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Hello Bastar (2011)

by Rahul Pandita(Favorite Author)

4.06 of 5 Votes: 7

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English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Tranquebar Press

review 1: I am an author and for my next book, I wanted to research Naxalism in India. This is the first book I read on the topic and I must admit, it has left me angry and fuming. It is difficult to imagine the hardships that our people have suffered, and are still suffering, in the name of caste and bias. Being from a higher caste and being born and brought up in a city, I used to think that nobody cares for what caste you belong to these days. I would help poor and old without asking what caste they belonged to. If I was thirsty or saw someone thirsty or hungry, I would give them water/food or take water/food from someone without asking the caste of that person. I thought that our government was propagating the caste structure by imposing caste-based reservations all over the cou... morentry, especially Maharashtra, and I firmly believed that people should be given jobs and promotions based on their quality of work and their caliber alone. But after reading this book, I realize that job reservations are necessary in India, only not in the cities, but in small towns and villages. There's an incident mentioned in this book where a villager from lower caste completed graduation and got beaten by the higher caste villagers for studying more than them. He then completed Masters and cleared a job interview, but the village Post officials tore his Appointment Letter up because they couldn't bear to see a lower caste boy securing a nice job in the city. And the boy's only dream was to earn enough to build a kitchen for his mother and purchase a two-wheeler for himself. Such a small dream, yet denied by the society. How could the human race show so much compassion and at the same time so much cruelty, is beyond me.The Indian government has neglected certain parts of our country since before independence to this date (!!) and yet, expect the peasants to die without attempting a fight for survival. Can any of you readers imagine a person earning a meager Rs. 1 in exchange for 100 bamboo shoots to be cut, packed & transported, which takes the Adiwasis a whole day? And what do they eat to draw strength for such hard physical labour? They put 3 or 4 grains of rice in a 'matka' full of water and boil it throughout the night. Whatever broth is formed in the morning, the whole family consumes that and they set out for another back-breaking labour of the day. Even businessmen have turned into leeches when they realized the Adiwasis weren't educated and weren't connected in any way to civilization - they would give 1 kg of SALT in exchange for 1 kg of DRY FRUITS!! Imagine the profits and then imagine the injustice.Those poor creatures would clear some land and try to do farming, while the forest officers would arrive with tractors at harvest time and threaten that they would raze the field unless those Adiwasis paid them a hefty amount of money or gave them two thirds of their farm produce, or sent their wives and daughters for their entertainment. How can a person survive like this?After reading this book, I realized that even the media personals sympathize with these so called Naxalite rebels because they understand these poor people are fighting for nothing but survival - which should actually be their birth right! We say India is a democracy; everyone has the right to speak, but what's the use if nobody listens? A country where everyone has the right to speak, there is a massive chunk of us who don't even have the right to survive!! It is NOW that I realize why Somalians have turned to dacoity and armed struggle. As I always say: 'The most dangerous person in the world is the one who not only knows his own hunger, but the hunger of his kids.' If the world community wants to reduce crime and danger to their lives, they only need to feed the hungry. Btw, hungry can't be fed by you striving to NOT waste food and stuff yourself with whatever comes on your plate. That's the recipe to obesity, not feeding the hungry. If the world really wants to feed the hungry, then stop stuffing yourself and make an effort to 'distribute' the food to the people who really need feeding. Like, for example, for the Kashmir flood victims, the Golden Temple is making a 'langar' (free food service) for one lakh people on a daily basis, which is being air-lifted by Indian Air Force helicopters and distributed to the needy. Only stopping the wastage isn't enough; correct distribution of food is the need of the time.I would have given a five star rating to this book, but the narration needs a bit of improvement - the timelines aren't clear and in a few places, you feel like reading a newsflash (different incidents, not related to each other, are mentioned in one sentence after another in the same paragraph). This means that the author's thoughts or pieces of information/facts need to be grouped logically into paragraphs, which sometimes is not seen and the reader tends to get confused because of that. There are also some grammatical mistakes and comma use mistakes throughout the book. Otherwise, the book served the purpose for me for now.P.S: It is said that whoever sympathizes with the Naxals, the government (especially under Chidambaram as Home Minister) brands them as either Naxals themselves or Naxal-sympathizers and punishes them for speaking up. I only want to say that I cannot be a Naxal because I'm from a higher caste, but I am a strong advocate of moral justice. I am a humanitarian and even though different societies have different laws, I stand by what is 'right', not what is written or believed or practiced.
review 2: Rahul Pandita has done a commendable job in outlining the impact when development is being neglected by the state in this well researched book. Hello Bastar traces the very origin of naxalite movement in India and goes on in detail to elaborate upon how it became the biggest internal security issue of free India. It throws light on why the tribals and the oppressed started fighting for self respect along with struggles for their livelihood. The ultimate manifestations are now visible when a parallel virtual government with no state authority in sight is being run by the Maoists on a stretch of land extending from Tirupati temple region in AP to Pasupati in Nepal, colloquially known as the infamous red corridor. Rahul has stressed upon the fact that the issue of violence is secondary and the primary issue is that of development deficit and oppression. Peasant's oppression, landlords exploitation, police siding with wealthy and elite class, growth of revolutionary ideas of Mao, Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, military and political training from China etc have been identified as the reason for the spread of LWE by the author. Hello Bastar is thus a very empathetic piece of literary creation which makes the reader understand the evolution, strategy and the current status of Left Wing Extremism in India and how it has morphed to become a serious headache to both central and state governments. less

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