I ran away from
home in 2002, when I was 16. I walked to the Dantewada railway station
and took a train to Hyderabad where I got a job with a company called
Krypton Novelties. I supplied gift items to shops and was happy with
my job. My parents would call my employer to check on me, but they had
stopped speaking to me.
One day some people
came up to me and asked me to get Rs 50,000 per month from my employer.
If I didn’t, they said, they would blow up his factory and kill
me in the bargain. They called themselves Naxalites.
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| |
‘I killed 12
people as a Naxal, including village sarpanches, panchayat officials
and an ASI’ |
My employer refused
and I feared for my life. I had no idea what Naxalism was, but I thought,
that a life extorting huge sums from businessmen would be much better.
I left my job and joined the Naxalites in January 2003. Their camp was
in Khammam district, bordering Chattisgarh. Spread across a huge area
in the jungle surrounded by hills, it must have covered at least five
square kilometres.
Nine months of
intensive training followed. They taught me how to make bombs, how to
operate weapons, how to protect myself in the face of an attack. The
arms training began with a .303 rifle. Then they gave me a 12-bore rifle,
and soon I was operating automatic weapons: SLRs (self-loading rifles),
AK-47s and finally, Light Machine Guns. My family presumed I had died.
Training over, I was inducted into the Central Military Dalam, cpi (Maoist)’s
highest military body.
We would go from
village to village in Dantewada, organising night meetings to attract
support and tell the villagers not to side with the police. I graduated
to taking part in operations, many of which I led. I killed 12 people
as a Naxal, some of them village sarpanches and panchayat officials.
I even killed an Additional Sub-Inspector. Often we would go to a village
and barge into the house of the wealthiest family. We would distribute
their wealth among the villagers. If the family resisted, we would murder
them.
We used to place
pressure bombs — ordinary things with explosives inside them —
strategically in places where policemen used to rest during their patrols.
The moment a policemen would sit on a pressure bomb, he would explode
into pieces. Landmines were effective in blowing up police and government
vehicles.
By the end of 2003,
I began introspecting: Why was I doing this? For whose benefit? So one
day I got up and went back to the factory in Hyderabad. They kept me
again. But they got suspicious and two months later sacked me.
So I returned to
Gumalnar to an emotional homecoming. My parents forgave me and I went
to Raipur. In January 2006, Chaitram Atami asked me to join the Salva
Judum. They made me a trainer in the Salva Judum camp in Gidam block.
It felt strange that I was doing this all over again, but this time
I felt proud of what I was doing. I was serving my village and my country.
