On June 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi waved a green flag in Bhilai to mark the beginning of the first commercial flight, launched under the Udaan regional air connectivity scheme, connecting Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur with Jagdalpur, in the left-wing extremism (LWE)-afflicted Bastar region.
The fact that the flag waving took place 300 kilometres away from Jagdalpur did not really matter, as the 18-seater Air Odisha flight passed through the celebratory water cannon salute on its arrival at Raipur from the renovated Jagdalpur airport. A road trip takes seven hours from Jagdalpur to Raipur. Eight passengers who boarded the flight reached Raipur in 40 minutes. Four passengers travelled back to Jagdalpur from Raipur. The distance between mainland Chhattisgarh and Bastar had shrunk, or so it appeared.
The member of Parliament from Bastar, Dinesh Kashyap, flew with seven chosen passengers on the maiden flight. Among them were, as profiled by a pro-establishment newspaper, a villager from the Abujhmad area (considered to be the stronghold of the CPI-Maoist), a visually impaired girl student from another village in the Bastar region, a tribal woman tendu leaf collector, a school student who has qualified for admission into the IIT, a girl student who successfully cleared the NEET examination, another student studying law in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, and the sarpanch of Balikonta village panchayat. Each of them, interviewed by the media, profusely thanked the Prime Minister for having fulfilled their dream. The visibly impaired student also thanked the Prime Minister for the pucca house given to her family under the Prime Minister Housing Scheme. Four passengers flew from Raipur to Jagdalpur and were greeted by the airport staff with roses. The paraphernalia was complete with the massive hoardings put up in Jagdalpur’s busiest intersection, the Maharana Pratap Chowk by the state’s ruling party thanking chief minister Raman Singh and Prime Minister Modi.
Nine of the 18 seats have been subsidised by the Centre and cost Rs 1,700 to 1,800 each, whereas the remaining would cost Rs 2,500 to 3,000. A bus ticket, in comparison, costs Rs 330 upwards.
Inaugurating the flight, Modi announced, “For many years in India, all the talk about Bastar was about bombs, guns, pistols and violence. Today, the talk about Bastar is linked to the airport in Jagdalpur.” Other officials narrated how the flight could be a turning point in the violent history of the region. Not only would the flight boost tourism and business opportunities in the region, but even would boost governance by making the region more accessible, they professed. While Modi’s self-congratulatory message is somewhat synonymous with the current regime’s public posturing, its content is highly misleading, to say the least.
(Incidentally, the very next day, the flight was cancelled after failure to receive Naval clearance).
Lives of security force personnel have been lost either while providing protection to the road building projects in the interior areas of Bastar, or in attempts to keep the roads safe for transport.Security. Credit: Reuters/Files
Bastar’s notoriety for being the worst LWE affected region of the country for over a decade remains undisturbed during the tenure of the current regime in New Delhi. Three weeks before the maiden flight, an ambush on a SUV had killed seven security force personnel in Dantewada, less than 85 kilometres from Jagdalpur.
In March 2018, CPI-Maoist cadres torched three buses after directing their occupants to alight from the vehicles in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district. A former police constable, who was among the bus passengers, was shot dead by the extremists. One of the torched buses was going to Hyderabad from Jagdalpur and other from Dantewada to Hyderabad. Among the most notable attacks on public transport vehicles that connected the remote regions of Bastar with the district headquarter was that of the ‘Freedom’ bus. Launched amid fanfare in May 2017, connecting the remote Jagargunda village and Jagdalpur, the bus was torched by the Naxals in January 2018, thereby disrupting the service.
The point here is not to predict an extremist attack on the plane, which may never take place, but to highlight the tokenism that this move represents. In a region, where public transport system remains skeletal and susceptible to disruption by extremists, an 18-seater flight whose one-way subsidised ticket costs more than the monthly income of many tribals, the plane emanates a sense of sarcasm and elitism.
The government has indeed made attempts to build some of the interior roads. Lives of security force personnel have been lost either while providing protection to the road building projects in the interior areas of Bastar, or in attempts to keep the roads safe for transport. The reality, however, is that while transport between district headquarters and the state capital have remained more or less safe, the interior areas continue to remain cut off. Only security force and handful privately-owned vehicles travel on most interior roads of Bastar. All amenities and administrative power are mostly located in the district headquarters. No or unsafe transport services, therefore, essentially translates to total isolation and deprivation from essential services for a significant section of the population. Not long ago, a CRPF officer told me that his men manning remote camps even had to pay the extremists so that vehicles carrying their monthly ration can reach them without getting blown up.
Chhattisgarh goes to polls later this year. Bastar is a stronghold of the Congress party. Eight of the 12 seats went to the party in the 2013 elections. The plane, BJP hopes, could change the political calculations in its favour. Left-wing extremism in the region nonetheless will continue. After all, the Chief Minister has revised his earlier calculations to predict that the problem won’t be over till 2022.
Bibhu Prasad Routray is Director, Mantraya.org and has served as a Deputy Director in the National Security Council Secretariat, New Delhi. He can be contacted at bibhuroutray@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @BibhuRoutray.