THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The Naxalites’ war always began where the road ended.  Everyone said so.  Manas boasted to me that it had been six years since he had seen a paved road.  The police, the political officers, the paramilitaries, the Adivasi tribes, the poorest local farmers, and the Naxalites themselves: It was the one thing they agreed upon.  There always came a point out there in those jungles of India’s infamous Red Corridor – foremost among them in the states of Chhattigarh and Jharkland – where the road began to give up the struggle against the thrust of vegetation, against the rain and the heat, where the last heavily fortified police station marked the farthest reach of central and state authority in a heave of tangled razor wire and bunkers.  Then it stopped.  After the end of the road?  Then you were into another world, undeveloped India, Naxalite territory: a land of parallel authority, communism, people’s courts, armed cadres, and IEDs.

Loyd/National