I was standing at the top of an escalator at the brand spanking new international airport in Delhi. (The swanky new airport, a huge improvement on its predecessor, was recently built by the Bangalore-based GMR Group.) In front of me was an ocean of people, in queues that numbered in the 40s, waiting to get through immigration. I got down and walked past all the lines, looking for the shortest one. I was moving back to India after 8.5 years in New York. After that journey of my life, what was another 30 minutes, I thought. So I queued up in the line nearest me, plugged in my iPod, and decided to be patient while listening to OneRepublic. The illusion of organized travel ended pretty quickly.

The booth serving the line next to mine had been empty for a while. So while my line managed to inch its way forward, the folks next to me had been getting increasingly agitated as both the officers at that desk had been gone a good 20 minutes. Finally two men–they looked official in their matching gray suits–took over the booth and started to process the paperwork. Suddenly a man standing in the line started clapping loudly. “Finally,” he said loudly. “We’ve been waiting here for ever. You call your self a manager? My 13-month-old son can do a better job of managing this booth.” The rant continued with how ineffective the whole system was. Other passengers chimed in. The cowed immigration officers dropped my queue and were only processing the one next to me. Anything to get the angry man out the door, I suppose.

Life in India is never without more than its fair share of drama. I can’t wait to catalog at least some of that!

I had always been interested in the Maoist insurgency that’s currently raging in eastern India. I had vaguely heard of the problems that businesses were having in parts of the country – both thanks to the rebels and the left wing political parties. Until I reported this story I had no idea how much the private sector was contributing to the problem. But this is not a new story in India. In fact, it’s 43-years-old. And way before I even came along, my aunt and uncle had to bear the brunt of the Maoists.
Uncle Avinash and Aunty June are amongst my favorite in the family tree, if one is allowed to pick favorites. I was in India to report this story when they called to wish my father on his birthday. June aunty has always been interested in my career and asked me what I was working on. I mentioned the word Maoists and it was like opening the flood gates.
The Maoist movement started with a peasant insurrection in 1967 in the village of Naxalbari in the state of West Bengal (and was initially known as the Naxalite movement). In the late 1960s Avinash was working for a British heavy engineering company. The Naxalbari rebellion was still fairly fresh and some of that fervor had taken hold in Calcutta. The unions had called for a lock out at most factories and both offices and management were being regularly “gheraoed” or encircled by the protesters who wouldn’t let them leave. The naxals were beating up workers so they couldn’t get to work. A few were killed – one had acid poured down his throat, another’s son was pushed under a bus – and nearly all had to shell out a mandatory amount from their monthly pay check, straight onto a red blanket outside the factory.
“They did petty humiliations like cutting the window mesh so the mosquitoes would come in, cutting off the electricity, not letting us go to the bathroom,” recalls Avinash. One time he was locked in in his office for two whole days, and he wasn’t given any food nor allowed to use the toilet. Every day he and his colleagues would meet at a different spot in the city and would be escorted by the police, in a convoy, to the factory. One day one of his colleagues who usually traveled with Avinash in his car, fed up with it all, called a taxi to go home early. The cab had barely exited the 10-acre factory compound when he was knifed to death. “He had six children,” recalls Avinash. “I had to tell his wife. She never forgave me.” While they were at the funeral two men on motor cycles drove by and threw crude bombs filled with nails at them.
Another time he was waiting at a cross light in his car when a man pulled up next to his car, tapped on his window and said: “Tell the big boss that when he comes, we’ll get him.” Only six people, including my uncle, knew that the big boss was indeed coming from England. The message sank in – they were not safe.
For Aunt June, it was a bigger threat, one to her children. She was home one afternoon when she heard gun fire. Their neighbor had been shot. She left her kids with the house help and rushed over to take him to a hospital on Lower Circular Road, she recalls. When she got back her 9-year-old daughter Anita said she had dropped her sweater on the road. It was covered in blood so Anita had put it in the sink to soak. “I suddenly realized that this is what it had come to,” says June. “Your children are watching their own father getting shot. That’s when my knees started to shake.”
I had no idea. And it was pretty scary that they had lived through such a violent period. My father’s other brother, Uncle Omesh, was also an engineer in Calcutta. He and his wife moved into a company bungalow on the factory premises after the violence started so they had less of an exposure to the daily humiliations and turmoil. His wife, my aunt Sumati, says that Aunty June was probably harassed even more as she’s Caucasian. It’s possible.
As I traveled through Chhattisgarh, and later through Orissa, I met scores of villagers who had been subjected to all sorts of humiliations and brutalities by the police, the government, the big companies. I was shocked that the smallest cog in this big democratic wheel was being so callously and brutally crushed by the very people who were supposed to look out for it. No wonder then some  turned to violence. And then I thought of June Aunty and Avinash Uncle. And I realized there is no black & white story.

After she finished her high school, Savita trained to be a teacher and taught in the village school. Until the day the principal made a pass at her. She slapped him in public and announced if he didn’t apologize to her in front of the entire school, she would lodge a complaint with the police. A panchayat was held and she appealed to the village elders. Before she could go to the police the school principal’s father begged her to let it go and prostrated at her feet. “He was my elder and it was not right that he was begging me and touching my feet,” she says. So she resigned. Soon after she joined a not for profit organization and has since been working on issues like right to health, food and land rights.

Savita isn’t the only one. From villages near Raipur to some near Raigarh, I met several remarkable women. One village that has been embroiled in a fight to keep a local steel maker out was worried about intruders. The villagers put up a barricade and a group of women kept a round-the-clock watch for days. In another village the residents had been protesting another company that was trying to acquire their land when the police launched a laathi charge. One woman snatched the stick out of a cop’s hands and beat him back with it.

And they do all this while they cook, clean, and work in the fields. They also take care of the flourishing business of tendu leaves – these are dried and used as a cheap substitute for tobacco. Having a lucrative business has helped boost their self worth and independence.

Driving from Raigarh to Raipur. It’s been raining on and off. The dust on the roads has settled, the leaves have been washed a clean green. The blue polyethylene sheets that are blocking the rain on some thatched roofs match the blue walls of some of the houses in the villages we are passing through. The sweet smell of damp earth is in the air and other than an occasional truck, the road is all ours.
On either side of this two lane road is a vast expanse of fields and the odd station to sell the crop, dhaan, piled high in multiple rows of sacks.
Chhattisgarh has three reserved forests, parts of which can be seen along this route, the thick foliage lining the road.
Time for some of the best ginger tea at a roadside shack in Saraipali.