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Vice Blog

TRAVEL SHMAVEL - DANTEWADA

Did you read how Naxalites killed 55 police officers in Dantewada? We were actually in that area and met the commander over there. You might have read the story about it in the Gangs Issue, but a lot of the smaller stuff ended up getting cut for space, so we'll stick it here. That commander guy in that area, seriously, is about one of the most intense dudes we've ever met, and we've met, like, Peter Halley, so… You know. Seeeerious.

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I'd just gotten to Dantewada, a little village in central India. Two men and two women circled each other the middle of the road, each with a slipper in hand. They were wasted people—drunk, dried like leather, hair like cornhusks—and they circled. Then one man darted forward and slapped the sole of his shoe across a woman's face. A cloud of dust like a cartoon, and they resumed the circling.

Forty kilometers south, there lived a communist politician nicknamed Comrade. It was past midnight when we got to his house, a two-story log-cabin sort of thing. On the concrete porch, two men slept. Comrade explained that they were strangers, peasants making the journey to Dantewada on foot.

"This house is built in the traditional style," my translator blurted out. "The wall is mud and upstairs, there is not a roof, but another floor. And this," he gestured at the beams, "is teak."

We went inside and met Comrade's wife, son, and friends. They were eating goat and drinking whiskey—no public vegetarianism or avowals of sobriety here.

Comrade's son looked about 35. He was tall and healthy and wore glasses. He said, "Tribals now in many areas don't keep their pigs, goats, and chickens alive, but rather eat them. They say, 'I know that I will die, and so it is better to enjoy what I have.'"

I asked what he meant, and he pointed to a houseguest, a drunk guy in trousers who was making flirting eyes.

The flirty guy said: "I am building a school in the forest. Recently, I was in my truck, and a police officer asked me to give him a ride. I couldn't refuse him without incurring a penalty, and on the next day, Naxalites set my truck on fire."

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Asked who was worse, the police or the Naxalites, they said they were equally dangerous. We talked more like that, and then Comrade and his son pulled an extra string bed into the reception room and the translator and I went to sleep.

In the morning, I went out to wash, and when I returned to the sitting room, the translator jumped up anxiously. He held out the comb that he had been stroking through his beard and asked if it was mine.

I told him it wasn't, and he sat and returned to the meditative combing.

And then Comrade came out of his bedroom and we all—me, the translator, comrade, the driver, and a tribal man who had one loosened eyelid—got into a car and drove at a breakneck pace through the jungle for close to an hour. On the road outside, I saw a person every five or ten minutes—a kid on a bike, a short woman with the physique of a cougar. And then for a long time nothing; the jungle began to look like a jungle.

We came to a clearing and four mud houses. Comrade and the man with the loose eyelid introduced the translator and me to a shy family and instructed us to wait there. An hour passed. The family brought us red tea, and a monkey with a string leash around its neck leapt out of the trees, skittered over the cooking pit, and came to a halt in front of me. He paused long enough for me to see his golden hoop earring and then leapt into my lap and bit me on the knee.

Another hour passed before Comrade and Drop Eye returned and led us down the narrow path to a valley where three Naxalites in full uniform were waiting under a shelter of sheet metal supported by wooden poles.

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They were tall men with fully developed physiques. They were clean and wore camouflage uniforms. The commander wore rubber sandals, and the other two wore rubber slip-ons. I knew he was a commander because his cap was embroidered in white with the word "commander." He spoke and the translator told me, "The commander wants to know who you are."

He looked about 40. He was solemn, and his eyes were funny, with no distinction between pupil and iris. They were flat, like there was no lens beneath, and so no light to play at its back. I began to explain.

He asked a few questions, I answered, and he, appearing to have made a decision, switched into English.

"We are in the middle of an operation, but I received word that you were here, so we have come only to greet you."

I asked what the operation was, and he sat silently, unreacting.

The other two Naxalites were quiet. One, a smiler, was young, giddy. The other was older, with early hepatitis, and a red star on his cap.

The commander said, "What is it you would like to know?"

"I want to understand how the ideology and actions meet."

Again, he stared flatly.

"Can you tell me," I said.

"Yes."

And he sat.

He asked me who else I'd talked to, and I rattled off the names. When I said, "KPS Gill" he started.

"What did KPS Gill say?"

"He spoke in platitudes. He said Naxalites are murderers, they cut off the hands of policemen, they kill poor people, they are nothing but bandits."

With venerate stillness, the commander took my number and said he would call and arrange to meet within a month. I pleaded with him to talk now, but he was obdurate. Weeks later, I was watching The Bone Collector in my hotel room when the phone rang. It was a local journalist; he said Naxals in the commander's district had kidnapped a group of peasants, cut their stomachs open, and slit their throats. When the conversation ended I let the horror movie continue to run. There was no need to perform it: I was afraid to die.
AMIE BARRODALE