Megha Bahree's blog

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.