IN THE SHADOW OFFEAR
In Maoist heartland, this election is a sideshow to the grind of hard life
Votes seem pretty cheap here,” says an Aam Aadmi Party volunteer who has come from Delhi to help with the party campaign. He is distributing pamphlets and notices that tribals take the pamphlet and then ask for Rs 10 or 20 if the party wants their vote.
He is stunned but this is Bastar, one of India’s most backward tribal regions. It’s the heartland of Maoist insurgency, yet, interestingly, an electoral bastion of BJP, which has not lost a Lok Sabha election here since 1998. This time though, the BJP’s sitting MP Dinesh Kashyap, 51, may not have it easy. He is being challenged by Congress’s Deepak Karma, 37, son of Mahendra Karma who was killed in a Maoist attack on May 25, 2013. He is hoping to ride a sympathy wave to sail through. Making the contest exciting and daunting for both these candidates is a new entrant armed with a powerful narrative of victimhood and exploitation that could resonate decisively in this region scarred by war and poverty. Her’s is the story of a teacher who was labelled a Maoist conduit, thrown into jail, allegedly tortured and sexually abused. AAP candidate Soni Sori, 39, narrates it to whoever cares to listen as she goes door to door with a group of volunteers, many of them from outside the region.
Her supporters introduce Sori to voters as a tribal daughter who was wronged. Then she takes over: “Four years ago, I was a daughter, a wife and a teacher. Today, I am a widow, an alleged Maoist supporter, and I’m fighting this election.” But Sori is well aware that appealing to voters’ emotions alone will not bring votes. So, in a rather unique move, she has released a declarationcum-manifesto on stamp paper, listing
AAP CANDIDATE SONI SORI AND CONGRESS’S DEEPAK KARMACAMPAIGN IN BASTAR
51 issues she will work on if elected. From empowering gram panchayats to improving living and working conditions of policemen and officers to providing legal help to jailed tribals to giving loans to farmers, Sori has promised quick solutions to all these issues, or her resignation if she falters. Still, that’s not the essence of her campaign. “It is about pride,” she says. “As a tribal, if I could rise, they too will.”
Swami Agnivesh agrees. “This is a war-torn place; nobody really wants to stand up. Her candidature will encourage many to break free from the grip of terror,” says the social activist who is a star campaigner for Sori along with senior AAP leader Prashant Bhushan. A plan to bring in AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal fizzled out at the last minute, not least because there is barely any election-related activity in this region,
save for an occasional vehicle blaring slogans through a loudspeaker or hoardings in a handful of towns. This is largely due to security concerns, says a senior police officer.
Campaigners have, however, found a way to reach voters. “Since there is no market or administration, villagers walk for miles to purchase basic commodities and sell their produce at the weekly market or haat. They are hard-pressed for time but since they gather in larger numbers and the location is relatively safer, parties try catching them there,” the police officer says.
Going into interior areas—Bastar is a vast constituency with 1.29 million voters spread across six sparsely populated districts of undulating terrain— is daunting as roads are non-existent and where there exist, they have been mined and turned into death traps by the rebels. Such is the climate of fear that Bastar was the only constituency in Chhattisgarh that voted in the third phase on April 10—the rest of the state votes on April 17 and 24. Though the Maoists have suffered reverses in the past few years, they retain the capacity for spectacular strikes as evidenced by last May’s wipeout of the Congress leadership at Jheeram Ghati as well as two punishing attacks on the state police and CRPF on February 28 and March 11 this year that left 21 dead.
Yet, strangely, the issues of security and insurgency are hardly part of the local political discourse. BJP’s candidate for prime minister Narendra Modi did appeal to the rebels to give up arms at his March 28 rally in Kondagaon, but there is no road map for peace. “What can you say to people who do not believe in your Constitution? Still, our Chief Minister (Raman Singh) invited them for talks but nobody responded,” says Kashyap, who won the seat in a bypoll necessitated by the death of his father Bali Ram Kashyap in 2011.
Karma isn’t convinced. He questions the record of the three-term BJP government of Raman Singh as well as the sitting MP and his predecessors. “I am up against BJP, which has, for two decades, sent members of one family to Parliament from here and they have not done anything for the region,” he says, adding that he’ll work to root out corruption, help people improve agriculture, find jobs, and realise the potential of their mineral wealth. Being the victim of violence that has torn this land, Karma cherishes peace and has a “Gandhian plan” to achieve it. He has “initiated the experiment, the results of which will be visible in two years” but won’t discuss its details because “Maoists will read it and obstruct it”.
If there’s a person who can empathise with Karma, it’s Sori. She was ‘punished’, her supporters claim, for being neutral in the bloody conflict, and she wants to ensure no one else is. “The Sukma collector was abducted, negotiations took place and a list was drawn up of prisoners to be released in lieu of the collector. Maoists let the collector go but the government did not do what it was to do. Tell me, who should I hold responsible? If there is trust, only then will violence come down,” she says.
If this was not problem enough, poor governance has compounded the situation. On her way to campaign in Sukma, Soni Sori’s supporters spot a large group of women outside a ration store. The tribal women have walked miles to buy subsidised ration, only to find the store locked. As Sori begins making calls to arrange for the shop to be opened, she remarks, “This is the kind of life these people have, completely left behind and isolated.” Will this Lok Sabha election make a difference? Followthe writer on Twitter
BJP HAS NOT LOST A LOK SABHA ELECTION SINCE 1998 IN ONE OFINDIA’S MOST BACKWARD TRIBAL REGIONS.