 Welcome to this symposium on Alpa Shah's new book, Nightmarch, among India's Revolutionary Gorillaz. Alpa spent 20 months with the Indian Maoists and documented her experiences over several years, and this book is the outcome of that experience, that journey. That Alpa had gone through, and she's here to speak with Kea Bag about some of the ideas, some of the insights of that experience. So I just want to introduce them and I'll explain the format and then I'll hand it over to Alpa. Alpa Shah is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and she's the author of In the Shadows of the State, and also co-author of Grounddown by Growth, and she's presented on various BBC documentaries, including India's Red Belt for BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents. You can check out her website. She's an accomplished author and academic. And Kea Bag is editor at New Left Review and Associate Publisher of Tribune Magazine, and we're very pleased to have her here. So Alpa will speak for about 40 minutes presenting the ideas in the book, and then Kea will say some words about her insights, her writing on the Maoist movement more generally, for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then we'll open up for questions, and then we'll take a few and have a discussion. Okay, thank you. So Alpa. Thanks very much for inviting me to present the book. I mean this is a department that's very dear to me and I've worked very closely with colleagues here to work on our last book, Grounddown by Growth. So and thanks Kea for coming on board. I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. It's really difficult to present a book like this because it's about so many different issues and also because so much of it is about how it's put across the writing. So what I'm going to do is maybe give you some extracts and then also some of the broader context and also some of the broader analysis. So just bear with me. So let's go deep into the forested hills of Jarkand on a freezing December night in 2008, when I made my way past three centreposts of solitary mud hut set apart from the rest of the village. The soft-spoken, slightly-bolding middle-aged man inside went by a nom de guerre, Gyanji, and like the gorilla platoon outside guarding their leader, Gyanji was dressed in olive-green fatigues and carried all his worldly belongings in one small rucksack. But in the dim light that was spreading from the kerosene lamp, I noticed the tender soles of his light-skinned feet. He had been constantly on the move in the rural backwaters of India, often sleeping under the stars in the forest, rarely staying more than a few days in one place. But in contrast, the dark broad feet of the tribal soldiers outside layered with year's worth of skin which made them as tough, dry and cracked as the red earth they had walked barefoot since they were born. Gyanji's feet were still soft from the childhood care and protection they had received in his parents' uppercast home. In the hills where the local tongue of Nagpuria trilled through the forests like Song, and even India's majority language Hindi was a rarity, Gyanji's polished English stood out. He could recite Shelly and Shaw, had a master's degrees in mathematics, and his siblings included a bank employee, an accountant, and a computer scientist who had emigrated to Canada. It was only Gyanji who had gone astray from the upper middle class path laid out by his parents. Inspired by the revolutionary spirit in the universities around him, and by the peasant rebellions that had been sweeping through India in the three decades before, aged 24, Gyanji cut ties with his family and took the oath of becoming a professional revolutionary. He joined a group of men and women who had renounced the comforts of their homes and their university classrooms, had declased and declasted themselves, and in a long tradition of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism resolved to fight oppression, injustice and inequality to make a more humane world. Today, these people call themselves the Communist Party of India Maoist, also known as the Naxalites or Maoists, and are leading what is now the world's longest ongoing armed revolutionary movement. This is in one of their camps at the end of this march that this book focuses, uses as a kind of narrative device and focuses on, ends on, and you can see their salute to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Kanai Chatterjee and Charomajumdar in one of their camps there. Is this mic actually on? I'm not sure it is. So these Naxalite rebels, they have haunted and taunted the Indian state for the last 50 years, but the foot soldiers of their people's liberation guerrilla army now come mainly from India's tribal communities, who are popularly called Adivasis, and they make up 8.6% of the total population of India, accounting for more than 100 million people, considered lowly, savage and wild by the dominant classes and castes around them. For centuries, Adivasis were left on the margins of Indian society. They'd survived in the jungles by cultivating whatever little land they had, living off forest resources by hunting and gathering fruits and flowers, and chopping wood to build their houses, fuel their hearths and make their digging sticks with. Able to reproduce themselves through the sources around them without much dependence on the rest of Indian society, many Adivasis communities developed social values and countercultures that were remarkably egalitarian and ecologically sound in comparison to India's dominant castes and classes. Today, increasingly squeezed out of their forest homes by the state and corporations, they migrate for a few months far away from their homes to the construction sites and factories of the towns and the cities, where they're used for the most grueling, backbreaking and hazardous work, providing the cheap labour of fueling the Indian economic boom. The Adivasi foot soldiers were often fighting for very different reasons from the abstract ideals of leaders like Gyanji. On a wider level, there is a struggle for tribal autonomy against the state they see as repressive, brutal and prejudiced, but for any individual Adivasi, their reasons for joining the Maoists were often much more personal. Take, for example, Kohli, a gentle, sensitive 16-year-old Adivasi youth with radiant dark skin and a coy smile, whose rifle was nearly as tall as himself and who insisted on carrying my bags when he was assigned as my bodyguard. He had run away to live with the gorillas after a trivial fight with his father about a glass of spilt milk, literally spilt milk, while working in his tea shop. Rather than breaking with their pasts, as Gyanji did, the Adivasi youth found in the guerilla armies a home away from home, and often moved in and out of them as though they were visiting an uncle or an aunt. To the government, however, both Gyanji and Kohli are simply terrorists, a dangerous cancer that must be eradicated. The insurgents have blown up security forces, derailed trains that defy their economic blockades, killed people they deem are police informers and delivered summary justice in their people's courts. Reproducing these incidents, newsbans, reading latest terrorist attacks appear regularly across Indian national TV channels, creating a climate of fear among the Indian middle classes for whom large sections of rural, central and eastern India are no-go zones. Last year, Home Minister Rajnath Singh promised the final battle against the Naxalites to be fought to the finish and won. He said, we need to bring aggression into our policy, aggression in thinking, aggression in strategy, aggression in deployment of forces, aggression in operations, aggression in development and aggression in road construction. The latest Indian government campaigns against these rebels began over a decade ago. So, these were the Naxal affected areas at the time when I did my research. This is based on a security South Asia terrorist portal data. In 2006, the then Prime Minister, Mohan Singh, had declared the Maoist, the gravest single internal security threat facing the country and had labelled them terrorists. This signalled a new wave of security operation to hunt down the Maoists and to silence their sympathizers and supporters. A red corridor was painted right from Nepal up in the north down to Andhra Pradesh in the south. The intelligence agencies at the time claimed that over 40% of India's land area was affected and this included 20 of India's 28 states, 223 of its 640 districts. These numbers are, of course, really hard to verify and were possibly inflated to justify an increase in security and defence budgets. More than 100,000 soldiers were dispatched to surround the Maoist guerrilla strongholds in the centre and the east of the country. They were accompanied by a squadron of helicopters, special force teams, which nicknames like Cobra, Jarkan, Jaguar, Greyhounds, who were trained in jungle warfare schools to fight the guerrillas with their own tactics. In some areas such as the Dandakaranya region of southern Chattisgar, local youth were armed and mobilised to cleanse the area of people in what was called salwajudum, meaning purification hunt in the local Gandhi language. Entire villages were plundered, hundreds of women raped, others mutilated, murdered and according to human rights activists, more than 350,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many forcibly evacuated into resettlement. There were no camps, which were like prison compounds. This is actually a Getty image taken from an area near to the Chattisgar zones. You can see the ways in which Adivasis are being carried out, treated like animals. The other two are pictures that I took. One was in the village where I lived, where the Maoists were occupying, where the security forces, when they climbed the hills, were occupying schools and health centres. This was a disused health centre, which the Maoists blew up once the security forces had occupied it. Here are surrender posters, so we have some packages being granted to people who surrender. Human rights activists have claimed that behind the state's desire to destroy the nax lights and civilise the Adivasis is actually the aim of cleansing the region for the extraction of minerals. Under the Adivasis forests in the states of Jarkand, Chattisgar, Orissa, Andrapadesh and Telangana lie some of India's most lucrative reserves of coal, iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese, mica, and there's more. Here are some pictures, these are actually taken from itai noise, field site itai, I believe is in the audience, so in a different part of Jarkand. These are coal peddlers, this is a coal mining area. Business analysts have claimed that Indian mining is a success story in waiting and powerful corporations have signed deals to exploit the resources and to acquire land for mining operations, steel factories, power plants, metal, SR, potsco, Vedanta, you name them, they're all scouting out the landscape, but there are historic laws which the Adivasis fought for in colonial times which actually prevent the land from being easily sold to non-Adivasis to outsiders so that Adivasis and the nax lights who live among them stand squarely in the way of India's economic boom. In the villages where I lived among the gorillas, the security forces searched and destroyed missions generated terror, those who could fled to neighbouring villages as the patrols mounted the hills. Villages had been used as human shields by the security forces and as informers to find the Maoists. Others had been caught in the crossfire and brutally beaten by soldiers during raids, accused of harboring the rebels. And like the Vietnam War, general boasts of better kill ratios to the media in the last decade according to the South Asia Terrorist Portal, almost 7,000 people have been killed, of which 40% have been civilians, 34% Maoists and 26% security forces. Of course we don't know how many civilians were killed by which side. The government has pledged many times in the past to destroy the Maoists and yet they endure. Every year in November, across the forests that are their strongholds, they celebrate the deceased in martyr's week. These meetings of gorillas in the forests lined with crepe paper bunting and memorials draped in red cloth are ephemeral as all traces of their presence must be erased to evade the security forces. Nevertheless, they fly their red flags high, painted with a hammer and a sickle, sing the socialist internationally and in remembering the thousands that have been killed, they seek to regenerate life in the revolutionary spirit from the dead. So that's actually a martyr's memorial on the left hand side of the Maoists and these are these martyr's memorial created by the security forces in Sukma in Chattisgar where 74 Indian soldiers were killed a few years ago. These traditions of the Maoists go back to their origins that they actually first made their mark on the Indian countryside in May 1967 when a small uprising in the foothills of the Himalayas took place in the West Bengal village of Naksalbari from which they get their name. Their peasants and labourers occupied land, reclaimed it as theirs, demanded that landlords cancel all their debts and end into generational bondage and at the time the Chinese Communist Party declared the Naksalbari events widely on peaking radio and announced that a red revolutionary area was being established in India. A peel of spring thunder has crashed over India, they said, but within a few months the uprising was brutally crushed by the police and many of the leaders were killed or imprisoned. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, the embers of the rebellion ignited sparks of resistance in other parts of the country in Srikakulam, in Andhra Pradesh, in Koraput, in Orissa, in the plains of Porchpur in Bihar, in Birbom, in West Bengal. The leaders of these rebellions formed different revolutionary parties and claimed that India needed the strategy that Mao Zedong had used against the Japanese in the 1930s when the conditions in India were also, they claimed, semi-colonial and semi-feudal. Sorry, when the conditions in China were also semi-colonial and semi-feudal, so they were taking over that strategy for India and they began a protected people's war mobilising peasants to establish rural basis and eventually encircling the cities, that was the plan, to capture state power in the fight for a global communist society. Now, drawn by the romance of the movement, many bright urban youth from upper and middle class and class families renounced the comforts of their homes and their university classrooms to work with the poor Ganges who once meditated alone for his nirana on the banks of the Ganges found kindred spirits amongst teachers and fellow students. They discussed and debated how to bring heaven on earth and create a communist society. They linked hands with the protests against the Vietnam War, the uprisings in Paris, the rise of the American Black Panthers and they distributed pamphlets on the death of God. Fired by the passions of those who had taken to the streets and challenged the injustices of governments in far away places, moved by the poverty and oppression in the slums around them, they were disenchanted by the corruption of party politics and the failures of the Indian state to address inequality. The agricultural plains of Bihar, where Gyanji initially worked in the late 80s, became known as India's flaming fields due to the fierce caste wars fought between the Naxalites, their supporters and the dominant caste landlords. One of the poorest areas of India, the region was marked by great disparities, so these are the plains of India where there were high caste landlords who controlled large swathes of land and smaller farmers and especially landless Dalits who worked for the landowners and were considered untouchables. The Naxalites tried to infiltrate the Dalit households to free them from their servitude. They selectively killed the most oppressive landlords, chased others away to the cities, seized their land and redistributed it amongst the landless and small farmers. They organised rallies, protests and labour strikes demanding wage rises, elimination of bonded labour, more equitable terms of sharecropping and they publicly beat men who harassed women and they descended on mass into government offices demanding clean water, better housing, healthcare provision. But in the 1990s the state repression increased and the high caste landlords retaliated against the Naxalites and their supporters by forming private armies or militias which went by all kinds of names like Ranvir Sena, Bhoomi Sena, Sunlight Sena, these Senas which were armies came with their own war cry. There is only one remedy for the Naxalites, cut them six inches shorter. Dalits in particular were massacred overnight. They were often decapitated as a slogan promised to make them six inches shorter. Men, women and children were killed, eight, one, nine, another, 22, another, 25, 35 and so the growing slaughter continued as the police watched on. The Naxalite supporters' houses were raised to the ground. There was nowhere to hide. So the gorillas could no longer take shelter in the mud houses and the rice fields provided shelter only when the crop was tall. So in the late 80s they read their Mao and Shea and they hoped to find India's Yanan and they went in search of actually better geographical terrain for guerrilla warfare. And they began to retreat into Central and Eastern India into the forests and hills there into what are now the states of Jharkhand, Shatisgar, Telangana, Southern Oresa, Northern Andhra Pradesh, South Eastern Maharashtra and also parts of West Bengal. At the time, the Naxalites who came from the cities and had experienced mainly of the plains knew very little about the tribal people that dominated these forested highlands, the communities of Uraus, Mundas, Horse, Paharias, Gons, Birhors, Koreas and many other Adivasi groups. Though the modern state through the British East India Company followed by the Indian government under the crown and then the independent Indian government had penetrated the area, it was mainly for taxation and for the exploitation of the forests for military purposes. So railway sleepers both in India also here and furniture for instance were taken out of those forests. For the Adivasis, the state was a policeman who beat you officials who caught off your forest and let outsiders steal your timber and soldiers who drove you like animals. The term used for Adivasis by many officers was jungly savage. When the Naxalites arrived, addressing local grievances, they chased away the forest and police officials, set up mobile health camps and gained credibility amongst the locals. Although the Naxalites were as foreign to the Adivasis as the officials, they treated the Adivasis with respect and dignity, gaining a legitimacy and an intimacy with local communities, establishing kinship links between the guerrilla armies and the villages, making it easy over time for youth like Coley to move back and forth. So by the time I lived in the guerrilla strongholds, almost every Adivasi house had or knew someone who was involved as an armed carter, worker or sympathiser and the Maoists were called the Jungle Sarkar, the forest state. In the six years since I left, the South Asia terrorism portal claims that over 6000 people have surrendered and more than 5000 arrested. The government has offered handsome monetary packages up to 1.5 to 2.5 lakhs at 1700 to 2800 pounds and more for weapons depending on the seniority of the Naxalite and the rifles with which he or she surrenders. But scholars, lawyers and human rights activists have said that many of these surrenders are fake, that Adivasis are being coerced. This is a new dimension to a long history of fake incidents. Rebels have been presented as killed in battle when they actually died in the police torture. Verification of events is tough. The few brave independent reporters, human rights lawyers and activists entering the affected regions have been chased out. I crossed paths with the guerrillas when towards the end of my doctoral field research in 1999 to 2002 they started to enter the Munda Adivasi village where I was living then. So these are the two villages where I've lived. On the left hand side is the Munda village where I lived between 1999 and 2002 and I've kept going back to since. This is the area I worked in much more recently. These are the hills that marked the Naxalite terrain. This was an Ural house that I lived in then. At the time, I saw them when they were first coming into my doctoral field's field site as protection racketeers, not unlike the Sicilian mafia. They were extorting money from state development schemes, beat business in return for safeguarding them, safeguarding against their own violence. But as I followed their progress from London, I was intrigued by the fact that so many Adivasis were joining the Maoists and I felt compelled to understand why. I knew I had to return to Jarkhan to conduct ethnographic research, that hallmarked practice of social anthropology, participant observation, deep immersion over a long period of time, at least a year or more, into the lives of people who are initially strangers learning their language, seeking to know and experience the world through their perspectives and actions in as holistic a manner as possible. Undertaking such long-term open-ended field research seemed crucial in order to move beyond the cursory impressions based on interviews or a visit of a few days that had begun to emerge of the Maoists. Staying with the Adivasis communities in a guerrilla stronghold seemed the obvious way to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of their predicament than those that had often emerged in comparable contexts, whether in the Vietnam War or Peru Shining Path interaction, which argued that people were either stuck between two armies, coerced into revolutionary support or turned to the guerrillas because of either some utilitarian benefits or long-standing grievances they addressed. But it was not until 2008, coincidentally, as the latest round of counter-insurgency campaigns were launched, that I was able to finally return to Jarkhan. I had gone with very modest ambitions. I wanted to spend time among the Adivasis to understand how life had changed for them in the face of this revolutionary movement, allegedly fighting for a more equal society. I never expected to see a guerrilla let alone meet one, but I had ended up living in what the Naxlites considered their red capital, one of the two guerrilla strongholds in India. As the state's counter-insurgency operations escalated, outsiders were prohibited from entering the guerrilla areas unless accompanied by the security forces, those who dared to venture in without informing the authorities rarely stayed more than a few hours at the most a few days. As the situation became increasingly dangerous, I considered returning to London, but the stories of the people I had met in the red capital had already pulled me too far into this little known world. So Nightmarch, which is the name of the book, refers to an unexpected seven-night trek with a Naxlite guerrilla platoon that I undertook in 2010 at the end of this research alongside these new counter-insurgency operations. As the only woman and the only combatant, I set out with a group of fighters, only non-combatant. I set out with this group of fighters under the cover of darkness to walk 250 kilometres from one part of India in the state of Bihar to another back in Jharkhand, the areas where I lived. And unraveling across this march, the book actually draws on the four-and-a-half years I have lived as an anthropologist amongst India's Adivasis with one long spell outside the guerrilla zones and one long spell inside. Nightmarch is then my journey into this underbelly of the subcontinent to understand why behind the mask of shining New India, some of the country's poor have shunned the world's largest democracy and united with revolutionary ideologues to take up arms against rising inequality. So I focus on both the perspectives of the revolutionary ideologues and the poor Adivasis communities who were joining them. So at the heart of Nightmarch are the nuances, complexities and ironies of the protracted encounter between the guerrilla leaders and their foot soldiers. So the book actually tells the story of vastly different people, very different people that I met along the way and how they came together to take up arms to change the world and how they fell apart, their dreams also turning into nightmares. So there is, for instance, Gyanji, who I mentioned earlier, the high-cast intellectual from a well-to-do family who has been underground for more than 20 years. Coley, the 16-year-old Adivasi foot soldier who fleets in and out of the guerrilla armies as though he were going to stay with an uncle or an aunt. Another central character is Vikas, the Adivasi youth who betrays the guerrilla forming a gang to destroy them. And there's Sombari, the Adivasi woman I lived with who grows to resent the guerrillas. So through these characters and my journey with them, Nightmarch shows how amidst proliferating contradictions, revolutionary motivations are sustained and subverted at the same time against a backdrop of exploitation, inequality and injustice, which is at the heart of contemporary India. I'll just highlight some of the kind of wider analysis which emerges through these stories, which is, you know, which the book unveils over the course of the journey. So the spread and collapse of these insurgencies, so this was, I didn't take many pictures on the march, but this was one of them. So this is everyday life in the guerrilla movement. This is in the area where I was conducting research, football matches that they organised, paintings of their flags, you know, reading newspapers. Many Adivasis grew up learning to read and write in the guerrilla armies. The spread and collapse of such insurgencies is usually explained in terms of ordinary people, as I mentioned earlier, either being caught between the state and the rebels, stuck between two armies, or joining the rebel cause because of the utilitarian benefits they provide, so that's greed, or because of genuine problems that the people faced, which they addressed, so grievance. Night March argues that these explanations are partial at best. Instead, the book shows the significance of the development of emotional intimacy, family and kinship networks between the rebel armies and the villagers, which both enabled the spread of the insurgents and also became their Achilles heel, undermining their activities. The next slides came in as dominant caste outsiders, but their ideological commitment to an egalitarian society, a caste-less and class-less one, translated into their humane treatment of those they encountered with dignity as equal human beings. Communism wasn't simply a utopian dream of a future society, but influenced the remaking of revolutionary subjects and the restructuring of social relations in areas that the party held sway. An enormous effort went into superseding and negating the specificities of caste and class divisions between those who encountered the revolutionaries. So it is this that encouraged the development of relations of intimacy between the next slides and the Adivasis. There are several other subsidiary arguments, which I'll just run through a few of them. So revolutionary communists in India are comparable to its religious renouncers. The one seeks personal emancipation, that is the religious aesthetic, and the other works for communal freedom. The revolutionary both have renounced the world around them, broken with their pasts, and sacrificed everything, including themselves, to fight for their ideals of human emancipation. And you can see this very clearly in the trajectory of some people like Gyanji, who was once on the path of renunciation to Nirvana and who then became an exile revolutionary. Another argument is that the next slide's leaders have dogmatically insisted on an outdated analysis of the Indian economy, arguing it is semi-feudal. And this analysis has acquired almost an untouchable status of some kind of transcendental purity within the movement, which has become like a religious mantra. And though it may explain why a poor group of leaders stick together or have stuck together against all odds, it has also created several problems for their aims of social transformation. So, namely, they aren't able to take full account of the way in which capitalism and its values have spread everywhere in the country, including in their own armies creating renegades. And they aren't able to develop and utilise also the already existing egalitarian values that exist amongst the Adivasi villages they are spreading amist and are in fact leading to the demise of those values. Another issue that emerges is that mobilising people to fight against inequality and injustice may require the use of arms, but violence resistance attracts, in this case, the violence of state repression. And the danger is that in mastering the art and discipline of guns, that becomes the focus of the humanitarian struggle, overriding and thus destroying efforts to mobilise people towards new, more egalitarian and just ideals and communities. The most sophisticated explanations of the appeal of the next slides have suggested that they are the combined outcome of the steady democratisation of the political process in India and the failure of its developmental reach. So, as the state has become more and more available to people who are kept on its margins and more of India's marginalised people have participated in its democratic process, democratic aspirations have flourished. At the same time though, the failure of Indian democracy to give adequate space in which a public sense of purpose can be articulated has left vast sections of society disenchanted and their results in grievances have made them turn to the next slides, that's how it goes. Nightmarch, however, concludes that the opposite is in fact as likely to be true, that is that this movement fighting against the character of Indian democracy has actually expanded its reach amongst people who have previously been left on the margins of the state alienated from it. So, by fighting for their human rights on an equal footing with dominant and higher caste and classes, the next slides have actually nurtured Dalits and Adivasis who will ultimately seek not a withering away of the state, that is a revolutionary ideal, but would also want a share of the state as a part of it. So, communist struggles to create classless communities where women will be equal to men, but they are most often led by men from elite backgrounds and their challenge to the structural inequalities of society, they too often neglect the incipient inequalities within. In India, the result may be that a Maoist inspired next slide struggle for a communist society will actually have given rise to an emboldened Dalit, Adivasis and women's movements demanding their rights to be treated on equal terms as a dominant classes and caste seeking a greater share of space within Indian democracy, keeping alive a dream for a better more equal world. Perhaps then one of the furthest reaching consequences of the next slides might have been as a democratising force in India catalyzing those who want to fight for a more equal world, who are mobilized by the spirit of the revolutionary struggle, even if they have been at the same time disappointed and disenchanted by its practice. I've got five minutes. I don't know if you'd like, I'd like to give you a small flavour of the march if there's time for that. The book is framed around this march, which is in a way also a narrative device to actually speak to the broader issues and also to introduce you and for you to meet the characters. So maybe I'll end with the end of the march when I was awoken for the roll call at 10pm. Gyanji assured me that this really was the last leg of the journey. We would not walk for much more than four hours across the plains. We would be in the safety of the forest, not far from Laugan, that's where I lived. One foot in front of the other, we had been walking by this time for about, this was the seventh night. There was a sudden jerk in my neck and the weight of my head had collapsed onto my chest. I realised I had dozed off while walking and awoke with a jolt. My eyelids were heavy and I struggled to keep my eyes open as we marched on. My neck jerked again and then again. Sleepwalking is what the gorillaz called it. They could all do it. I used to laugh in disbelief when they told me about it in the months before, not once imagining that I would share their lives to such an extent that I would find myself walking in my sleep as they did. I had never experienced it before. My head seemed to empty of all consciousness and awareness moved to my feet which continued to put themselves one in front of the other with mechanical regularity. They intuitively appeared to sense the unevenness of the ground beneath them without recourse to the eyes of the brain. Four hours later it was obvious that something was wrong. We ought to have been surrounded by the forest then. Gyanji had been uneasy for most of the previous hours. It became clear that we were not on the route they normally took through this area. Four hours later there were now more than two central reserve police force camps with at least a thousand men of security forces stationed in these planes, all trained as commandos in counter-terrorism and jungle warfare tactics. They were there to conduct domination exercises to sanitise the area and get rid of the gorillaz. Vikas was leading us. He kept running back when Gyanji beckoned him, bringing assurances that everything was under control and that the pilots up ahead were on the right track. But clearly something was amiss. I was very annoyed with Gyanji. He seemed to be taking too lenient an attitude towards Vikas. Did Vikas know where he was going? Was he deliberately leading us astray? Wasn't this exactly how ambushes were set up? We seemed to be setting ducks. Parastus, another leader, meanwhile seemed oblivious to my concerns about Vikas. Noticing my struggle to keep up, he suggested that I should ride the horse. There was this horse that joined us on the last track and last night. I tried to protest, afraid to lose control of my mobility to an animal, but he insisted. I was too tired to hold my ground. In any case, I wasn't sure I was the best judge of what was good for me at that stage, and so I gave in. The saddle was a pile of blankets and the stirrups were two loopholes knotted in a jute rope. It was far from comfortable, but loaning up and down on the animal certainly kept me awake. An ear-splitting bang resounded through the landscape. The horse bolted away from the line. With my heart in my mouth, I dug my calves into its side and tugged ineffectually at the reins for a few seconds, and then wrapped my arms around the horse's neck, hanging on for dear life. Just as I was about to free my feet of the stirrups, there was another boom. Coley ran to my side, grabbed the reins, and brought the spooked horse to a halt before helping me dismount. Run, people were shouting. Coley said, let's go, diddy, and so I ran, trying to keep up with him. Earlier on in the night, when I had been constantly on the brink of falling asleep as I had walked, I wouldn't have believed that I was capable of running at all. I hadn't known that when you think you have a gang of armed men after you find the strength to run, I was half sick with fright. I passed others who had stopped in their tracks to filling themselves onto the ground and crouched down behind the rice buns. Some of them appeared to be crawling on their bellies towards what looked like the contours of reeds. I wondered whether I should follow suit. I couldn't keep up with Coley, and he disappeared from my sight. Then I heard the voices of North Indian soldiers, and although I didn't know if they were imagined or real, and although I didn't know where I was going, it galvanised me into running faster. Everyone back in line, I heard Ganji, and then Parishji shouting, stop running, calm down, don't disperse. Parishji's voice rang through the air. They said it was only a shotgun, probably a hunter in the jungle, someone just practicing their shooting. The Indian security forces there showed us would not be out now. I stopped running. Gorillaz emerged from all sides like ghosts. A company line formed again. But after the recent panic, the line kept breaking. It seemed that everyone's nerves were frayed. Soldiers were huddled together, and the spaces between the groups kept increasing. It was hard to keep 80 people together, and we soon became a red-touch bunch of misfits roaming the landscape. Ganji was in despair as he said we were losing discipline when we needed it the most. It was as though the gun had shot through everyone's confidence in the Gorilla army. I never discovered what the gun shot was, but I grew increasingly frustrated with Ganji for not taking the Carter task and for not taking on the responsibility to lead the Gorilla company himself. So many lives were at stake now. However, I was too shaken to speak and focused my energies back on placing my feet one foot in front of the other. It must have been five o'clock in the morning when we entered a patch of forest. We were to rest there for no more than ten minutes. Yet bags were thrown in the ground. People collapsed onto whatever clearing was closest to them. There was no attempt to keep any kind of military formation. Within minutes it looked like most of the 80-odd crew was fast asleep. I wondered how people could sleep under such stressful conditions. I said beside Ganji fully aware that he was aghast that everyone had just dropped off to sleep. I knew that having stopped everyone would now find it extremely hard to start walking again with such exhaustion. It was more important than ever to keep the rhythm of the march going. I said to myself that under no circumstances must I allow my eyes to close, although my eyelids were like a lead weight that wouldn't stop sinking. That's an incredible story. I should just say that copies of the book are on sale outside for £10, that's half price, and they also take hard in case you don't have cash. Thank you for that, and now we're here from Kenya. Thanks, Faizi, for the invitation to speak, and thank you, Alfa, for a fascinating book and presentation. It's a real pleasure to be here today to discuss Nightmarch with you. For those who haven't had a chance to read the book yet, it is an extraordinary book that straddles various genres. Throughout, there is a quest structure that keeps the narrative going, plus a social portraiture that each part of the book gives you both this incredible story about the Nightmarch, plus, unlike other works of creative non-fiction or long-form journalism, it spans various disciplinary categories of history, economics, politics, moral and existential philosophy and sociology. The method is to both illustrate and illuminate these dramatic tensions that encapsulate the various social contradictions, and I think a real mastery of imagery to capture complex ideas. So the Nightmarch itself becomes a metaphor for the persistence of Maoism in India, and Maoism itself is a symptom of Indian society. For me what really set apart Nightmarch from other writings about this question was the moral dimension that's very strong throughout, and one of the strengths of this participant observation is that it enables critical sympathy, and crucially, Alba has moved between different perspectives in her work, which you discussed. There is a recognition in the book too that there are perspectives that are excluded by any one study, and I think it's quite an achievement that what we get so much is on the one hand sort of condemnation of these movements, but then also on the other hand a sort of romanticism, and what Alba gives us quite refreshingly is a critical analysis, as she says, of the experience, visions and actions of these people, recording not only what the Maoists say, but what they do, and demystifying Maoism is especially important at the current moment when they are being demonised and instrumentalised by the Indian state. So this book helps us to understand what is at stake when we hear of Maoist atrocities being reported, or organisations being vilified, and civil society activists in India being incarcerated for being quote-unquote urban noxels. So in terms of Alba's ethnographic study, you get this attention to the micro-level of Indian politics, and this shows us the various modes of power which the Maoists have been building. There is the aspect of coercion of course, and corruption, and consent if we think of these as sort of three modalities of power in general. Along with that kind of nuanced fine grain analysis of the appearance and reality of quote-unquote corruption, and if we define corruption as the ways in which public goods are channeled for private gain, but showing sort of the flip side that private gain is also being redistributed in some of these cases. I mean for me some of the most fascinating details in Nightmarch are about Maoist efforts to build hegemony, and this photo of the sort of football tournaments, and there's some mention of Maoists working to create a written script for Gond in Chethysgar. I'd be very interested to hear more about that in the discussion, because I think that kind of thing is not generally a part of the discussion about Maoism in India. So one of the major achievements of this book is also that the macro-level of the Indian economy and state is also in view. I think it's worth saying, especially when the Maoists here are purporting to challenge the state, or in some cases supplant the state. What is the reality of the Indian state? That geography of uneven and combined development is very clear throughout the narrative, and of course these features have been amplified under a neoliberal competition and fragmentation of these subnational states. There's a point where the platoon I think comes across a convoy of lorries with I think iron slurry, and it's a really interesting image in terms of thinking about this kind of fragmentation. So we, through this kind of narrative device, we learn about iron mining in Chethysgar, but that the ore goes on to be pelletized in Andhra Pradesh, and then laid into steel in Gujarat. And that this mining development that displaces the Adybatsis, rather than employing them as say unskilled workers as it might have in the past, that we see this sort of overview of the reality of sort of informal, precarious seasonal work and migration on the one hand, and accumulation by dispossession on the other hand. And I came across a startling figure actually that since independence in India, development projects have displaced between 20 million and 60 million people. So that's something worth thinking about in terms of the context of this book. And so that's sort of like an overview of the contras of the Indian state. I think one thing I'd like to comment on and I'd be interested in picking this up in the discussion is the couple of the states that are part of this kind of red corridor or had been a part of the red corridor in fact were created as quote unquote tribal states. So in 2000, statehood was granted to Jharkhand and Chattisgar by the, I think then ruling BJP. And in fact the politics of these states were, have been quite sorted to say the least, and surely is a part of an explanation of the prevalence of malism in them. And we should keep in mind that sort of malism is not the only form of armed struggle in India. We also have separatist movements and fundamentalist movements. So interestingly, you know, the region in West Bengal where Naxalism takes its name, you know, is, since about the, I guess the 80s and 90s also been a sort of stronghold of separatist movements of Rajbanshi and Gurkha separatists who have their own arm contingents. So what I'd like to do in sort of my commentary is just take a look at the concrete features of Indian democracies or the failures of Indian democracy, the kind of, I guess, opportunism that is also a major feature of party politics there. So, you know, where the book provides this kind of macro and macro level, I think my comments I'd like to comment on the middle level, or muscle level of party politics. So at one point in Nightmarch, a young Maoist called Bursa, I should maybe just read the passage, has spent some time in jail, and this is a part of a discussion of sort of the kind of, I guess, contradictions and sort of corrupting features of sort of compromises that being involved with the Naxalites, you know, mean for some Adivasi youth. So Bursa comes out of jail and decides that to earn a decent living or gain power, he began considering pitching behind a member of the legislative assembly for whom his older brother worked in the hope that he could one day mobilize enough support to fight for a seat himself. And I found that a very interesting passage because the subtext was that this is just politics was a route to just lining his pockets or this was another kind of form of corruption. And so I think it's worth sort of looking at the sort of alienation from party politics or why this might be the case in this situation. So, you know, in, I guess, even amongst the left, in India, sort of criticisms of the Maoists can fall into a few broad categories, you know, on the one hand, their sort of high handedness that they put their supporters in the line of the state's fire, that support is often under duress, but also that they're sectarian and closed off from others with different viewpoints. And I think the book does a very good job of sort of fleshing out some of these criticisms and complicating them. But the sort of sectarian divides amongst sort of progressive forces in Indian politics is something I've wanted to sort of spend a little bit more time on. And here I think it's worth historicizing and surveying some of the underlying experiences that shape what is, I think, you know, certainly one of the major fault lines of the Maoist movement. So, I guess what sets Indian Maoists apart from other guerrilla movements elsewhere in the world is India is one of the few countries in the world where communist parties, not only in their sort of Maoist forms, but in their sort of Stalinist variations are a significant political force, or, you know, still have a major presence, you know. The largest and most influential is the Communist Party of India, Marxist, or CPM, which has a presence in the south of India, primarily Kerala, but also under Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. But its main stronghold is still in the east, West Bengal, and the small state of Tripura. And, you know, the CPM was among the first and had been one of the longest running democratically erected communist parties in power. Given the degree to which India's society and economy is so polarized, and which Akbar was speaking about as being one of the fuels of the kind of explosive kind of violence and contradictions of the Maoist movement, left-wing politics itself has kind of been pushed into these very two different directions. So, you have kind of a Stalinist left, which is committed to liberal electoral politics, and Maoism, which has been the principle sort of defenders of the poorest and deprived, and have concerned themselves with, you know, agrarian distress. So, at the end of Nightmarch, there is a very helpful overview of the different kinds of representations and studies of Maoism, and in one particular, you know, this idea of the tribals being caught between two armies, that of the state security forces in the Maoist. This thesis does seem to be promoted mostly by Indian communist intellectuals, and these same communist parties can trace their origins to a history of peasant revolt, particularly in what is now the state of West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, you know, where the modern day Maoists often sort of trace their origins and have their sort of strongholds. So, in what follows, I'd just like to talk about some of the formative moments of Maoist history, some of which Alba has described, but putting it into the context of their relationship to parliamentary parties. So, it was in 1967 when, after the West Bengal state assembly elections, that the CPM won 18% of the vote and entered a governing coalition as a junior partner with sort of a breakaway of the congress party at the time. And it was the CPM's Jyoti Basu who became West Bengal's deputy chief minister at the time, while Hare Krishna Konar was the land minister. And very shortly after they were elected in this historical moment, it was that May that a peasant rebellion erupted in the village of Nakshalbari in Darjeeling district, and it was in fact led by the CPM's peasant front. And Konar himself attempted to mediate and try to get the peasants to put down their arms, and in the end the chief minister dispatched the sort of congress chief minister dispatched security forces to repress the uprising, which was crushed with extreme brutality over the succeeding months. And the CPM's leadership continued to participate in that government, the United Front government, that was undertaking state reprisal against a section of its own base. So this is what led to the split in the party, the CPM then split, and that's where the CPI marched this land in us, so the kind of the original maxillites, that's when they were formed, and they pledged a guerrilla strategy in the countryside along the sort of mouse lines that Alpa describes. And Nakshalbari was a watershed for the CPM, and it led to a virulent campaign against left adventurists, and it degenerated into sort of fratricidal armed conflict on both sides. So, but at the same time, you know, in later years determined to avoid a second Nakshalbari, the CPM pushed for a real degree of land reform. Conar strategy was to combine mass mobilisations with land redistribution measures already mandated by state law. So agricultural workers, sharecroppers and small farmers were called upon to identify land belonging to absentee owners or holdings that were sort of in illegal excess of sort of land ceilings. And it, you know, it involved people on the ground in this very like enthusiastic upsurge of, and that was a major way that the CPM was able to build its cater in the countryside and dislodge the dominant congress supporting elite. So they, you know, they were in a sense forced to mobilise poor and landless peasants to seize the land. And, you know, at the same time, so in the early 70s, peasant insuractions were erupting in the countryside led by the Malacipi IML. While the, and this is also happening in the context of martial law being imposed in East Pakistan. And I think the Malas at the time were working across the border. And, you know, this certainly I think raised questions of some kind of communist unity between the two sides of Bengal that had been split during partition. The congress government in New Delhi in the early 70s dispatched the Indian army to crush insurrectionary forces on both sides of the border. And the CPM was caught in the blowback of state repression while at the same time mounting a further factocidal assault on the nationalites. Under chief ministers, Siddhartha Shankaray, a reign of terror was unleashed against the CPM and CPM IML or mouse militants alike. And, you know, trade unionists, peasant organisers and radical students were also caught up in this. By 1973 there were nearly 18,000 political prisoners and West Bengal jails. So this is two years before the emergency. So arguably the CPM's original baptism of firing office was its effort to crush naxalism under the 1960s United Front. So this formative experience was not of mobilisation but repression of a rural movement. And this generated a certain pride in its toughness against sort of ultra left adventurism. And it was, you know, nearly 40 years later that this kind of, I don't know, that we could see this coming to haunt them and that they were eventually ousted from power in West Bengal in 2011 because it was CPM Cater who are now clashing with rural masses even more so than state forces. So the main events in 9 March take place in the late 2000s. So I would just like to kind of conclude by speaking about the Maoist upsurge in West Bengal around the same time. So Maoist had been at that time launching sort of spectacular attacks on police installations in West Bengal and had begun to dominate the sort of arid western plateau which in West Bengal had been kind of dubbed Jungle Mahal. And that made up a sort of a corner of the tribal belt of India. And as we know from 9 March, the most affected states have had these kind of isolated Adivasi populations in Virgin Forest usually on top of mineral deposits. So but what set West Bengal apart is that this early state campaign of sort of violent repression of sort of passive movements was followed by sort of these incentives of agrarian reforms. So this certainly sets it apart from places like Bihar and whatnot. And this had, you know, for many decades induced peasants more or less to put their weapons down. So, you know, it was the state's own sort of development programs and the ways in which they had been dispossessing these kind of rural communities that kind of turned the tables on them. In November 2008, a landmine blast hit the CPM chief minister's convoy in West Midnampur, sort of a, I guess, a county of West Bengal. And this must have been one of the most like high profile kind of attacks at the time as he was returning from the proposed site of a Jindal steel plant in Salboni. So without evidence or warrant, the police launched reprisal against people in neighbouring Lalgar. So villagers barricaded themselves in and new spread from village to village apparently with traditional Shantal drums and mobile phone. And the solidarity from surrounding villages brought the movement, it spread it between districts. So the government at the time, afraid of sort of repeating a massacre that happened just a couple of years before, where 14 protesters had been shot dead protesting against a special economic zone in another part of the province. The government actually withdrew police and during that time the sort of newly unified CPI Maoists were able to then get a significant presence in the state and lend their support and recruit in the region. And what I'd like to highlight here is that the organisers, they were from the neighbouring regions of Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh, but they trained local youth to defend their own earlier attempts at self-government. So these youth had been experimenting with sort of like direct democracy and sort of like more Gandhian forms of peaceful resistance. And as ways of sort of bypassing party and traditional hierarchies. So it was of course like state repression in this example that made them ally themselves with the Maoists. So it's not just that they certainly had agency and initiative in this scenario. And eventually you know the protesters, they destroyed the CPI's offices and the Maoists proclaimed the area liberated zone. So eventually and another feature that kind of marks this off as well is that at the time the Maoists, there were sharing platforms with independent activists in Lalgar against the government repression there. And you know had actually I think a more of a contact with mainstream politics and a dialogue with other protesters and a major party, the Turnimal Congress, which is actually now in power and really quite opportunistically used struggles like this to show themselves, to sort of like outmaneuver the CPI from the left. And the Maoists even supported an independent candidate called Chatudar Matal, who in the 2011 state elections in his I think still continues to be a political prisoner. So just to wrap it up, yeah. Just to sort of bring that to the present, the issue of land redistribution and a grand poverty had been more or less ceded by the mainstream left to the Maoists which had led to the collapse of support for the CPM. So since that flash point at the end of 2010, it's a sad story what unfolds. Mamatha Banerjee who had offered her solidarity when she was in opposition within months of her taking power, the main leader of the movement Kisanji was killed by state security forces. But at the same time I think this is an example of showing how to quote Frederick Douglass or misquote Frederick Douglass power doesn't concede anything without demand since then the state has offered some development and irrigation and whatnot and extra provisions to those areas. But they've also encouraged surrenders and set up local vigilante groups and jailed more leaders. And that Jindal plant that was supposed to be built there, more than 4,000 acres of that land has I think still been left unused. And I think very recently in the last year the Jindal group has started planning to build a cement plant in the same place. So to conclude I think I'm bringing this sort of slightly different example to that is outside of the kind of purview of this book to raise in the discussion that in a remarkable study such as Night Watch that the understanding of the trajectory of Indian Maoism requires of course as I think is very evident in the book. Look at very local specificities which and you know even though the Maoists themselves often define themselves against parliamentary politics I think nonetheless it's important as an optic for identifying the contours of the movement. Okay, thanks very much Kea. So questions, comments, contributions, we'll take a few and then Alpar will come back to answer them. Paul Hudson, thank you very much indeed for your talk. I found that absolutely fascinating. I ought to declare my lack of credentials. I have no expertise in this here and some of my questions, sorry I beg your pardon, is that clear? They may say naive, incoherent or plain ignorant. But one of the things that struck me early on in your talk you talked about a number of people who had given up their studies and joined the Maoist movement. Had they given them up or in fact has it been excluded? The reason I ask that question is I have actually taught Indian students but they were largely from East Africa from India so that may be critical. And one of the things that struck me is they are very concerned about doing well for the reputation of their families or the prospect maybe of getting married well, that was one thing. And another thing that impressed me but I don't know whether I've drawn the correct inference is there didn't seem to be any impression in my mind that the Maoists want to try and win hearts and minds, it seemed to be largely violent. And the last thing is that you refer to the injustices that the Maoists felt and that's valid. I was just thinking in places like Kerala which are communists and one of the best educated states in India I believe if not the best. Was there very much support from people from Kerala and the other better educated states for the Maoists? Did they recruit from these areas very well or not? Hi, so my question is regarding the gender aspect of the Maoist movement. The Krantikaari Adiwasi Maelah Sangatan is the women's front for the CPI Maoists which is now banned, it's underground, it's operated in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Chathisgar, all those areas. So did you have a chance to interact with the activists who are a part of the organization and also if you did, did you happen to sort of ask them why did they join the movement? Because there are a lot of, like I was reading your chapter on gender right now and you have sort of mentioned about Anuradha Gandhi who's also a part of that organization and she happens to say that there are a lot of women who are a part of it. Plus, even in the burning forest by Nandini Sunda, she also happens to say that the movement consists of 40% of women. So why do they join the movement? What is their perception about it? Because there are a lot of critique about the naxalites and the way they handle a women's question. So this is a completely contradictory position taken by Anuradha Gandhi and who was already a part of it. So what was your view on that? Thank you, Alba. I've just finished your book and it's excellent. My question is about, you know, in India currently, so I belong from the sort of wildlife conservation dimension and I work in Chathisgar. My question is about, currently in India there is a discourse about militarizing conservation itself as a perceived Maoist threat in these sort of parks. During your time with the carters, did you come across any events that sort of corroborated the claim of many conservation NGOs that naxals are taking part in the illegal wildlife trade? And if not, could you also sort of speak to some of the Maoist leaderships like Gyanji or Parazji about their sort of perceptions on environmental conservation, especially to do with these tiger reserves? Alba, first I want to congratulate you on what looks like a fantastic book and hopefully my next read. I have, I guess, two questions. One is related to a previous question on gender, but for me it would be really interesting if you could expand on if you think the gender challenges that a movement like these faces are somewhat comparable with some of the challenges that the feminist movement in India is actually grappling with, or you think instead that these are just different sets and if you can just expand on that if they're, you know, it's because there are devices or, you know, what can trace these differences. And the second relates to, you know, people like Gyanji, so in a sense the figure of the upper caste Brahmin that somewhat is related to progressive social movements or like any type of social movement that is sort of, that emerged in India. So in a sense my question is a bit like what really, what is particular about the upper strata of the Maoist movement if you consider that that's pretty much the trajectory of all the social movements you had in India that are highly Brahminical and perhaps that in a sense, despite their aims, is also partially the limit that they have shown. So if you could expand on these two things, thank you. I'm three quarters blind. I'm three quarters blind. I'm three quarters blind. So I want to buy a book but I want to read it. But my question is more specific. I missed the lecture because I couldn't come there early. Anyway, my point is within the context of bricks in general, bricks in general, and Modi's Hindutva in particular, how significant is the slogan in collapse in the abad? My question is about the philosophy of the Maoist movement. So when the Naqsalwari movement started, it was based on the Maoist philosophy that rejects parliamentary democracy. So is the current Naqsalwari movement is the end goal still to encircle urban areas, overthrow government authority and completely do away with parliamentary democracy? And if so, what does that mean for India as a country and for the diverse peoples that make up India? And parliamentary democracy in India has not been a total failure. It has given rise to the Minorities Act and SAST Act and participatory democracy movements like the panchayat movements. So I just wanted to ask what if the Naqsalwars do achieve their final goal, what would that mean for India and the rest of the people in India? Hi. What surprised me the most is that you mentioned that the Maoists failed to appreciate the fundamentally egalitarian social structures in Adyvasi societies. I've stayed in Adyvasi villages myself and have witnessed this and found it to be incredible. And I was just wondering why there's this feature and what structures are the Maoists sort of trying to replace these with? Thanks Alba for giving us this exceptional book and the brilliant analysis of what the Maoists did and what they didn't do, what they understood and what they didn't understand. Now, what do you think is the future of them now? Because even if they understood the sea in which they swim better now, would it simply be too late with the Indian government taking such a drachronian perspective? In practice, in relation to them, have they got a future at all? I was just wondering, did you run into any trouble with the government while you were doing this kind of quite astonishing research in terms of your research visas and stuff like that? Alba, thanks for the wonderful talk. One of the areas that government has focused in the last couple of years to reduce this Maoist threat is to strengthen the education system in these zones. They perceive that as one of the dimensions which can actually reduce the impact of Maoism in this area. So what's your take on it and how Maoists perceive education in this area, especially the government schools, which may not be operating in that particular zone, but which could be operating on the periphery of it. So what kind of dynamics are there between teachers, schools, the system and Maoists? Thank you for a really compelling talk. I would like to ask you more about your research methodology. Since an ethnographer always seek protection when studying conflict, I wonder what the role of terror and fear has been in your research and how did they reshape your topics. Second, I would like to ask something about ethics. Did you set yourself any boundaries while on the field regarding cooperating with the militants? I wonder if you set yourself any boundaries while you were on the field regarding cooperation with the militants. Thank you for your talk. This may be a simple question, but are they aware that they are being perceived as terrorists? Are they aware that there are people globally who are in solidarity with them? Also, what do they want internationally? Do they want recognition? Do they want support? Do they want aid? Would they be willing to work with more democratic Western nations, or do they just want global hegemony? I asked questions, and then I'll get off to attempt to answer those. I'm not sure I'll be able to do justice to everything, but I'll try to take them up on several broad themes. Let's turn to gender first. I didn't explain this last slide, but I'll bring it up. These are actually women from the Women's Liberation Front, that picture there, which is actually from the cover of my book. This is in Jarkand. They were actually young and diverse women who were posing for the photo. They borrowed the guns from their male counterparts, and they really wanted me to take the picture. They were showing their faces, and I said, no, I can't take a picture like that. You've got to hide your faces. That's how that picture came about. This meeting here is International Women's Day in 2009. There I am. I'm taking the photo, but there are my neighbours who are going to International Women's Day. There was this big meeting celebrating the legacy of Clara Zetkin held in these forests in Jarkand. Gender was really a very big thing. It has been a big thing in the movement, just as mobilising ballots in Adivasis has been. I find it very interesting that this 40% figure, a lot of people who have written about the Maxites have been attracted to the idea of all these women taking up guns. I guess what I'm trying to show in my book is that the story is much more complicated than that. In Chattisgar, I think the situation became very different to the parts of Jarkand I've talked about after the Selva Juddum basically burnt and cleared villages. After that moment, villages had no choice but to either go and join the guerrillas, or they ran away, or they left and were displaced into neighbouring states like Selangana. It's the most obvious place for other parts of Northern Andhra Pradesh and parts of Southern Oresa. What happened in the movement then was that huge numbers of women ended up in the guerrilla armies because there was no choice for any of these villages. The guerrilla armies expanded massively as a result of Selva Juddum. So when you have like Arndati Roy talking about 40% women in the movement, that was the case possibly in certain moments in time in parts of Chattisgar. But what I've tried to draw attention to in the book is also the big, you know, to the kinds of questions that Alexandra was raising about the problems of gender and patriarchy within the movement which I think are very similar to those that exist in feminists have been drawing attention to in India and exist in many other such movements. And I think in this case the difference, the particularity of the situation is, whilst there are many commonalities with what the complaints of, you know, with how patriarchy works itself in this movement, the added kind of complexity or the added irony is that adivasi women in these areas are actually much more, in my opinion, egalitarian to their men or have a relative more independence and autonomy from their men than those in the neighbouring plain areas, which is what you were talking about that you experienced. And this is, I think, quite, this is not to say that, you know, adivasi societies are egalitarian, there's no hierarchy and that women are totally equal to men. But it's, you know, in everyday life women work outside, women control the purse, women and men partake in drinking of alcohol together and there's nothing to boo about this. You know, so there's lots and lots of kind of premarital and extramarital relations are not as prohibited as they are in the plains. If you don't get on with your partner you can leave and it's not like looked down on, you are incorporated into society or there isn't even an issue of incorporation that happens so often. So this is a point that I think that the Maoists didn't kind of really get, you know, their overwhelming focus was on how adivasi are so, you know, how there is always patriarchy in adivasi societies and they are basically there to kind of save the adivasi from their patriarchy. And in fact, you know, I mean, I discussed this at length in the book. I talk about the debates and fights I have with Gyanji who is the kind of, you know, trope of many other, who is kind of archetypal trope of many other of these leaders around, you know, their failure to take, to understand the egalitarian values that already exist. Within adivasi society and how they might actually be giving rise to forms of patriarchy amongst adivasi men that didn't exist before. So it's actually, in my opinion, a very sad story in relation to gender. So I'm not at all, you know, and I know that women like Anuradha Gandhi, who I never met, but you know, I met women who had worked closely with her. You know, they were struggling with many of these issues, but their own understandings of gender came from the plains. I mean, for her it was Nagpur, you know, working in the slums of Nagpur. And then they came, they were all sent to these areas when it got very difficult to work in the plains. And so, you know, in the book I have a conversation. I talk about my relationship with a senior naxalite leader called Sima, who is being brought from Andhra Pradesh, who I call Sima. She's being brought from Andhra Pradesh when things got very unsafe for her there. And she was sent to Japan to lead the women's movement there. She was looking to me to understand Adivasi society better, and I invited her to stay in my house with some worry, because I wanted her to experience what life was like for Adivasi women on an everyday basis, which in my perspective was quite far removed from their kind of idea of gender inequality and patriarchy. So, yeah, so there's many similarities, but also these added kind of ironies of working in this particular area, which I think is, for me, is one of the saddest parts of the story. Democracy, yeah. So, yeah, they, they, so the naxalites, as you said, you know, when they decided that they're not going to take part in parliamentary politics, that basically parliamentary politics is corrupting, was corrupting. But this was left at the level of tactics for many years, which meant that people could, at any given point in time, they could change those tactics and maybe at some point engage in parliamentary politics. And certain parts of the naxalites have done that. So, for example, CPIML liberation in Bihar is in party politics. But in 2008, when the CPIML was formed from a group of different underground factions, they actually elevated democracy participation in elections to the level of strategy, which meant then they decided that they wouldn't basically participate in elections at the level of strategy, which then makes it actually very hard to challenge within the movement. But, you know, if you're thinking about democracy in a broader sense and not in terms of just parliamentary politics, I agree with you that kind of many great things have emerged out of, you know, the Indian Constitution, out of people's mass movements that have fought within the democratic system. But if you look at democracy in a broader sense, I mean, it's not that the naxalites are against it. They want something which they argue will be much more democratic, just not through the present parliamentary process, which they see as being very corrupting. So, yeah, so the event, and I cannot answer the questions about what the future is going to look like with them, you know. I mean, you know, I have deep suspicions of any of these movements, you know, and what they look like when they're eventually in power. And are they going to be any different from, you know, the Russian experiment is George Orwell's animal farm, you know, going to kind of wring through, you know, you know, of course, you know, you have all of these concerns, and you relate them down to, you know, people you met in the movement and there were, you know, wonderful people like Yangi, who met well, but I think was really wrong on several of his analysis. And there's other people who are, you know, very dogmatic or, you know, who you couldn't really have a conversation with because you were so bored by what they said because it was like a long speech. So, you know, there were all of these different kinds of kinds of characters. So I think what would be important is the kind of processes that they put in place to make democratic structures. Education, I didn't intend to say that, you know, they were giving up their studies. They actually continued the studies once they left the movement. And these were people who are highly educated, actually, you know, mainly had master's degrees and were doing PhDs. And these were people coming from the most privileged sections of society. So they weren't, I don't think exclusion or being excluded from the system was an issue. Education, we had a question also about schools and whether, you know, schools are going to make a difference in this area. I don't know because my, what I experienced with schools was that there were these school buildings and everybody wanted a school because, you know, these buildings were built and they brought in a lot of money. And, you know, so there were deals and deals taken. I talk about this in the book that they were, you know, they basically all contractors or wanted money, took money in the process of the building of the school. You know, there were ridiculous things like a small village of 100 households had two schools built simply because they belonged to two revenue villages. The parts, the village actually was cut up into two hamlets where each hamlet was actually officially registered in different revenue villages. There were two schools serving 100 households, no school teacher. You know, and so, you know, this is where are the school teachers, you know, where, you know, that I used to teach at the local school as whenever I was not, you know, interviewing somebody or going off on a hike somewhere or what. I used to try and teach in the local school every day when I was living in the village itself. And often I was the only teacher there, even though, you know, the students turned up, they kind of played around, they had their free midday meal. You know, there were four teachers on the books, there was a headmaster, but, you know, the headmaster had this long record of having allegedly raped, you know, four of the girls. I mean, it's, so yes, UNICEF World Bank had big school initiatives with the jargon government. They put schools in these areas, but what have the schools done? I don't know. So, sorry. Two minutes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, well, future, the future. What is the future of them now? Yes, this question. I don't know. I mean, look, Rajnath Singh, yes, the last couple of weeks ago put out a statement that now only 10 of the 12 districts, 10 or 12 districts of the country are affected. They're going to completely, you know, kill them off. But, you know, there's been, there's a long history to this movement, which is about, you know, repression and then the movement rising up again. So, I don't know what forms how it's going to emerge. What you can see happening is how it's given rise to, you know, how it's going to give rise to adivasi movements. It's not surprising that the Gorka, there's, you know, Gorka movement now in the areas where, you know, of Naxalbari originally. So, you can see how people get politicized through their involvement in movements like this and then take on, you know, other forms, other causes. So, yeah, so, but I also find it very interesting right now, you know, with the current situation. And, as Kayya was mentioning earlier, this whole, you know, branding of people as urban Naxites and actually how, and I heard actually that Sonia Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi is now, you know, allegedly giving her support to the Naxites. So, it's at the very moment, at the very moment when this movement is being, you know, killed militarily, you see it kind of re-emerging in all these other places where you least expect it and people being, you know, I mean, so all these things give life to an idea, you know, not the movement itself, but the idea of resistance revolutionary spirit, which in a way I think, you know, Naxalism is now standing for at this moment in time when the fighters are being, you know, arrested or killed or killed in custody. Yeah, so, I don't know, how much more time do I have? Yeah, yeah, that's it, that's it. Well, maybe actually that's a good note to end on. Thank you all for your questions. And yeah, I'd be happy to talk to people afterwards, but yeah, I'm sorry I didn't get back to all of them, especially this interesting question about leaders and whether they're any different. Okay.