This is an excerpt from her trip.
After an hour and a half of walking, a young man dressed in an olive green uniform with an old rifle slung over his shoulder emerged from the bushes. Behind him, a few meters away, were five men dressed similarly. The first lookout for our fate, I guessed.
Lal salaam, lal salaam (red salute, red salute), we greeted them one by one as they clasped our hands and raised their fists in the air. The last soldier wore a black T-shirt with the inscription: "I'm not reliable, inefficient, unpredictable, disorganized, unruly, immature, but I'm funny!" A message in stark contrast to the disciplined line the soldiers had lined up to greet us, it made me smile.
We continued on, passing two more guard posts, and then we plunged back into the forest. Suddenly, the light of dawn exploded through a clearing in the trees. I blinked in disbelief. In front of us, bathed in sunlight and framed on three sides by the granite hills, was a colorful spectacle of interwoven paths that stretched like a spider's web. Sculpted by the bushes, the paths have been aligned at the level of the view with rainbow garlands. Crepe paper, carefully cut into triangles, was carefully glued to the jute rope by dozens of hands. The paths led from one large tent to another.
I had met the Maoists many times in their camps in the forests of Jharkhand, but nothing could have prepared me for this. It was a small, festive town in the middle of the mountainous forests. I felt like we had stumbled upon Lindon in Gil-galad, the Elven paradise in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Far from the dazzling skyscrapers and malls of Gurgaon, built to loom permanently over New Delhi, it was equally impressive in its grandeur and transience. It could be dismantled in a matter of hours, leaving no trace to the untrained eye.
The tents housed the various sections of the guerrilla army. There was also a medical tent, a tailor's tent, and a "computer room" consisting of a dirty, battered Dell laptop and a gray, overturned printer, all hooked up to a tractor battery. At one end is a series of curtain-shaped cubicles. The holes had been dug for latrines; even one had a white porcelain seat squatting on it.
In the center of the net was a large red and yellow curtain with a green roof. With a capacity of at least a hundred people, this was the central meeting room. Seven blank, framed photographs hung on a red cloth wall. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong. Below these international gurus were Charu Majumdar and Kanhai Chatterjee, the two Naxalite leaders of the 1960s whom these Maoist guerrillas remembered as the initiators of the Indian struggle. All the photographs were wrapped in marigolds. In one corner of the wall in this photo, someone had placed a rudimentary drawing of a person pointing a gun at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Next to it was a portrait resembling Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born president of the Congress Party, who had married a member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that had ruled India, except for a few years, since the country's separation from British rule.
On one side of the field was a large open space, a field, where the at least 200 young people were gathered. One group surrounded the field in a counterclockwise direction, advancing every ten meters to one side. Another group did the same, but in the opposite direction. Those in the middle stood in ten disciplined lines, leaping into the air in a synchronized star-shaped leap. This was the People's Guerrilla Liberation Army, practicing daily.
The kitchen was perhaps the most surprising in its organization. The stacked sacks of rice and lentils formed two walls, while a running stream formed a third. To provide the camp with clean drinking water, a well was ingeniously dug on one side of the stream, fortified with large rocks and a pulley system. Three trenches of different lengths were dug in the middle of the kitchen. Each had chimneys with huge aluminum pots on top. I thought it was rice and curried potatoes. The young people sat cross-legged on the floor, pulling out chapattis (unused yeast bread) for those who did not want to eat rice.
We had come all this way to attend the conference of the Maoist State Committee, a meeting held every five years that brings together all the guerrillas from the neighboring districts of the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. For some, it was a two-week journey. It was difficult to know how many members of the total army of the People's Liberation Guerrilla participated in this meeting, as there were about 400 at that time. I was told that these lectures were held simultaneously throughout the country in other parts of Jharkhand and in the forests of central India and eastern Europe, in Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and nell'Odisha. At each conference, Maoist activities of the past years were analyzed and evaluated, new plans for the future were drawn up, and solutions to problems were found. This was the place where important decisions would be collectively debated, discussed at length, and finally put to a vote, with the majority decision binding on all. At least that was the theory. Born during what Lenin called "democratic centralism," it was used to build the Bolshevik Party.
The conferences were also the place of Maoist criticism and self-criticism. These were the public confessions and denunciations of mistakes made by each soldier; an attempt to strengthen group cohesion and discipline used by many Maoist-inspired parties, most notably the Khmer Rouge. The conference was also where promotions and political and military training for the cadres were decided. Above all, for the Maoist leaders, it was a space to rebuild the sense of community and commitment to the cause that united the guerrillas and to renew solidarity. The missing combatants, scattered in different parts of the country and sometimes in isolated areas, gathered for a few weeks, ideally to strengthen, form and reform the links between them. The hope was to create a classless microcosm and district of the future utopian community for which they fought. In contrast to the villages of the caste-divided regions of India, caste names were abolished in the communal guerrilla: everyone became a comrade, born with a new name. While respect for elders was shown by calling them "Dada" or "Didi" (older brother or sister) or by adding the suffix "ji," material differences had to be eliminated. The idea was that people would go to the guerrillas with nothing and receive everything they thought they needed to live. A uniform and a simple set of clothes, a blanket, a sheet, a plastic sheet, a backpack and a bar of soap. Even the division of labor according to caste, class, and gender hierarchies that existed in the outside world had to be eliminated. Cooking, in turn, meant involving everyone, men and women. And while the subordinates had to learn to read, the leaders had to dig the graves of the Council of Ministers.
