Late one spring night in 1966, the scent of Mahua flowers dense in the air, Maharaja Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo—long, dirty nails curling out of his fingers, his unkempt beard and hair running down to his waist—stepped out onto the steps of his run-down palace, into a hail of bullets. The blood of the last king of Bastar, local legend has it, mingled with that of even hundreds or thousands of his loyal Adivasi supporters. Local police records state that the 61 rounds they fired claimed 12 lives. Even today, some Bastar residents mark 25 March as Balidan Diwas, the Day of Sacrifice.
To his father, the supremely eccentric Pravir Chandra had seemed a “young puppy, spoiled by the British.” Less constrained by paternal affection, Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant described him as “erratic and whimsical,” noting that in the estimation of many people, the king was “almost an idiot.” A senior bureaucrat suggested he give up his Yogic practices and instead “marry and live a decent family life.”
For the Adivasis of Bastar, he was a living god: A god who was destined to lead them, bow and arrow in hand, to victory against a world that threatened their survival.
Last week, police announced the killing of 29 Maoists in an ambush in Kanker, the largest number ever claimed in a single firefight. To some Adivasis in Bastar, the slain insurgents are heroes, inheritors of a tradition of desperate resistance against the annihilation of a people.
The Adivasi rebellion
The Republic of India ends somewhere past the school, post office and the Mahalaxmi ice cream store: The earth track from the town of Bechaghat is interrupted by ditches and barriers, making it impossible for vehicles to traverse. The bridge the government has sought to build across the Kotari River remains just an idea, because of resistance from the villagers it is intended to serve, as well as the risk to the life of any contractor who seeks to build it.
Everywhere along the path to the dry hills leading to the site of last week’s fighting, there are memorials to slain insurgents. The massacre of 22 police personnel in April 2021 and 10 more last summer are to be celebrated as revenge, not mourned.
For many living in those hills, the story began in the year of the Bhumkal, or earthquake, long before the birth of independent India. Early in 1910, the Adivasis of Bastar rose against the small British colonial force stationed in the remote kingdom, pillaging the bazaars, killing merchants, and attacking government offices. Tensions had been building up for more than two years among the Parja Adivasis living around Jagdalpur, the historian Hira Lal Shukla has recorded, who were subjected to rape, looting and extra-judicial killings.
Led by a charismatic shaman known as Gunda Dhar, a loose network of village and town heads quietly prepared for war. Then, red chillies, mango leaves, and bows and arrows were circulated, as secret signals that the time to rise had come. The rebellion would take the colonial state almost six months to put down.
The political scientist Ajay Verghese has noted that the rebellion came amid seismic ruptures in the Adivasi world that were brought about by the colonial state. Across India, pre-colonial rulers had established a complex set of customs to regulate their relationship with Adivasis. The rulers of Rajputana, for example, gave Bheel and Meena Adivasis a role in government, recognising their status as the original inhabitants of the land. The Bakkarwal of Kashmir, similarly, were made tax-collectors.
Following the defeat of the Maratha Empire in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–1819, though, states like Bastar became vassals of the East India Company. The colonial authority claimed ownership of the forests on its territories and deprived Adivasis of the rights to use its produce as they wished. Traders and moneylenders from the plains migrated into Bastar, to capitalise on the new opportunities.
Large numbers of rebellions, the historian Ranajit Guha recorded in a famous essay, exploded across the Adivasi lands, “on scales ranging from local riots to campaigns spread over many districts”: The Santhals in 1855, the Naikdas in 1868, the Kolis in 1873, and the Birsas in 1895.
The Raja of Bastar, sociologist Nandini Sundar has written, was among the many rulers faced with the wrath of his subjects. In 1876, the Raja was intercepted as he headed out to meet Edward Albert, then the Prince of Wales, on his visit to India. The Adivasis complained about being forced to work without payment for petty officials and supplying them with free goods. They also protested the harsh new colonial penal code, as well as high taxes.
Following a brief skirmish, when the Adivasis threw clods of earth and ritually-polluting cow bones at their ruler, the king ordered his soldiers to open fire. Two people were killed. A month-long siege of the king followed, which was only resolved after British administrators arranged for the sacking of two despised officials of the royal court.
The Brown Sahib’s Raj
“The Pax Britannica is so firmly established,” the imperial civil servant BP Standen wrote on the eve of the 1910 uprising, “that the idea of overt rebellion is always distant from our minds, even in a remote State like Bastar.” A hundred years later, in April 2010, 76 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were massacred by insurgents near the village of Chintalnar. From 2007, Maoists who had fled from Telangana began embedding themselves in Bastar. Extortion targeting businesses like Essar, as well as killings, rose to levels that the government could not ignore.
Learning nothing from the colonial rebellions, independent India intensified the imperial policies that had immiserated the Adivasis. The post-colonial state, historian Ramachandra Guha has written, “further strengthened the organising principles of colonial forest administration—the assertion of state monopoly right and exclusion of forest communities.”
Following independence, Pravir Chandra was declared insane, and dispossessed of his properties. The insanity was not, it seems, so severe as to prevent the Congress from recruiting him as a candidate in the 1957 elections. The party, however, refused to restore the properties, and the alliance soon fell apart. In 1961, the government removed Pravir Chandra from his throne. Thirteen protesters were killed in the violence that followed after Adivasis besieged the jail where they mistakenly believed him held.
The king’s own party, and his non-political front organisations, rapidly grew in popularity. In 1965-1966, when India faced a food crisis, Bastar residents were subjected to forced levies on their grains. Local people demanded the restoration of Pravir Chandra to the throne, Nandini Sundar writes, believing “that the government was not to be trusted, and that if the grain was collected and given to the king instead, he would redistribute it among the poor.”
The killing of Pravir Chandra marked the end of the first major rebellion in Bastar—but soon after, another became visible. From 2005, the Communist Party of India-Maoist became a new means for Adivasi resistance to express itself.
Seduced by then-fashionable “clear, hold and build” counter-insurgency doctrine then being implemented in Afghanistan, Home Minister P Chidambaram pumped in 14 battalions of the CRPF and another five of the BSF into Dandakaranya. Then-Home Secretary GK Pillai announced that “within 30 days of security forces moving in and dominating the area, we should be able to restore civil administration.”
Like their colonial predecessors, though, the security studies scholar Ajai Sahni has noted, the Indian state and the security forces slowly learned their lessons. The skills and numbers of police forces in Bastar were expanded, and logistics developed. The Telangana and Andhra Pradesh police, for their part, succeeded in infiltrating the insurgents and eliminating key leaders. The Maoist insurgency has indeed been wiped out from its heartlands in Telangana and seems in terminal decline across the country.
But in the Adivasi territories of Dandakaryana, the great swathe of forest running from the Abujmarh (‘the unknown hills’) to the Eastern Ghats, it is stubbornly refusing to die.
The Adivasi rebellions
Large numbers of Adivasis in Bastar aren’t persuaded that fighting the modern world is a battle that cannot be won or is even desirable: The modest gains of a bridge, or a school, or the income from a public works project is better than nothing at all. Those who voice such beliefs, though, risk savage punishment in the so-called People’s Courts. Enemies of the revolution have been forced to flee their homes or face execution.
The state’s often indiscriminate violence—no-one has yet been punished for the execution of 17 children, women and men, none of them Maoists, killed in cold blood by the Chhattisgarh police in 2012—serves to legitimise the brutality.
For many among a prospect-less generation of young Adivasis, moreover, the promise of progress is meaningless. The leader of the squad eliminated last week, Telangana resident Sripalli Shankar Rao, had left school after the sixth grade, and had little to look forward to. Lalita Gotta, killed with him, was also a school dropout. Bastar remains among the poorest regions in the country.
Following the dramatic expansion of the Maoist insurgency early in the millennium, mathematician and civil rights activist Kandalla Balagopal noticed that the young people who had joined the movement were “more attracted by its weapons than its politics.” The so-called misguided youth were using the Maoists to secure their own empires of mud, rather than being seduced by revolutionary ideology.
Even though the encounter has all but wiped out the insurgents operating in Partapur, one of four section-sized Maoist squads operating in northern Bastar, the gap will likely soon be filled up.
To address the problem, India needs to do something infinitely more difficult than killing Maoists: Giving Adivasis some justice.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)