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Journalism of Courage
The books they carry in their hands are worn-out, the binding a little loose, the pages dog-eared. Every day, for the past two months, they walk through the narrow, dusty lanes of their village, through wild, untamed vegetation. They walk past structures that once held a hospital, a school, a government building, but whose walls now, mossy and damp, hold up the open sky. They walk till they reach buildings that have walls, a roof, tables and chairs — the children of Jagargunda are back in school.
Over a decade after Jagargunda, a village deep inside south Sukma, was ravaged in the fight between Maoists and the state-backed vigilante group, the Salwa Judum, the district administration has begun a slow rebuilding effort, starting with schools. In September this year, after six months of difficult, often unyielding, conversations between teachers, parents, students and the Sukma district administration, Jagargunda’s schools opened its rusty gates to welcome back students. While some of the children were coming to school for the first time, for the others, whose families had fled Jagargunda and neighbouring villages at the height of the violence, it was homecoming of a different kind.
Until March, for12 long years, all Jagargunda was left with was one primary school, with 30 students and three teachers. Beginning September, that has gone up to 310 registered students and 28 teachers spread across a primary school, a middle school, a senior secondary school and two hostels, which house 177 of the 310
students.
At the Jagargunda Government Secondary School, Manish Kumar Nag is waiting under a banyan tree for his friends to catch up before they all head to their classrooms. There are not many in class this week since the school has just reopened after the Dussehra holidays.
Manish’s family is from Elampalli, eight km from Jagargunda, and until recently, he stayed in a hostel in Dornapal, about 58 km from Jagargunda. “I used to like staying in Dornapal too, but studying in Jagargunda means I am closer home and can see them whenever I want to,” he says. Quietly, he adds, “I want to be an engineer.”
In Jagargunda, a village with more than 2,500 people, most conversations slip into reminiscences of a bygone time, before the violence cleaved the village and the region. The village, that connects to Sukma, Dantewada and Bijapur, was considered a centre for tribal culture and trade, home to one of the biggest tamarind markets in Asia. Migrants from Andhra Pradesh, drawn to its markets and commerce, had over the years made Jagargunda their home.
Across Jagargunda are remnants of the prosperity the village once enjoyed, among them a rusted locker that lies in an empty plot. Villagers talk of another locker that lay next to this one for years, the property of the Chhattisgarh Gramin Bank that had its branch in the village. Villagers, Maoists and government officials tried to open the locker, set fire to its hinges, break it open with hammers, but it refused to yield until, three years ago, it was taken away by officials of the bank. Jagargunda also had a hospital with doctors’ quarters, even a football club, each with a building of its own. “We even had an MBBS doctor here. At that time, there were MBBS doctors only here and in Sukma. They lived in that building there,” says a villager, pointing to a building overgrown with moss. The ceiling is broken, and the window is a big hole in the wall. When the violence came, this was one of the many buildings that were left abandoned or destroyed.
It was 2007, the year Salwa Judum began, that the violence struck. The Salwa Judum was an effort backed by both the then BJP government and the late Congress leader Mahendra Karma, which saw civilians being given arms by the state to wipe out the Maoists. The Judum was declared illegal by the Supreme Court in a landmark judgment in 2011, but by then, the violence had torn Bastar apart. Thousands were displaced and homes were burnt amidst allegations of wide-spread human rights abuse.
As the Judum entered villages in the forests off the main road, there were only two choices for villagers. Most left their homes and fled to neighbouring states such as Andhra Pradesh, but thousands were herded into Salwa Judum camps run by the administration. As the Maoists and the state engaged in a bloody conflict, these camps became targets for the Maoists.
Jagargunda, which lies on a narrow road that masquerades as a state highway, houses to this day one of the biggest Salwa Judum camps in Bastar, most of its inmates residents of villages in the forests surrounding Jagargunda. Over 1,700 people — more than half of Jagargunda’s population — lives in this camp. Spools of concertina wire encircle the village, with four gates manned by the CRPF and the Chhattisgarh Police.
Sitting at one of the two shops that sell tea and biscuits in the village, Raju Sori, a resident of Jagargunda, says, “Every day, they open the gates at 6 am, and shut at 6 pm. We live in a cage.” Like most others, his source of income is the paddy that is grown in fields outside the gates of the village. With no irrigation, there is only one crop cycle — during and after the monsoons. For the rest of the year, the fields are a dry yellow and brown, the ground thirsting for water and the people for jobs.
But he considers himself lucky that he doesn’t live in the Salwa Judum camp, in tightly packed homes separated by narrow lanes. At least Sori’s home has two rooms, with a small patch of garden at the rear, he says. At least he still has his land. “For us, our land is everything. But these families in the camp had to abandon their villages and their fields. Here they have no work, no agriculture. In one sense, bad as it is, at least Jagargunda was on the road. These people had it worse because they lived in villages off the road,” he says.
At the entrance to the village is a milestone that says “Jagargunda-0”. Villagers have painted it over in bright blue to ensure that its other pointers — Sukma, Dantewada, and Bijapur, roads emanating from Jagargunda and which connect it to the three big towns in south Bastar — are not visible. They know well that while these radiating roads made Jagargunda a prominent junction and a centre of affluence all those years ago, they also turned the village into an epicentre of violence.
As the conflict continued, Maoists destroyed the roads to Dantewada and Bijapur and damaged the once black tarred road that connected Jagargunda to Sukma via Dornapal. It was on this road that in 2017, 28 CRPF jawans lost their lives in an ambush. There are as many as 15 security camps on the 58-kilometre stretch, and yet, only 23 km of a cement road has been built over the last decade. “When it rains, we get completely cut off,” says Sori.
A Class 12 student who lives in the hostel says, “When we were in Dornapal, we could go to Sukma from time to time. In Dornapal, there were shops where we could buy nice things to eat, or just step out of school. In Jagargunda, everything is too far away and too dangerous. And once the gates shut at 6 pm, there is nothing
we can do.”
In March 2019, District Magistrate Chandan Kumar travelled down the road that connects Dornapal to Jagargunda, on National Highway 30. At Jagargunda, he was besieged by villagers who implored him to bring the village back “to what it was”. Step one was the resumption of schools.
“In March, when we began work on reviving the schools, we realised there were so many dilapidated buildings, many that were blasted apart and had Maoist slogans written on them. We thought that instead of building new structures, it would be better if those buildings could be moulded back into shape. We were able to complete the work two months ago. We then had meetings with other stakeholders such as teachers and hostel wardens who were living in Dornapal, because these institutions had been shifted out of Jagargunda. Initially, they were not willing to go back to Jagargunda, but we told them that this is for the future of students. Education is ideology-neutral. Nobody will oppose a school,” says Kumar.
Though the schools have reopened, the immediate challenge for the administration is to ensure that students and teachers stay beyond this session.
At the Government Boys Hostel, which together with the girls’ hostel house 177 students and 28 teachers, students say resources are often stretched thin.
Mahesh Kumar Markam, a Class 12 student from Elampalli village near Jagargunda, says he is happy that the school has begun. But he points to where he sleeps at night — a corridor in the main school, open to the elements. “The hostel facilities are not good. When it rains, there is no choice but to get wet. There are puddles where we sleep. It was not like this in the Dornapal hostel,” he says.
The district administration says a third hostel is under renovation, a building that had fallen into ruin and is now being refurbished. But the pace of work is slow. A contractor, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, says, “Everything in Jagargunda is slow. We want to finish work as soon as we can, but there is very little we can do. The problem is labour. Nobody wants to come here. Everybody is afraid of being caught in the conflict.”
No contractor, or teacher, or a government official wants to be quoted in Jagargunda. The consequences of speaking out are far too high. “If we speak against the administration, we might get suspended. But if the Maoists think we are speaking out of turn, we and our families are in danger,” says a teacher from the village who has been posted to the Jagargunda Government Senior Secondary School.
“We were told to join the school for the sake of the children, but what is the point living like this? I might quit my job if things don’t improve,” he says, sitting with his colleagues in the staff room. It’s around 1.30 in the afternoon and teachers of all the three schools in Jagargunda congregate here every day at lunch time.
This staff room has other uses. In one corner are utensils, in another, mattresses have been stacked up. Damp from the rains, some of the mattresses are torn, a sure sign, the teachers say, of rats chewing through the cloth. “When darkness falls, we put the mattresses next to each other on the floor and sleep. There are times we wake up with bites, and we don’t know what has bitten us,” says a teacher.
While formal schools have now opened in villages such as Jagargunda and Bhejji along arterial roads, the district administration has embarked on another project: opening some form of schooling in villages that are in the forests, where, to this day, the administration has very little reach.
Around 123 schools were destroyed during the Salwa Judum years. So far, with help from the local community, the administration claims to have revived 91 of these schools and brought around 3,600 children back to school.
But while getting children to school needed a little coaxing, the looming question was who would teach the students. Convincing teachers to travel to Jagargunda was difficult enough, to get them to live and teach deep inside forests, with no connectivity and no contact with the outside world, proved almost impossible.
“So who do you think are running these schools? Young boys and girls who are from the same village where the schools were destroyed. They are our shiksha doots, people who have volunteered to start these schools. As of now, these are single-teacher schools. As and when more children get enrolled, we will deploy other human resources,” says Kumar.
Yet, as with everything else in Bastar, all these initiatives come with long-standing challenges. There are questions being raised on the quality of education that will be imparted by “shiksha doots”. The district administration admits there is little by way of checks and balances, but the idea, they say, was to make a beginning. “Before inducting them, we gave them one month of residential training here in Sukma. We are hoping that they can teach alphabets, counting, simple mathematics so that when these children get to Class 5, we can bring them to middle schools being run along national highways. That way, at least a generation won’t be lost,” says Kumar.
Of these 91 one-room schools, most of them run out of mud hutments, the administration is seeking to firm up 36. But the Bastar landscape is a testament to the difficulty that exists — most of the formal residential schools are run out of large porta cabin structures. “Maoists usually target structures with concrete roofs. So we build structures with asbestos and prefab sheets. As of now, I have not faced resistance, direct or indirect, for starting the schools. That is a positive sign,” says Kumar.
In Jagargunda, a village that longs for the “raunak (life)” it once held, these positives, however small, stand out.
Six months ago, electricity returned to homes, and from inside them come muffled strains of Bollywood music or a Shahrukh Khan film. Until six months ago, trucks from Sukma came bearing supplies twice a year; the supplies now come once a week, the trundle of pickup vehicles now commonplace. A small weekly haat bazaar has restarted as well.
Most of all, there are sounds of a resurgence in the buildings that house the schools. Of children in uniform playing in the fields, of a student in a corner being admonished by a teacher, of the chorus of “chutteeee (freedom)” as the bell tolls at the end of a school day. The sound of “rounak” again.
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