Where the road ended
The road ended two kilometres before the village did.
This was sometime between 2011 and 2013, when I was working at a research centre. We had hired a six-seater for the day and driven deep into Palamu district in Jharkhand. At one point the driver pulled over on the main road and told us this was as far as the vehicle could go. The rest was on foot.
So we walked. Down a hillside, across a small flowing river, and on through the green. I remember thinking that I had read about places like this in reports for years, and had never once had to cross a river to reach one.
The sarpanch and her husband
The village, when it finally appeared, was everything a Jharkhand village is in the imagination: hilly, green, scenic, and very quiet. Serene is the word I keep coming back to.
The first person I met there was a woman who introduced herself as the elected village representative, the sarpanch. Then, in the same even tone, she told me about her husband. He was an active Naxalite, she said. He had been released from custody just the day before.
Won’t share his name as he surrendered afterwards and joined mainstream. He was the man I had walked two kilometres to interview.
“That threat is necessary”
He did not speak like a man making excuses. He spoke about his life, about the problems he had faced, about inequality. And then he said something I have never forgotten.
In Jharkhand, he told me, you will find that government schools run and government functionaries do their work. Why? Because they are afraid. They know that if they do not do their jobs, the Naxalites will come and beat them. In his view that threat was necessary. Officers, he said, tend to loot the people and do not do the work they are paid for. Fear was the only audit that reached this far.
I did not agree with him. A teacher who turns up out of fear is not the same as a system that works, and violence is no way to hold anyone accountable. But I could not pretend I had not heard the question underneath his answer: if the threat is the only thing making the school open, who was supposed to be making it open?
Then he surprised me a second time. He said he would not go back. He had surrendered, and he had given the government his word that he would now work actively within the system. That, he said, was why he had made sure his wife became the village representative.
What the village was asking for
Walking back, I tried to sort out what I had actually seen.
I had seen resentment, certainly. But it was not the resentment of people who did not understand the state. It was the opposite. These were people who knew their rights quite precisely, and who had watched the local machinery of government fail to deliver them, year after year. Their anger was aimed at that gap.
I had also seen how little they were asking for. Life in that village was small in scale and rooted in nature, culturally and in every practical sense. Nobody there wanted the luxuries of a metropolitan city. They wanted to live peacefully, with the basic necessities. They wanted the school to function and the hospital to function.
No grand things. Just the ordinary promises, kept.
What I carried back
I cannot say exactly how that day changed me. I only know that it did. It showed me a side of life I had never been exposed to, and I believe it made me a better person and helped me see the world a little more clearly.
I have spent most of my working life since then in public communication. Whenever a conversation about governance becomes too abstract, I think of that walk: the car left behind on the main road, the hill, the river, and at the end of it a man who had picked up a gun because the school did not work, and put it down because he decided the panchayat might.
The last two kilometres are where a government is finally judged. Most of us never walk them.