Captors of the Liberated Zone

Late one night recently, my phone rang. It was my sister, and her voice was trembling. A member of India's nominally Maoist insurgency had just called her husband, demanding a protection payment of more than $1,000. The caller said someone would be sent to their home to collect the payment. Don't call the police, the caller warned. There was no danger of that. For years the Maoists have practically owned the impoverished eastern state of Jharkhand, where my sister and her husband live in a rented house on the outskirts of a small, dusty town. The terrified local cops seldom venture outside their station houses.

My sister didn't know what to do. The extortionists wanted roughly five full months' pay from my brother-in-law's midlevel government job. Even if the two could scrape up so much money, they didn't expect it to solve anything. When a protection victim pays off, the Maoists come back for more. But refusing is no option. My sister's husband, a soft-spoken, bighearted man, has traveled around the state as a literacy worker. In remote villages he's seen men who defaulted on small payments to the Maoists. Some were missing an arm. Others had their ears or their nose cut off. Running away wouldn't help, either. How would the family live if my brother-in-law left his job?

After a sleepless night I boarded a long-distance train from New Delhi. I wanted to see my sister and her husband, and I hoped to find someone who could help them. I grew up in Jharkhand. Now it's part of what India's Maoists call "the liberated zone," although most of the area's desperately poor inhabitants are anything but free. Of India's estimated 1.1 billion people, 836 million live on less than 45 cents a day, according to the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector. The states where self-described Maoists operate are home to nearly 80 percent of those 836 million. In Jharkhand, one of the worst-affected states, guerrillas routinely attack police stations, assassinate "class enemies," blow up government buildings and laugh at state authorities. The campaign of violence has intensified recently; the Maoists have tried with only slight success to impose a boycott against India's monthlong parliamentary elections. The group has blown up a couple of railway stations, hijacked an entire passenger train, torched trucks on the highways and killed five civilians on suspicion of being police informers or defying Maoist rule.

It was a hot, bright morning when I got off the train in Jharkhand with a vague plan to get in touch with the rebels. I knew some of the state's original Maoist leaders about 40 years ago. The group was outlawed after it began killing landlords, moneylenders and tough cops, and it petered out entirely in the late 1970s. A new generation of Mao-spouting armed rebels appeared in the 1990s. Their so-called people's war has been spreading across India ever since. There's little direct connection between the two movements other than their joint appropriation of Mao's name, but I thought if I could find any of the old leaders, maybe they could relay a message for me.

While I waited, I set out to find an extortion victim who could tell me about dealing with the Maoists. Jharkhand is full of businessmen, private doctors and shopkeepers who pay "taxes" to the shakedown artists, but most of them prefer not to talk about it. Finally, Sanjiv, a construction man in his early 40s, agreed to talk if I didn't mention his full name and location. Last year he had a government contract to build a stretch of road, and the Maoists heard about it. They sent a man to tell him they wanted a 30 percent share of his total contract in cash before they would let him start work. Sanjiv showed up the next day with the money. He was blindfolded and escorted deep into the forest, where a man counted it as masked gunmen stood by. Since then the Maoists have come back twice for more money. Another local contractor took too long paying. He arrived at the site one morning and found his road roller destroyed by fire, Sanjiv says.

I got further background on the Maoists from a local journalist. Deepak Ambastha is the editor of Prabhat Khabar, a Hindi daily newspaper. "There is no trace of ideological purity among the Maoists these days," he told me at his office on the outskirts of Dhanbad. "They are into extortion, kidnapping and even commit rape. The state's writ runs only within city limits." When the Maoists call a general strike, railways cancel trains, truckers get off the streets and people in many parts of the state stay indoors. Ambastha and a group of fellow journalists were robbed on a highway once by a gang of armed Maoists. He and his friends fled the scene and begged for help at a local police station, he says. The cops refused to open their gate. Ambastha warned me not to leave town after dark.

Still, I hadn't seen the Jharkhand countryside in years, so I hired a car. The driver agreed to take me out of town on one condition: he had to be home before sunset. We headed out into the countryside, where the Maoists rule. Many villages are miles off the narrow, potholed main road, accessible only by dirt trails. We stopped at Muraldih, a village of 500. About 100 young men and women live there, but only one has a permanent job in town. Others make money any way they can—pick-and-shovel work, subsistence farming, selling wood and fruits from the forest. They have no electricity, no health care and only one well for drinking water. I wanted to check out a rural police station, but my driver kept reminding me of my promise. We didn't see one police patrol all day.