, including Jagori Baskey.

The non-tribal Jharkhandis are more strongly opposed to the Maoists. “We were not consulted before the demolition of CPM leader Anuj Pandey’s home in Dharampur. This brought the joint forces in and turned us into cannon fodder,’’ said Ashis Kundu, a non-tribal member of Sijua panchayat.

“The joint forces’ presence has ensured peace and emboldened us to speak up against Maoist terror. They should not be withdrawn,’’ Kundu said.

Busy reclaiming their political space, the Jharkhandis now resent Trinamul’s increasing hegemony and have been demanding autonomy for the state’s three Jungle Mahal districts: West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia.

“In the name of the Jana Jagaran Mancha, Trinamul’s Bhairav Bahini has replaced the CPM’s harmads,” JAP leader Mahato said, echoing the Maoists. The CPM too complains about the Bhairavs.

Nisith Mahato, leader of the Trinamul-backed Mancha, denied the allegations of atrocities but claimed credit for “paying the Maoists back in their own coin”.

The Jharkhandi-turned-Trinamul leader from Jhambani said he and his associates had launched the Mancha following the murder of Soumen Bhagat, a Jharkhandi panchayat pradhan, by “the CPM and the Maoists together” in July 2010.

“We followed the Maoists’ own strategy to fight them. Ours is a non-party platform like the People’s Committee. We reclaimed remote villages from the Maoists by marching into them en masse while the joint forces gave us cover. We shared information about the movement of the Maoists,” the history graduate said.

He, however, denied having been supplied guns by Trinamul leaders and the security forces, as the CPM and the Maoists alleged. Nevertheless, he insisted: “The new government was suffering from indecision. We got it to launch the battle against the Maoists.”

His mentor and Trinamul MP Subhendu Adhikari lauded the Mancha’s role. “The Mancha has helped bring Jungle Mahal’s youth back into mainstream politics and is now mobilising them to pursue the chief minister’s development agenda. Only the Maoist-Marxist nexus is sore about it,’’ he said.

Jungle Mahal’s politics seems to have turned full circle.