My eyes popped out when I went to pick up my assignment order – Dilip Pawar: Chhattisgarh. Printed in bold letters. My mind began racing. Where, exactly, in Chhattisgarh? Sukma? Bijapur? Dantewada? Rajnandgaon? Bastar? Narayanpur? Or somewhere else? It had to be one of these Naxal areas that had fallen to my lot. I was required to report immediately to the assigned district and stay nailed there as the Election Observer (EO) till such time as the election results were declared – that is for the next 76 days.
I called my wife on the mobile immediately. “Yes,” came the voice from the other end, “where, then?”
“Chhattisgarh.”
The voice went silent for a fairly long time. The people at home were well aware of the collisions and encounters that had been happening in that state almost as a matter of course.
“Is that the truth?”
“Shall I WhatsApp a copy of the order?”
“No need,” came a weary response. “I had known that it would be something like this.”
“But, honey, these are orders –”
“Even if they hadn’t been, you would have nudged the Commission into giving you some such place. I’ve known you for a fairly long time, haven’t I? Your forts and your districts! Don’t I know what the mere sniff of jungles and mountains and gorges does to your system? And when have you ever cared for home and family?”
There was no option but to hear it all out.
Well, what was the big deal about having to go to a Naxal state? In any case, there was no way an officer could duck the responsibility. Besides, an Election Observer held tremendous power in his hands. In the event of a skirmish happening at an election booth, he had the authority to recommend re-election. If there was strong enough reason, he could get the counting of ballot papers stopped. For the purpose of holding re-election, the EO’s recommendation held extraordinary importance. In administrative jargon, the EO was the eyes and ears of the Election Commission. It’s on account of all these responsibilities that the entire district administration and police force stands at attention before you at all hours of day and night. Thus, all things considered, even if it was genuinely worrisome and a tad uncomfortable too, this appointment to a Naxal-ridden area hadn’t seriously upset me.
Once having come to terms with the inevitability of the assignment, the wife had been left with no option but to put up a brave front. She was quite rattled inside, though. There were, after all, children to be settled down. For the head of the household to be posted to such an explosive area, even if for a couple of months or so, it was certainly a matter for worry. The kids had got busy ferreting out information from god knows what all places. The younger one, Sharayu – whom we called Chingi – came up with this one at the dining table. “Mom,” she chirped, “when an officer gets kidnapped in a Naxal area, he gets quite a lot of publicity, doesn’t he?” These unpleasant words quite startled the wife. She gave her a sharp pinch and shut her up with a glare.
As soon as the meals were over, she followed the girl to her room and tweaked her ear. “What was that stupid thing you were talking about in dad’s presence?” At which the well-equipped Chingi showed her mother two newspaper clips and a small footage on YouTube.
In April 2012, Alex Paul Menon, the District Collector of Sukma, had gone to a village called Manjhipara to participate in a farmers’ conclave. During the early days of their career, young officers are quite charged up with the desire of being of service to the society. This was, perhaps, why our young Collector saheb was so dead-set on participating in the Swarajya Abhiyan, the self-governance project of the administration. When the road had become unmotorable, he had abandoned his Tata Safari midway and gone pillion-riding on a subordinate’s motorbike. The sun was setting as the Collector sat chatting with the farmers discussing their problems when a bunch of armed Naxals threw a ring round him. They ruthlessly killed the Collector’s two security guards and whisked their prize catch away with great excitement.
The Naxals moved the Collector with lightning speed. They covered 80 kilometres through familiar jungle tracks and secret byways, slipping past five police base camps without the cops getting wind of their passage. They kept Menon prisoner in a place near the Tadmetla jungle. This patch of forest had gained notoriety two years earlier when almost an entire company of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men, 78 in all, had been wiped out in a daring, never-before ambush operation by the Naxal insurgents.
For the next twelve days, the District Collector remained a prisoner of the Naxalites. The storm that the episode had created in the national newspapers, the desperate straits to which the Menon family had been reduced, the tensions and the unprecedented experiences of those turbulent, anxiety- ridden days in the life of an administrative officer – our Chingi had gathered all those hair-raising cuttings and the wife couldn’t help reading them over and over again in the bedroom, punctuating her reading with frequent sighs.
As she moved around the house, she would throw sharp, admonishing glances at me that read: Why are you jumping into that godforsaken pit? Why are you inviting disaster? Why can’t you get your posting changed?
I, however, had been sufficiently primed up for this adventure by my years of jungle safaris and my life-long romance with the Sahyadri range of mountains, the mountaineering expeditions to Shivaji’s forts ranging from the gorges of Kalva to the ghats of Maranai. I cannot deny, therefore, that I was quite excited at the thought of what lay ahead.
Excerpted with permission from Dudiya: In Your Burning Land, Vishwas Patil, translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan, Thornbird/Niyogi Books.
