New Delhi: He called me dada; I called him bhai. Co-travellers, we learnt our first – and the most enduring – journalism lessons in the jungles of Bastar. I then worked with the Indian Express, the newspaper that had given me a crucial assignment to travel, report and write from Central India. I had a luxurious cushion of “national media;” he was exposed to the daily risks against which I was largely insulated.
But Mukesh Chandrakar always remained an explorer, whereas I, the unlucky one, had to abandon the jungle. If the foundation of journalism is field reporting, the daily grind in the sun and the soil that leaves your body grimy and the soul tanned, Mukesh epitomised it.
His own life experiences greatly contributed to his understanding of the police-Maoist conflict and the Adivasi life in Dandakaranya. He was born in Basaguda village of Bijapur during the early years of the Naxal insurgency. He lost his father early and was later uprooted from his village in the Salwa Judum violence. His mother, an anganwadi worker, shifted to the Basaguda refugee camp before the family was forced to move to another refugee camp in Avapalli. A decade later, he lost his mother to cancer.
He was, thus, naturally predisposed to be a remarkable chronicler, an outstanding interlocutor of the tragic zone that Bastar is. He worked for several Raipur-based media houses for nearly a decade with little salary and multiple editorial diktats before he began considering the YouTube model of journalism.
In April 2021, he and some fellow journalists, including another extraordinary reporter named Ganesh Mishra, secured the release of a commando of the Central Reserve Police Force’s Commando Battalion for Resolute Action unit from Maoist captivity. As the abduction made headlines, the country’s elite paramilitary forces remained helpless before a bunch of young journalists emerged from the jungle in jubilation. Till date, Mukesh’s X handle has the pinned tweet of a few bikers arriving in celebration, with him leading from the front and the released commando riding pillion.
A year later, when I published Mukesh’s profile in Outlook magazine, I quoted him on his decision to change his mode of journalism: “Ganesh Mishra and I played a major role in securing his (the commando’s) release. National channels were taking my bytes. But unfortunately, at my own channel, my editor-anchor hogged the space.”
I go back to our chat history amid an engulfing sadness to find the conversations we had in 2021, the messages and phone calls to discuss the title and format of the new channel.
The channel, Bastar Junction, soon became a credible voice of Bastar. He was among the first to report on the May 2021 Silger incident in which three Adivasis were killed in firing by security forces.
The video genre lent him maximum joy and a sense of fulfilment. He no longer had to send endless story pitches to negligent editors nor was there any fear of his byline getting whitewashed.
Reporting from a conflict zone is always fraught with risks; in Bastar, another tragic component gets added to it. The zone doesn’t have any representative in the national or international media or academia. Kashmir, for instance, has its interlocutors with several reputed media houses and academic institutions. In absolute contrast, Bastar doesn’t even have a voice in state capital Raipur. There is no one to write their stories except a few activists or journalists, who earlier worked in the area, and invested their emotional and intellectual energies into the jungle, but now live with a guilt of having to abandon what they once believed was their only homeland.
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I last met Mukesh a few years ago in Bijapur. We spent a morning together and clicked each other’s photographs. My phone still has photographs from that day – of him sitting on a bench in a park, smiling.
Following an uproar over his killing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Chhattisgarh has promised justice. But last August, Mukesh and Sukma-based journalist Raja Rathore co-wrote a news story for The Wire Hindi after four Bastar journalists were arrested in an evidently false case following their reporting on illegal mining allegedly involving BJP leaders. The article suggested that the Chhattisgarh police planted the evidence to frame the journalists.
The next morning, Mukesh sent me the screenshot of a WhatsApp message by a senior police officer, expressing disapproval of the stand he had taken for the imprisoned journalists. “Kuch hoga to nahin na? (Nothing will happen, right?),” he asked me from the other side of the phone, an apprehension in his voice.
A few months later, he was found murdered; the two episodes conjoined by a belief the administration-criminal nexus in Bastar share – that journalists can only survive at their mercy. Soon after his body was recovered from the premises of a contractor, fellow journalists called it the graveyard of journalism in Bastar.
That you can be killed for reporting can discourage many. In Bastar, it can be permanently paralysing. The journalists of Bastar have given their lives to bring an utterly neglected zone to the national consciousness. It’s now for others to ensure that Mukesh’s voice doesn’t fall silent.
Note: This article was originally published in the Indian Express.
