I went through the full essay of Arundhati Roy and this refreshed my own memories of the year 2007. Based on my limited stay and dialogues with various people there I would like to share the following with you.
· Most of the allegations of the tribal people being subject to repeated injustices are true but at the same time that is not because of the fault of the state functionaries directly but more of reluctance on part of these very communities to make them accountable. The cure to dysfunctional school or forest department is not to massacre forest officials or teachers or lay mines around the village so that no outsiders can come in. This is like throwing the baby with the bath tub!! This has only resulted in the access to basic services from becoming bad to worse or further still development becoming regressive for them, making them go from abject to absolute poverty.
· Most of the kuccha areas in bastar are laid with mines today meaning that external agencies would think 10 times before entering them. This literally means that one is trying to segregate onself from the outside world. This is one of the few places where there are no train links. On asking many of the villagers say, we don’t want trains as our bastar is so full of minerals. So the popular perception that has got saddled in their psyche is that of only resource export and no import in terms of goods, services or even information. This kind of a self imposed seclusion has only exacerbated the problems of education, learning and progress that human civilizations usually benefit from in terms of exchange.
· If we go by the idea that logic that tribal, non-consumerist way of life doesn’t need to change as per other civilizations but then the livelihoods practiced by them like hunting (Bastar doesn’t have any wild life left now), encroachments on forest lands (most of the naxalite regions are also where most of the reserve forest areas have been chopped off to facilitate rice cultivation cannot be called sustainable either. Naxalites do not want regulation by the state but have they been able to improve or play the role of facilitators themselves for livelihoods? Arundhati roy’s articles has mentions of a feeling of emptiness at least 2-3 places where the alternate government of naxals miserably fails to provide that much needed support that degenerating livelihoods desperately need. Wiping off an existing government or state is very easy as we see in Afghanistan, Iraq etc but creating a stable and responsible agency from scratch is a very tedious task. I am only worried that this violent approach to self-governance is only a hole that these people are digging them in. The only escape route for them is mutual killing. (Tribal killing tribal, tribal killing non-tribal etc etc.)
Finally I would like to make a point that no community can claim to be self-sufficient enough to live in isolation for long and still claim to be a civilization. The only kind of viable choices are in the choice of governance system rather than having or not having a government. A governance system based on complete violence can only spell doom and anarchy and therefore violence and dispensing of justice should be better left to the state or people’s representatives rather than the youth that naxals have tended to leave to. The misguided incident of yesterday only goes to prove that.
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