Nandini
Sundar (2016). The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar, Juggernaut, pp. 413
In the mythical landscape of
India described in the epic Ramayana, Dandakaranya or the Dandaka forests, is a
land of exile for the protagonist Ram. It is here that he sheds his identity
and the privileges that come with it, faces his own demons, fights and
overcomes covert and overt enemies and makes decisions in the face of ethical
dilemmas. Bastar, the contemporary counterpart of Dandakaranya, in the southern
part of Chhattisgarh in central India, has been posing a new kind of dilemma to
the social and political fabric of our protagonist, the modern Indian State. In
these forested hills for more than three decades, Maoists have almost run a
parallel state, distributing land, settling disputes and entering into contractual
relations with its inhabitants. It is here that the Indian state fights its
counter insurgency operations against the Maoists and with it the poorest
inhabitants, whose citizenship have been devoid of rights and distributive
justice, reduced to a ‘law and order problem’. In all these dramatic accounts
of a war and counter war, the average Indian in the forested hills is at best
obscure- this book digs her out of the crossfires of conflict and evocatively tells
her story.
This important book comes out of
over three decades of research in the Bastar region in India by renowned
anthropologist and Infosys Prize winner, Nandini Sundar. The author dvelves
into her extensive field experience, and from the vantage point of an academic
and intimate outsider, lays bare the nuances and contradictions of the raging
war in Bastar. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part called ‘The
Landscape of Resistance’, Sundar locates the struggle in the social and
political exploitation of the adivasis. In the second part called ‘Civil War’,
various forms of insurgencies and counter measures from the state is analysed,
to bring out the severity of the vortex of violence in which Bastar is steeped
in. In the last part called ‘Institutions on Trial’, the reaction of various
actors including politicians, human rights organisations, media and judiciary
are brought out. Sundar argues that there are only a few opponents to this war
in the forests of Bastar and fewer institutional and structural checks and
balances from the state to excesses against its own citizens. It is because of
this failure of state in the face of corporate or political greed and against
its own citizens that the ‘violence, even against injustice, degenerates into
brutality and corruption’.
This book is about a war by India’s
poorest to reclaim land and property, a battle to co-opt traditional power
struggle in an ideological insurgency and the state’s last attempt to hold its
bastion of political authority. It speaks from the viewpoint of an average Adivasi
and her need to keep the Maoist and the Indian state in and out in carefully
measured political spaces. It directly pits the conundrum of the citizen to
choose between security or development, state or protectorate vigilantes, food
or land, road or jungle. It exposes the discourse that uses development as a
weapon to get consent of people, security as threat to land and livelihood and
elections as battle ground. It speaks of
the propaganda wars of a significant part of media and the response of judiciary,
both guardians of democracy, in the three decades of unceasing internal violence.
It also unflinchingly admits the limits of cause celebre campaigns and civil society
movements because of the difficulty in articulating the position of the average
citizen on whose behalf political action is demanded. This is a deeply
researched portrait of struggle for citizenship and raises important questions
for Indian democracy based on field research, court testimonies, government
documents, media reportage and field participation.
