Inside Abujhmad, once a perilous Naxal safe haven

ONe daytime endure hebdomad, Narayanpur’s territory aggregator Namrata Jain hopped onto the back of a motorcycle and took a ride through a dense forest, navigating narrow forest tracks and, at times, no tracks at all, travelling to villages that aren’t there on the map yet.Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh, is one of the three districts (Bijapur and Dantewada are the other two) covered by one of India’s most inhospitable forests, Abujhmad, which translates as hills of the unknown in Gondi. And unknown, the 5,000 square km large forest has been, until now.Jain and her team are part of a team mapping the area. They have been travelling by bike, occasionally tractor, and often, foot, crossing streams under a punishing summer sun to reach villages that, until now, existed only in oral accounts. This is an unprecedented exercise — the survey and mapping of a region that remained beyond the administrative reach of the state since Independence. The villages and their residents were cut off not just by geography, but by a five-decade-long Maoist insurgency. For most residents, this marks their first direct interaction with the government.Across the three districts, the government has begun surveying and mapping Abujhmad as Maoist armies are no longer present in this dense forest, which once served as the central guerrilla base of the CPI(Maoist).Jain, who hails from Bastar, said even she was unprepared for what the teams were encountering. “We had only heard of these villages through word of mouth. We are also finding new villages in this exercise. This is the first time that the villages are being mapped and surveyed. We are reaching out to people to connect them with government programmes,” she said, adding that the exercise is being carried out with support from IIT Roorkee, following a memorandum of understanding signed in January.In Abujhmad, administrative records were sparse and access, limited. Spread across Maoist hotspots of Narayanpur, Bijapur, and Dantewada, the challenging terrain of dense sal, teak and tendu forest, the absence of roads, and the omniscience of Maoists put the indigenous communities — Gond, Muria, Abujhmarhia, Madiya, and Halba tribes — at the mercy of the insurgents and beyond the reach of the State. For years, this isolation allowed Maoists to establish firm control; they established a parallel system of governance, known locally as “jantana sarkar”.Explaining the type of control that Maoists exerted over Abujhmad, Rupesh alias T Vasudeva Rao, surrendered Central Committee (CC) member of the CPI(Maoist), described the forest as their liberated zone where no government teams dared to come.“The CC meetings were always held in Maad (Abujhmad). It was our safest place where all leaders could come together and hold conferences for days without worrying about the security forces. You may see it as a forest with no motorable road or electricity but for us it was our headquarters. We had access to everything. We even had computers and printers that run on generator sets. During the conference, we would print our magazines or minutes of the meetings.”That sense of complete control began to erode in late 2024, when security forces first managed to penetrate the forest — a development officials describe as a turning point in the fight against Maoists. Maoist chief Nambala Keshava Rao aka Basavaraju, wanted for over five decades, too was traced in the Abujhmad forest last year by the security forces and killed in a gunfight.Bastar Zone’s Inspector General, P Sundarraj said the entry of forces into Abujhmad and the gradual establishment of camps dealt a psychological blow to the Maoists. “It sent a message to the Naxals that they no longer controlled their military base. There is no Maoist army there now. Forest department and other government teams are entering the area and mapping it.”While the mapping exercise is underway across all the three districts, Narayanpur accounts for the largest expanse of the forest. The administration here has so far mapped 412 villages, of which 377 are inhabited. “We are meeting people with distinct traditions that have remained unseen all these years. Local people are helping us and sharing information about the villagers further inside. Three days ago, at one remote village, Albeda, where our teams reached after crossing a stream and trekking through the hills, the villagers wore their traditional dress and a headwear made of flowers, which they wear only for special functions. At another village, we saw the villagers storing their food grains outside and worshipping it. It was unique,” Jain said.“The villages inside are sparsely populated. In some villages there are just five or six families. These villages could be anywhere between five to 70km away from the district headquarters. We are building roads to connect them. Our teams are preparing identity cards to make people eligible for welfare schemes.”The work has finally begun. Survey teams are spread across the forest. With a nationwide census underway, the villages and residents of Abujhmad must be found, identified and entered into official records .For decades these people existed as blank spaces in government records. As teams now trek from one remote village to another, the blanks are beginning to be filled.