Unfortunately I caught only the tail end of the conversation with Ganesh Devy in the David Sassoon Library garden. Somebody asked him about Naxalism. Here’s a gist of what he said.

It’s like P Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought. It suits governments to declare areas drought-affected. In the same way, the Government says 128 districts are “Naxalite-infested.” We have about 600 districts in this country, and I’ve been to about 350. I’ve not seen so many that are affected. It helps the government to say there is this danger. It conceals the failures of development. Nobody listens to these people, so in an absurd way they are hitting back using their bodies. The media does not want to look at the fine print in these stories.

This fed well into the next session at the Garden, which was about writing on conflict. Sudeep Chakravarti, author of Red Sun, was the moderator, and said something similar to Devy. The Government says 15 of our 28 states are “Maoist-infested” — a term he detests — and if you add J&K and Nagaland and Arunachal and Manipur and a few others that are wracked by violence, you have 21. 21 of our 28 states that are going through social conflict. What is conflict if it is not endemic to India?

Sonia Jabbar read out three extracts from her forthcoming nonfiction book. One small part stuck in my mind, and I shall try to paraphrase. It was about a young man abducted in Kashmir. His sister met the abductors, and pleaded for her brothers life, while stroking one of their AK47s. It was an unmistakable sexual gesture, and it made the others present queasy: this young girl, offering the unthinkable for her brother’s life. It didn’t matter, because they killed him anyway.

Sudeep played two short audio clips, intercepts of police transmissions in Chhatisgarh. The first is some quick intructions from a senior officer to his men. If they find journalists who are going to cover the Naxalites, said this officer and all of us in the Garden heard him, “unko seedha marwa dena.”

The second is about reaching out to villagers in these areas. Reach out once, reach out twice … if after the third time the cops think the villagers are still supporting Naxals, tell them “tumhara gaon jala denge.”

The next session, I am to moderate. Right about now, I feel distinctly queasy.