‘I wanted to break through the veil of denial’

He’s been a journalist for the longest time. Factors added up for Sudeep Chakravarti after 20-odd years of writing on development, economics, Politics and so forth, pressing him to look at “Other India” and write a story about it. After a year-and-a-half of travels across the “red corridor” in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Nepal, he wrote Red Sun--Travels in Naxalite Country, thus “tearing the veil” off a movement urban India has ignored for far too long. “I wanted to write about the 80% of people who don’t seem to matter to the complacent middle class,” he explains. In fact, Chakravarti was ready with his second novel but both publisher and writer thought “this story needed to be told first”. Chakravarti talks to Sudipta Datta about state apathy and the Maoist rebellion, why only eight states out of 28 in India are “at peace” and the simmering discontent in vast urban areas. Excerpts:

What prompted you to write the Red Sun?

I’m a beneficiary of a liberalising Economy but while appreciating that, I haven’t been able to put away from my mind the other side of liberalisation. I wanted to tell the story of the so-called Other India. We’d read about skirmishes between the state and Maoists, but the reportage was events-led, numbers-led, and often, highlighted by tabloid-style writing. I wanted to put names to numbers, faces to names. I knew it would be a brutal story but I wanted it to be told in a humanised way. I wanted to break through the veil of denial and show what we are doing to ourselves. In short, I wanted to tell the story about a country at war with itself.

If a lot of people are joining the Maoists out of anger in rural India, should the trend match in urban India too?

It’s not as visible in urban India. But there are rumblings in vast areas of India. In the cities there is greater glare of governance and a greater sense of justice and accountability. But who takes care of a villager raped in Bengal or Jharkhand? That’s one of the reasons, an example of non-governance and absence of justice, why the Maoist rebellion has gone ahead in rural India. The levels of corruption, mass deprivation and issues such as discrimination on account of caste and being a tribal are heightened in rural India and besides, there’s complete lack of...