A Chhattisgarh diary

July 22

I  have to travel to Chhattisgarh on work, a trip involving a flight to Hyderabad, another flight to Raipur and then a five-hour train ride to Raigarh. I am excited because I have never been to the state before. Our work there is with the adivasis of the area whose lands have been “bought” by private companies running thermal power stations. The land has been appropriated in violation of the Atrocities Act, whose provisions the Supreme Court so dislikes (without, of course, knowing much about how the Act is actually implemented). The adivasis have filed criminal complaints against their dispossession. The Chhattisgarh police have refused to register FIRs (which is itself a crime). The flight is, of course, early and it gives me a chance to review the papers. What our polity is doing to the adivasis in the name of development is absolutely monstrous.

On landing at Hyderabad and going through the connections, about faces security check again (there’s no stamping of boarding passes here — possibly the only airport in India that doesn’t do that).

The CRPF squad is laughing loudly over something with the man in front of me. Something about the man’s boarding pass, perhaps his name. They have another exchange about it just as I mount the platform to be swept with the handheld scanner. “Rahul,” one of them says, “nobody names their child that anymore.” They all giggle.
 

Raipur is a sprawling place, quite new, and with broad roads that nobody has quite learned how to use. There are many large hoardings of the chief minister, Raman Singh, a chubby fellow who will his 15th year in office in December this year. In large parts of North India, where we have two-party contests, the BJP seems to be permanently in power and the Congress
permanently in Opposition.

Raipur station is clean: Swachh Bharat Abhiyan? I ask someone but they say it’s always been clean. The train I have been booked on to Raigarh, the Gondwana Express, is three hours late from the night before. I know this because I start getting SMSes from the railways, which adds that the time is “likely to be made up”. By the time it eventually comes it is five hours late and I’ve taken a train before, the Azad Hind Express (who names these things?) which has a large image of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad near the front of the train. I had bought an ordinary ticket and need to get a reservation. The two conductors, one about my age and the other much younger, are patient and polite. They draw up the ticket. I tip them and they are surprised.

There is a family of four with me, a couple of about 60 and their son and daughter-in-law. They are Biharis headed to Hooghly. They speak Hindi well and use the masculine for everything (“roti khatam ho gaya” and “iska chai achcha nahin hai”). I try to read on my Kindle (Samuel Rawson Gardiner’s A Student’s History of England) without success. It’s too chronological and I am losing track of all the kings.

Seated in front of me, the matriarch is muttering something and I only catch the last sentence: “They shouldn’t refer to us as bhakts. If someone is doing good work, shouldn’t we support him?”

July 23

Raigarh is overcast with spotty rain. Our drive to the adivasi area is about an hour, through awful roads that have been, and are being, torn apart by the huge trucks carrying ore. In large sections the surface has been ripped up so totally that it’s lying in shreds by the sides. We stop for tea at a stall that makes the awful Indian beverage (Maulana Azad refused to touch it, calling it “liquid halwa”). The men who have gathered around the stall speak Tamil. “All the workers here are from outside,” my companion tells me.

The thermal power company is enormous. It has a boundary wall that covers an area the size of a European village town. It is complete except for one patch that adjoins the adivasi hamlet. When the company tries to close that gap, the adivasis rush to stop the work. A gutter runs along the wall. It has water, jet black, gushing through it and into the fields.

The adivasis are led by their sarpanch, a woman called Pavitri Manjhi. She’s a widow and is being summoned constantly by the local officials (who are under pressure to get her and the 97 other people who filed the complaints) to withdraw or “compromise”. She refuses. She speaks calmly but with laughter in her voice. The adivasis are thin and scrawny but all have fine bearing and carry themselves with dignity. One of them, an old man sitting next to me named Mukutram Manjhi, says that he is being threatened and bullied but he will not give up. He is being offered money — great sums, Rs 2 million an acre he says, I think — but he does not want to sell. This is my land, he says, it is the land I was born in and it is the place I will die. I am moved deeply and find it embarrassing to brush away the tears. Fortunately nobody comments.

We drive to a place the company calls an ash pond. It is an enormous home gouged into the ground, about a kilometre across. There are a dozen dumped trucks and bulldozers parked, unusable for now because the rain has turned the ground to slush. The adivasis got a stay from the high court six months ago when work had just begun. Of course, the company pays no heed and work is almost complete.

Nearby is another area where the company has dumped its waste. The black mounds, 20 feet high, dense and menacing, remind me of Mordor. It is sickening, sad and angering. All at the same time.

July 24

The train to Raipur from Raigarh (Jan Shatabdi Express) leaves at 6:25 am. Just before Bilaspur station arrives, around 9 am, there is a small group of men standing on the tracks parallel to ours. By them is the body of a thin young man, lying carefully straight, wearing shirt and trousers, fully elongated and perpendicular to the track. His hands are by his side and his neck, or what remains of it, is right on the track. His head, of course, is missing, crushed to pulp or decapitated. I wonder what he was thinking of in doing it with such precision.

In Raipur on the flight back home (through Indore this time) four young men — mid-20s — settle into the emergency exit row seats around me. One of them, seated diagonally ahead, is watching a video on his phone. It is Modi’s no-confidence motion speech. He has seen it before (he skips forward and back to get to bits he wants). He is riveted by the material, often smiling to himself. It is clear he likes listening to the man. When it ends he turns beaming to his friends and says: “2019 ka intezaar hai.”