Paramilitary soldiers and policemen clear a road blocked by Maoists' supporters at Pirakata in west Midnapore, about 145 kilometers west of Calcutta, India, June 18, 2009. — AP

IN the mosquito-infested inaccessible forests of Chhattisgarh, Maoist guerrillas often carry an insect repellent cream called Odomos. God help you if the security forces hunting the guerrillas — now for the first time with the help of helicopter-borne commandos — ever catch you with a tube.

Other than that there is little to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary tribal or a Dalit, the two major communities that form the bulwark of their revolt straddling 20 Indian states.

Very little is made known about the Maoists except that they are a bloody-minded lot. The gap in information about their worldview can be partly ascribed to their cultivated aloofness from, and suspicion of, the mainstream Indian media. Otherwise too it has become a risky proposition for journalists to venture to assess them objectively.

Anyone writing even-handedly about the dust, doubts and hopes of Chhattisgarh would have to first cross swords with the rightwing BJP government that rules the state with draconian anti-terror laws. And now the scribes have to fear the wrath of the federal paramilitary police too, and possibly of their political minders of the Congress variety who rule Delhi.

However, there are those who dare to write anyway. A friend showed me a cartoon on her Blackberry, which had two groups carrying a banner each. One stood for MOUism, the other for MAOism. The usually neutral weekly newspaper Current carried a headline to underscore the divide: ‘Red Terror’ a state ploy to privatise Bharat (a common name for rural India), it said. “People’s power stands in the way of corporate greed.”

Ironically, it was the recent arrest of Kobad Ghandy, a Maoist ideologue who had come to Delhi for a serious ailment, which gave a wider urban audience their first insight into the life of an average tribal in the backwaters of Chhattisgarh. “Wherever we work, we tell the tribal people to boil drinking water. It has reduced diseases and death by 50 per cent,” he said in a radio interview. “Child mortality decreased because we have managed to empower women to an extent.”

Boiled drinking water, if you think about it, is the prime solution to what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls the gravest threat facing the country: left-wing extremism, wrote Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard.

“As the countdown begins to a massive armed operation against the Naxalites, specifically those in Chhattisgarh, you wonder what all that sophisticated weaponry and formidable forces that Home Minister P. Chidambaram is putting together will do to make up for the lack of governance and development.”

According to last month’s update from the home ministry, left-wing extremism affects over 2,000 police station areas in 223 districts in 20 states. If there were 1,591 incidents of Naxalite violence resulting in 721 deaths last year, by August end this year, the figure was close to 600.

With the Maoists in its crosshairs the government took barely any notice of a series of devastating reports that revealed the extent to which the government has failed in an area which has the most profound consequences for the country’s future: the health and well-being of its children. Reports from reputed international NGO Save the Children, Unicef and the World Bank have all been sharply critical of the failure of governance in health and education that has left Indian children way behind their counterparts in Sri Lanka, Nepal and even Bangladesh. According to Jishnu, two million children below the age of five die every year in India, which means one every 15 seconds. “To the country’s everlasting shame, it must be noted that this figure is the highest in the world. Of these, more than half die in the first month of their birth and over 400,000 within the first 24 hours.”

The fact that left-wing extremists have stepped into the breach prompted Prime Minister Singh to observe that “despite its sanguinary nature, the (Maoist) movement manages to retain the support of a section of the tribals and the poorest of the poor in many areas”.

Such cold facts are not the kind of staple the mainstream media has much appetite for. They have become adept at journalism of easy conclusions. The reviled embedded media in Iraq were at least taking the trouble of visiting the war zone even if they gave a biased picture of the mayhem. Cooking up stories from Delhi is any day a safer proposition.

One day up went the chorus that a Maoist leader had been arrested in West Bengal. It turned out to be a false alarm. On another occasion reports circulated that Maoists had carried out a massacre in a Bihar village. The chief minister denied it. This is not to suggest that Maoists don’t kill. They do and they can be cold and brutal.

News came one day that the Maoists had kidnapped a police officer in the state of Jharkhand. They wanted the freedom of Kobad Ghandy and two other jailed leaders for his freedom. Government officials denied such an offer was made. Soon after that the headless body of the unfortunate policeman was found with telltale signs that the Maoists had killed him. The headlines described it as Taliban-style killing.

It would be an appropriate description were it true. The whole difficulty with the Taliban is that they use high technology to target their victims, often with the help of suicide bombers. True there have been the odd cases of beheading. A shadowy Muslim terror group in Kashmir called Al Faran had beheaded a Norwegian tourist in the 1990s.

There have been instances of the more barbaric method of killings by beheading in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. But the Saudi government carries out the really institutionalised beheading, routinely. And that would not be an enticing point of reference for the Indian media. The fact that the Romans beheaded their elite and crucified the slaves is too fine a reference to be given here, not to speak of the preferred way for Henry VIII to deal with his wives.

The fact of the matter is that there is no verifiable political constituency for an anti-Maoist campaign in India, though there may be one if it got somehow laced with Muslim extremists. It is on the confluence of this dilemma that a new imagery is being hammered out, not without the help of the media, on the banks of the Indrawaty River.

In the heart of Chhattisgarh the river separates the Maoist-controlled areas from the region occupied by the security forces and the state-sponsored vigilantes of Salwa Judum. It is common among the security forces and civilians under their watch to refer to the Maoist areas across the river as Pakistan. And this has been the case for months before the Taliban-style beheading happened the other day.

Shoring up the chorus of unrelated idioms are the security forces. Both the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and the Rashtriya Rifles were dispatched to Chhattisgarh from duty in Kashmir, where their training was to see the enemy as a Pakistani or a Kashmiri Muslim subversive. None of these factors obtain in Chhattisgarh. But the chorus disregards the facts and continues to try to sway public opinion with imageries that are easy to conjure. But they are also fraught with unthinkable danger if they ever became real.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com