Songs of Survival

Trapped between the Naxals on the one hand and the police on the other, fear is a leitmotif villagers have come to accept as part of their lives. "Earlier, it was just the annalu (brothers, read: Naxals), but now we have to contend with regular police visits as well," says Kondai villager M.D. Ibrahim. "The police nail us saying we give food and shelter to the Naxals, and the Naxals corner us, accusing us of siding with the cops when they (the Naxals) are fighting for our rights."

Local empathy with the Naxal movement is indeed fading, and a sense of weariness is replacing it. "If earlier, the Naxal leaders were educated and genuinely interested in our upliftment, the current lot are mostly brutal and illiterate," says P. Satyaiah, who gave up arms to set up a grocery store. Small farmer Mohan Rao recounts how he was once beaten up by a Naxal dalam after it mistook him for a police informer. "Whether we are inside the village, or outside, we never feel secure," says Rao. "Once a Naxalite, always a Naxalite: that’s the prejudice harboured by local police," says another former sympathiser. "We are denied the dignity of a free life despite returning to the mainstream."

And were one to expect the state to rescue them from this devil-and-the deep sea situation, Eturunagaram has no such luck. The villages of Shapally, Gogupally and Kondai have no roads, buses or hospitals, and often, no drinking water. It has been two years since state funds were sanctioned for a road to these hamlets, but after the PW opposed road construction, no contractor has been willing to take it up.

"All that Independence has meant to us is that every now and then we line up to cast votes," says villager Kogila Lal. Two other villagers, who are headed for the mandal headquarters in a tractor (the villages’ only form of mass transport), add that their mla Podem Veeraiah has never been seen in their village after the polls. "Even doctors refuse to come to our villages thinking we are all Naxals," they say.

Many of these villages have stupas, built in the memory of Naxals killed in encounters. Today, villagers cut a careful path around them, especially if a police team is in the vicinity, says Gogupalli’s Yenugola Chinna Lingaiah. At the same time, they also have to take care not to antagonise the Naxals. Revolutionary songs blare forth from ageing cassette players at night, almost as if to keep the wolves at bay. As Lingaiah puts it, "This is music not for the soul, but for survival."