Surrendered Maoist women walk ramp at Raipur handloom show

Who is afraid of a tribal woman making her own choice?

New Delhi, Aug 26

There is a video from the recent National Handloom Day programme at Raipur that I have watched more than once.

On August 7, National Handloom Day was celebrated at Raipur's Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Auditorium with a fashion show showcasing Chhattisgarh's Kosa silk and traditional handloom sarees.

Nine surrendered women Maoists from the Bastar-Sukma region, now undergoing rehabilitation, walked the ramp alongside professional models symbolising their return from armed extremism to a peaceful life in the mainstream.

It isn't the ramp walk that stayed with me. It is a much smaller moment.

One of the surrendered Maoist women is getting ready. Someone begins applying nail paint to her fingers, and she becomes visibly emotional. She had apparently never had nail paint put on her nails before.

It is difficult to explain why such a small moment can say so much about a conflict that has lasted decades.

We have spent years discussing Naxalism through encounters, operations, casualties, weapons, ideology, and territory.

Yet behind this enormous conflict are people whose lives have been remarkably restricted. Many women joined the movement very young. Some were recruited, some followed relatives or people they trusted, some believed in the cause, while others grew up in places where the Maoists were simply the most powerful presence around them. Once inside, life followed the discipline of an underground armed organisation.

Then imagine coming out of that world and discovering things most of us consider ridiculously ordinary.

A little nail paint suddenly does not seem so ridiculous.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah spoke about a strikingly similar moment in Parliament earlier this year. During his Lok Sabha address on Naxalism on March 30, he recalled a surrendered Maoist woman breaking down while applying nail polish for the first time.

According to Union Minister Shah, she had been taken away at the age of seven and had spent the years since then in the clothes prescribed by the movement.

He also spoke about women discovering things as ordinary as mehendi and lipstick after coming out of the forests.

There is something terribly sad about a woman crying over nail paint. It tells you how much of an ordinary life she never had.

And months later, similar emotions could be seen around another group of surrendered women from Bastar.

Nine surrendered women Maoists recently travelled to Raipur, where they walked the ramp on National Handloom Day wearing traditional handloom sarees.

Videos from around the event show women smiling, laughing, getting ready, and experiencing something entirely new.

A YouTuber who interacted with them captured a side of these women that rarely enters the grand political debate around Naxalism. They appeared relaxed and happy as they spoke about the experience. One of the most moving moments was the woman becoming emotional while nail paint was being applied.

Then came The Wire.

Its report claimed that the women had been "tricked" into ramp modelling. The women quoted by the publication said they had initially been told that they were travelling to Raipur for tailoring training.

The government's account was different. An official quoted in the same report said Rs 10,000 had been transferred to each woman's bank account and that they had also received clothes as gifts. Other reporting and video interviews showed women speaking positively about the experience.

And this is exactly where the 'dimaagi Naxal' enters the story.

The armed Naxal once decided what these women should wear, where they should go, and what role they would play in his revolution. The 'dimaagi Naxal' now seems equally uncomfortable when those same women step outside the role that has been intellectually assigned to them.

That is what I find so disturbing about The Wire's framing.

A tribal woman apparently remains acceptable as long as she conforms to a particular picture of tribal life -- exploited, angry, alienated from the State, and permanently suspicious of anything associated with it. The moment she enjoys something outside that picture, her own experience suddenly needs somebody else to interpret it.

A headline containing the word "tricked" does something very powerful. It immediately converts these women from participants into victims. Their excitement becomes incidental. Their interaction with people after the event becomes incidental. The possibility that some of them actually enjoyed themselves becomes almost inconvenient.

This is precisely the intellectual habit that deserves to be called out.

The 'dimaagi Naxal' does not have to carry an AK-47 or live inside Abujhmad. The battle has moved beyond the forest. It survives in narratives that instinctively search for exploitation whenever the State succeeds in bringing someone out of the Maoist ecosystem, while finding endless explanations for the coercion that kept people inside it.

For decades, Maoist violence was explained through deprivation, exploitation, displacement, and failures of governance. Those realities existed and deserve serious examination. But where is the same outrage over the young girl recruited into an armed organisation? Where is the investigation into what happened when a cadre wanted to leave? Where is the concern for the alleged mukhbir dragged before a Jan Adalat? Where is the romantic language when the victim happens to be a tribal person killed by Maoists?

There is something particularly patronising about claiming to speak for a tribal woman's freedom while refusing to accept that she might actually enjoy an experience that does not fit your politics.

But journalism cannot begin with an ideological conclusion and then arrange a woman's life around it.

Ask these women whether they enjoyed themselves. Ask whether they would do it again. Ask what they want to do next.

And then believe them even when their answer ruins your narrative.

There was another purpose to that ramp walk which has been almost completely lost in the argument surrounding it: the sarees themselves.

Kosa silk, Chhattisgarh's distinctive variety of tussar silk, is known for its natural golden sheen and earthy texture. The state has more than 20,000 handlooms, and the silk economy supports a long chain of cocoon rearers, spinners, dyers and weavers. For many families, this is livelihood, not luxury.

That is why the fashion show mattered. Putting Kosa and Chhattisgarh handloom on a ramp gives a traditional product something it desperately needs visibility beyond its existing market. Fashion creates aspiration, aspiration creates demand, and demand eventually travels backwards to the person weaving the cloth.

And who better to showcase the transformation of Bastar than women who have themselves travelled through an extraordinary transformation?

These surrendered women were not merely being dressed up for an evening. They were helping take the textiles and craftsmanship of their region before a larger audience. If that visibility helps sell more sarees, brings more buyers to Chhattisgarh and puts more money into the hands of the people producing them, the economic value of such an event should hardly be dismissed as frivolous.

This is what makes The Wire's framing even more disappointing. In its eagerness to turn the ramp walk into another story of victimhood, it largely misses what the event could also represent rehabilitation meeting commerce, and women who once belonged to an underground movement becoming visible ambassadors for a legitimate local economy.

For years we have asked what economic alternatives can weaken the appeal of Naxalism. When those alternatives begin appearing in unexpected forms, even on a fashion ramp, perhaps we should first understand their value before rushing to discredit them.

I travelled through these regions for months and bought three sarees myself. I saw the work behind them. Bastar's handloom and Kosa silk have the potential to travel far beyond Chhattisgarh and generate livelihoods for people who have lived in the shadow of this conflict for decades. A fashion show showcasing these textiles can introduce those products to buyers who might otherwise never encounter them.

If a woman from Sukma models that saree, earns money, and helps another woman in Bastar sell what she has woven, why should that automatically become a story of exploitation?

That is also development. It has a face, a name, and an income attached to it.

More importantly, it has choice attached to it.

A woman who has surrendered should be able to decide what she wants her new life to look like. She may want tailoring training. She may want employment. She may want to return to her village. She may discover fashion. She may discover something at thirty that another woman discovered at thirteen. None of this diminishes her tribal identity.

For decades, a certain romanticism surrounded the Maoist movement. The failures of the State were examined in extraordinary detail, and much of that examination was necessary. Bastar did suffer neglect. Tribal communities did face exploitation. Governance failed badly in many places.

But understanding why an insurgency grew cannot become a permanent excuse for sanitising what that insurgency became.

The CPI-Maoist fought an armed war against the Indian State. It ran Jan Adalats. People accused of being informers were killed. Young men and women were recruited into an organisation from which walking away could carry terrible consequences. Infrastructure was destroyed because connectivity threatened the isolation on which Maoist control depended.

That history cannot suddenly disappear because the State is now winning.

This is why the debate over 'dimaagi Naxals' matters long after the military structure of Naxalism has been broken.

The physical geography of Maoism is shrinking rapidly. Senior leaders have been eliminated or have surrendered. Security forces have entered areas once considered almost inaccessible. Thousands of cadres have come overground.

The ideological geography will take longer to disappear.

It survives wherever every State initiative is presumed sinister before the evidence is even examined. It survives in the romantic memory of the guerrilla while the brutality of the movement is quietly pushed into the footnotes. And it survives when a surrendered woman smiling in a saree creates greater discomfort than the thought of the same woman spending years carrying a rifle through the forest.

What happens to these surrendered men and women now will matter enormously.

Rehabilitation cannot merely mean handing somebody money after surrender and closing a government file. These are people who have spent years outside ordinary society. They have to rebuild relationships, learn skills, find work, and understand a world that may have changed enormously while they were underground.

More than anything else, many of them have to rediscover the ability to make choices for themselves.

Sometimes that process begins in ways no government rehabilitation policy could ever adequately describe.

That is why I keep returning to that woman looking at her painted nails.

Maybe she became emotional because she liked the colour. Maybe because nobody had ever done that for her. Maybe it reminded her of a life she had never experienced. I do not know, and I do not want to manufacture an explanation for her.

Her expression is enough.

There is a tendency to make tribal people symbols of whatever argument we are trying to win. They deserve the same contradictions, ambitions, vanities, and changing desires that everybody else takes for granted.

A tribal woman can care deeply about her land and enjoy a fashion show. She can value her traditions and want to earn money by taking those traditions to markets outside Bastar. She can have suffered exploitation and still refuse to spend the rest of her life being introduced through that suffering.

A former Maoist should also be allowed to close that chapter.

For years, the central question in Bastar was whether the Indian State could defeat an armed insurgency.

We are entering a much more interesting phase now. We will discover whether the people who have emerged from that insurgency are finally allowed to build lives of their own choosing.

Government policy will play a part. Rehabilitation money will play a part. Employment and economic opportunity will matter enormously. But freedom will also reveal itself through moments too small to appear in official reports.

A woman looking at her freshly painted nails.

A saree she has chosen to wear.

A ramp she has decided to walk.

She may never want to walk it again. She may want to walk another one tomorrow.

Either way, after all these years, the choice should finally be hers.

(The writer is a bestselling author known for transforming years of meticulous research into powerful human stories. Her work explores conflict not through battles alone, but through the lives, sacrifices, and resilience of those who endure it.)

— IANS