“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
When Verrier Elwin, a brilliant Oxford scholar and anthropologist, moved to Bastar in 1940 with his Gond wife Kosi to write about the tribes of the region, it was truly an idyll. He built his home overlooking the Chitrakote Falls on the river Indravati.
Over the next half century, the Bastar tribals in the subcontinent’s richest region were rendered virtually stateless, dispossessed, and fighting for basic rights. By the eighties, the Maoists moved in where governance was absent, finding a haven for their operational base, and mobilising the villagers for armed action. What followed were conventional state tactics and extra-judicial methods of raising vigilantes and alleged repression.
From time to time the Maoists struck hard, and the retaliatory war carried on. Till last month the Indian forces claimed to have made major advances.