Farewell to Arms by Rumela Sen

Author:Rumela Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Rebel’s Perspective

The story of Ranjan Yadav (MN2), a former Maoist commander turned politician in the North, is instructive in highlighting how crosscutting cleavages affect the Maoist organization as well as the retirement process in the region. I met him for the first time in October 2013 in the premises of the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly in Ranchi.11 I shadowed him as he met politicians, primarily from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), to try to clinch a nomination in the 2014 election. I spoke to him for a total of 15–30 minutes a day. In addition, I had two long, open-ended follow-up conversations with him, each of which lasted for over three hours. I learned later that he was not able to secure an RJD nomination; instead he ran in 2014 election on Samajwadi Party ticket. In In his 5 years career in electoral politics, he had switched his allegiance between four political parties across the left–right ideological spectrum. Among all the former rebels I met in Jharkhand, Yadav was the most articulate and willing to talk. He described how he was arrested in Ranchi in 2006 when he was sneaking into the city to visit his family. However, a few local journalists and activists suggested that he got himself arrested deliberately because he was ready to quit the Maoist Party. Yadav did not confirm or deny that, but he shared that in pursuing a career in electoral politics that he was following the example of former Maoist zonal commanders Kameshwar Baitha and Yugal Pal (MN3), both of whom ran for office while they were still in jail.

I met Baitha earlier in the summer of 2013. Baitha was arrested in 2005. He was still in prison when he contested the Palamu by-election in 2007 on the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket. Although he had finished second, hundreds of thousands of people had voted for him despite the fact that the Maoist Party had called for an election boycott and warned people not to vote for Baitha. Two years later Baitha left BSP, joined Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and won from the Palamu constituency in 2009 parliamentary elections. Baitha lost in 2014 after he was refused a nomination by all major parties in the region and had to run on Trinamool Congress ticket, which did not have much hold in Jharkhand. Another former Maoist zonal commander, Yugal Pal, also got arrested before he went on to surrender. Pal joined JMM and ran for office in 2009 while he was still in prison. Baitha’s brother was his campaign manager. The Maoists torched his election office in the Vishrampur Assembly Constituency, and they distributed pamphlets to warn other cadres not to join electoral politics. Encouraged by these example, Yadav also ran for office from the Chhatra constituency on CPI(ML) Liberation ticket during the 2009 parliamentary elections. Both Yadav and Pal lost the 2009 elections.12 Pal, who had switched allegiance to the All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) for the 2014 election, also lost. Although Maoists

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