The Age of Aspiration by Dilip Hiro

Author:Dilip Hiro [Hiro, Dilip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971413
Publisher: The New Press

7

Maoists in the Mineral-Rich Heartland

The Road to Dantewada

In the absence of a satisfactory inn in Dantewada, a visitor has to settle for reaching it from Jagdalpur, a far bigger urban center, fifty miles to its east. The 190-mile road journey to Jagdalpur starts at the freshly built airport of Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh (Hindi: Thirty-six Forts). A brief run along a tree-covered avenue leads to a city of mismatched structures. Babylon Hotels and Restaurants stands next to a garage marked Silverline Automobiles, with its mechanics in greasy uniforms lounging near the clinically clean Marble Art, written in Hindi, displaying marble statues of Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Once you leave Raipur, the asphalt road becomes smooth and uncluttered, except for occasional motorcycles driven by men wearing Bedouin-style headgear. In the surrounding plain, the dwellings range from huts of flimsy material to brick houses. These are built inside compounds delineated by walls of bamboo or plastered, baked bricks. Often the walls are overlaid with gigantic advertisements in red, blue, and yellow. The dominance of cement companies—ACC (“Build with confidence”), Jaypee Cement, and Ambuja Cement—interspersed with signs for GK (TMI) Mortgage Company underscores the boost given to the construction industry in the wake of the New Economic Policy. The approach to a village en route, hosting such signs as Kashyap Cycle Store and Kalpana Ready Made Clothes, is signaled by speed breakers of bent steel bars or stone-hardened asphalt.

After a three-hour drive, you begin to ascend. The distant hills are thickly forested. The highway becomes a ribbon between clearings and fields that are neither large nor particularly fertile. Sighting a tractor is a rarity. The clearings are dotted with electricity pylons and cell-phone transmission towers. The sudden appearance of a red-and-white Aircel billboard between these skeletal gray frames is a dramatic reminder of the communications revolution. Colors of human-made structures—green, blue, yellow, and white—merge with those of nature. Along the road you see an occasional Hindu temple, with its round pyramidal architecture, painted saffron. The area is the domain of Adivasis (Hindi: original inhabitants), most of whom live in villages in the interior, so there are very few people walking along the margins of the road. Occasionally, a lean Adivasi woman carrying a bundle of long, thin tree branches, used as cooking fuel, is seen trudging along.

Then the road turns into a series of ascending serpentine twists that can be maneuvered only in low gear. My Adivasi driver, Arjun Das, who was prone to speeding, slowed down. He stopped near the village of Koska, in the bend of a very sharp hairpin turn near a stone structure bearing a sign that read in Hindi MAA TELINA SATI (Mother Telina Sati). He left the car and disappeared into a semidark shrine huddled between two gigantic boulders to receive the female saint’s blessings for safety on the road. For the slender, twenty-one-year-old Das, with the frame and looks of a boy in his mid-teens, this ritual was more reassuring than heeding the warnings in English—“Speed thrills but kills”—posted along the highway, which he could not read.

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