February 14: It was the heat of the discussion the previous night that finally undid Ravinder Reddy. He was mulling over the short temper of his fellow PWG dalam members when the shots rang out. Three of them which turned Reddy from a human being to a statistic last week.One that will never tell the true story but will add to the growing number of deaths in the PWG-police fights in this belt of Andhra Pradesh. Reddy was ambling on a bullock-cart at night, with a gun (German-made, the police claimed), wondering whether the heat of the election was getting to his colleagues.
He was, after all, part of the Anandanna dalam (a PWG hit squad is called a dalam) whose job was to keep politicians away from the villages and the villagers at home during the election. But when he finally slumped and the cops came to drag his body away, Reddy left behind a host of questions. Posers with no answers and no escape.
Welcome to PWG land. A land where nobody talks much, a stranger is at once reported through mysteriouschannels, where life goes on with such apparent drudgery that you could miss the whole point of being on blood-soaked land. Where visions of Utopia fight with the reality of brutal repression to cast such a spell that brilliant youth take to starving and guns in the search for justice.
Over the last few weeks, the police has been poking, bending and stretching in search for booby-traps in culverts, drains, effigies and bullock-carts. They failed. With the result that an eight-year-old Dalit boy was blown away by a bomb in a mandal headquarters, a telephone exchange was ripped apart in Karimnagar, an ex-Congress sarpanch had his house blasted (he was hiding in Hyderabad) and the stage was set for a bloody run-up to the election here on February 22.
No leader, of any party, has yet summoned the guts to campaign in villages after the PWG warned them not to. The PWG was dead serious and this had the leaders scampering for safety, sticking to the well laid-out roads in urban areas and holding poll meetings inthe morning before running home. Thus far, the PWG has issued at least 25 pamphlets and more are to come.
The most polite word used to describe the election is ``fake'' before the rush of blood-curdling warnings takes up most of the pamphlets. Indeed, it is a measure of the PWG's dominance that the outfit is believed to have has actually held more meetings than the politicians. And none of this is helping the administration's morale.
The collectorate here is still in its slow-motion process of compiling a list of ``sensitive'' constituencies (as if they didn't know all these years) and is showing ample signs of fatigue. Generations have changed in the khaki uniform but the battle is far from won. On the contrary, despite numerous setbacks, the PWG is alive and kicking.
A PWG meeting is probably like no other in this part of the country. Almost always in the dead of night, with word going around just an hour ahead, a PWG dalam descends on the chosen spot in dense jungles. A dalam normally has between 12and 25 armed members. Half of them begin laying landmines over a wide area leading to the meeting spot. Once these are ready, the other half starts rustling up the villagers.
There is no way the police can now approach the site without killing themselves over the landmines. Once the crowd gathers, the dalam leader lays down the group's philosophy: Why the elections are a fraud, why all villagers should be armed and why the fight is for independent village power centres in a State of their own.
From reports here, and from the PWG sympathisers this correspondent spoke to, it appears that a meeting last week in Dharamraopeta had 2,000 people attending and one at Kannayagudu (both hamlets in Warangal) drew 5,000 people. The normal PWG to civilians' ratio the administration uses is 1:8 and that would equate to 40,000 people attending a politician's rally.It is most unlikely that any party will actually summon the courage to defy a PWG boycott call, indeed none of the main contestants seemed to be botheredabout the fate of the voters in the sundry affected villages. In the past, a boycott call meant that the police swoops down on the villages on the polling day, forces the residents out and adds up the polling figures.
In some cases, it is alleged that the police themselves vote for the people. In such cases, the votes go to the party the policemen want. Telengana is normally a Congress belt and the party still has a good support base. The TDP looks like the biggest loser here and the Congress might well gain. This is an unintended fallout of the PWG's methods: that a party which believes in the system gets the benefit of a long struggle.
However, locals says the PWG is no longer the force it was, alluding to its not yet issuing death threats as a pointer. Apparently, the villagers do what the PWG says so they can simply stay alive. Also, reference is being made to two interviews given last month by the current PWG chief Ganapati and the PWG's Warangal District Committee Secretary Ramakrishna (better knownas RK) as proof of its need for publicity.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
