"Are the women still topless,” my father asked the moment he heard I had had my first encounter with the tribal people in the Dandkaranya forest. I had hoped my father would ask me if I was safe. Perhaps being a well-informed central government retiree my father knew better. After confirming that the hotel food in Bastar was still as bad as it was three decades ago, my father quickly handed the phone to my mother who asked me if I had been to the Danteshwari temple yet?
It was my second evening in Bastar. Earlier in the day, when they saw me, tribal children ran for their life. I felt like an intruder. By now I knew that everything I had read about the place in newspapers was lopsided to the point of being ridiculous.
The only thing that scared me was a mosquito. For a warzone, Bastar is beautiful beyond measure. The Dandkaranya forest confirms the primeval human belief that heaven is hilly and green. Depending on where you stand politically, the drive from Jagdalpur to Dantewada is the highway to hell or the stairway to heaven. Either way, one is more likely to die of malaria. As I hung up and got stoned on the weed sourced locally in Jagdalpur, I pulled out the little red book from my bag and began reading.
I chose the little red book as my only reading material for the trip despite being handed a lot of books by journalists and academics because ever since I quit active journalism, I have cultivated a suspicion bordering on disdain for the travelling journalist. I wanted to read what the people in the forests were translating and reading, and for what it’s worth, the little red book happens to be that text.
Ten minutes later I found myself lingering on the shortest quotation in the book on page sixty-one: “Every communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’” Whose gun, whose truth, I wondered. I thought about the tribal woman who was no longer topless and my mother. Both were alien to each other, and yet despite their sense of alienation from each other, my mother and a tribal woman had the same impression about the police, the local and central government, and watched the same third-rate television serials.
A trip to Bastar confirms that no matter how much we quote Marx, Locke, Hegel or Hume, it is impossible to deny that the only real political doctrine being applied in the world is Machiavellian. As a result, everyone is a victim in Bastar if you ask the right questions. The CRPF, the police, the tribal population, the forest, the journalist, the businessman, the politician, the iron-ore under the earth, the bad food at the best restaurants, everyone and everything is a victim. (I am sure the Naxals too feel victimised but since I did not bump into any of them, I cannot confirm it.) People demand and decry democracy at the same time. No one knows what the tribal population thinks, what they talk to each other about when they are alone, and the horrors they witness when they dream.
In Bastar a tribal reporter sang a folk song in Gondi, which I have labeled ‘Democracy in Dandkaranya’ in my mind. The song teases hunters who return without a kill. “O hunter we could hear the birds and the beasts here in the village, the forest is full of them/yet you come back empty handed!”
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