BOOK REVIEW - The Death Script: Dreams And Delusions In Naxal Country by Ashutosh Bharadwaj

 

THE DEATH SCRIPT: DREAMS AND DELUSIONS IN NAXAL COUNTRY

by Ashutosh Bharadwaj

“Bastar is a museum of death.”

The Death Script: Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country is based on Ramnath Goenka Award-winning journalist, Ashutosh Bhardwaj's lived experience in the forests of Dandakaranya, covering the naxal violence and the severe human rights violation of the sandwiched lives of the villagers living in the forest. 

Dandakaranya, as mentioned in the Valmiki Ramayana is the same forest where Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita were sent for their exile. Millennia later, the Ramayana’s Dandakaranya, the seat of revered sages, has transformed into a treacherous battlefield, as the sacred grass now nourishes the mightiest insurgency of independent India. Sita, it appears, foresaw the upheaval when she gave Rama a lecture on Kshatriya dharma, or warrior principles, shortly after they arrived in the jungle. Sita's advice to her husband to be careful is an uncommon occurrence in the epic. Sita foresaw Dandakaranya's future even before the notion of India or its borders were established.

The author in his reporting of 4 years encountered more than 200 deaths, most of which were civilians who belonged to neither of the sides, i.e, the police or the naxals. As rightly mentioned by the author, “one who decides to enter the jungle, has already taken death for granted”.

This pain is reflected in the book's structure, which is profoundly fractured. The majority of the book is made up of Bhardwaj's diary entries, which are not organised chronologically and are labelled with recurring titles that feel interchangeable. There is no discernible narrative thread. The author's voice, which frequently departs from the third-person voice of a report or the first-person voice of testimony, also varies in form.

Particularly unpleasant sections, such as the one cited above, appear to produce separation, with the author referring to himself as "you." Even the voices of the dead are sometimes imagined and ventriloquized, as seen by this startling passage:

“My Madam. That’s what I called her. I wanted to have a baby with her. I’m a dead man now. Whom will she have a baby with, I don’t know. My name was Korsa Joga. It still is. Your name doesn’t change after you’ve been murdered.”

The author, by mostly referring to himself in the third person, lets the victim speak about the human rights violations that they have been subjected to, sometimes even giving the voice to the dead.  One story he narrates is of a girl who was hit by two bullets, one in the chest, the other below the waist in an operation by a police team who had come out to confront a ‘platoon of thirty-five Naxals’, but they could fire only three bullets, two of which hit the girl at around 3 am. The doctor who dissected the body of the girl recorded that the corpse had fresh marks of men. The home minister of the province, also an Adivasi, made an ‘on-record’ statement: ‘Doesn’t the post-mortem report say that she was habitual? If so many policemen had done something to her, wouldn’t there be swelling? Where was she returning from at 3 a.m.?’

The residents of neighboring villages took an oath upon the forest and said, ‘She was not a Naxal. It was a rape and murder.’ Justice still awaits.

Another example is the massacre of 17 persons, the majority of whom were schoolchildren, in what the Indian state called the "largest Maoist encounter" in Chhattisgarh. Later, a judicial inquiry chaired by former Madhya Pradesh High Court judge Justice V K Agarwal issued a critical report on the security forces. Later in its report, the panel stated that there is no indication that they were Maoists.

These occurrences, as depicted by the author, highlight the lack of human rights protection for villages that have no involvement in the violence but desire a decent education and a source of money. They are sometimes viewed as collateral damage.

The book extensively covers the institution of Salwa-Judum, which attempted to militarise the villagers as the first line of defence by equipping them with guns and weaponry to combat the naxals in their hamlet, which was also rejected by the Supreme Court of India. Even the Maoists who are still fighting realise that the ‘red flag on the Red Fort' would not be seen in their lifetimes. Except, in the face of continued exploitation, they see no other option but to fight.

As you progress through the novel, the numerous strands begin to build knots of betrayal and retribution, of injustice and wrath, knots that will ensure that the death script continues to play out.