Ajay Kanu, 56, seems like some other middle-class man strolling down a highway in Bihar’s capital, Patna. He’s in blue denims, black sports activities footwear, and a checked polycot shirt. He sports activities a little bit of a middle-aged stomach, and his spectacled, mildly pudgy face doesn’t conform to the stereotype of a harmful Naxal laughing in loss of life’s face.
“It was in prison that I learnt who I was,” says Kanu, who has been a free man for a few years now, having served 18 years in a number of jails within the State. The erstwhile Naxal commander, accused in 50 circumstances of homicide, right this moment seems upon the world with forgiveness and a few religion.
In 2005, Kanu, alias Sao, or the extra sedate Raviji, was the explanation behind the Jehanabad jailbreak that led to 389 prisoners, together with a number of Maoists and hardcore criminals, escaping. Nearly a dozen folks have been killed and about half a dozen injured; police rifles and bullets have been looted. The energy of the overcrowded Jehanabad jail on the time was 659; the official capability was 140.
An officer, who later turned Bihar’s Inspector General (IG) of Police within the early 2000s, says a whole lot, each higher caste folks and peasants, have been killed in caste massacres within the 1990s and early 2000s. “Infamously known as the ‘killing fields’ or ‘flaming fields’, law and order in central Bihar — Jehanabad, Gaya, Aurangabad, Bhojpur, Arwal — was severely compromised.”
The fundamental problem for the police have been the guerrilla warfare ways that Naxals used, blowing up police autos and extorting cash from personal corporations concerned in building. Their armed squads, typically supported by politicians, moved via the thick jungles of Jamui, Sasaram, Gaya, and Nawada, pitching their camps and planning assaults.
Towards the latter half of the 2000s, the Naxals shifted their base to the neighbouring Jharkhand districts.
The 12 months of the Jehanabad jailbreak, Bihar recorded 13.4% of all crimes towards Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the third highest within the nation. Patna recorded the best circumstances of homicide, theft, and dacoity amongst cities.
Breaking out
On November 13, 2005, at 9.05 p.m., the primary bomb exploded, not removed from the jail. “A signal to fellow incarcerated Maoists that their comrades had come to release them,” says Kanu. This was the identical month that the Bolshevik occasion had seized energy in Russia in 1917.
In Jehanabad, about 1,000 armed Maoists besieged the jail, simply 70 km from Patna, for over two hours. Then the piercing sounds of extra bombs and bullets reduce via the quiet of the city whose electrical energy had been reduce off. The land across the jail and the roads resulting in the nationwide freeway have been carpeted with landmines. Every police picket was garrisoned. Soon, Kanu remembers, the jail was opened. “We just walked out; we didn’t even run.”
The senior police officer, who was concerned within the probe, says Kanu was thrown an AK-47 that he used to kill two commanders of the Ranvir Sena, the higher caste militia group at loggerheads with the Maoists in central Bihar on the time.
The foot troopers, carrying toilet slippers and outsized police uniforms, appealed over microphones to the city’s residents to “remain indoors” as “we have no quarrel with the public, only with the prashasan (administration)”. People heard the sounds of crude ‘cane’ bombs (in milk cans) and gunfire, interspersed with dreadful silence. “If the deaf were to hear, the sound had to be very loud,” says Kanu.
Bihar was underneath President’s Rule and the State Assembly election was on. Much of the police pressure was away on election obligation, so stealing arms and ammunition was straightforward. The operation was executed by the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (India), a militant underground unit of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), of which Kanu was the commander. The jail remained open till daybreak the subsequent day, for all to go and are available freely. By the next month although, 269 prisoners returned of their very own accord, however the Maoist cadre and Ranvir Sena members didn’t.
“It is the duty of revolutionaries to help the oppressed and free their cadre even by storming a jail,” says Kanu, sipping kum-cheeni-waali chai (low-sugar tea) at a roadside stall on a muggy day. Crowds bustle round. “I’m diabetic now,” he says, wryly, including that he additionally has hypertension. His thoughts is alert although, and actions fast, all the time watchful of his environment. Over the years, he has been acquitted normally. “Very soon, I’ll be acquitted in the remaining six, and I’ll be a free man,” he says.
Ajay Kanu
| Photo Credit:
Amarnath Tewary
The formative years
Kanu hails from Chauhar village, Arwal district, 34 km from Jehanabad. He comes from the Extremely Backward Classes (EBC), a clutch of communities that in Bihar’s 2022-23 caste survey kinds 36.01% of the State’s inhabitants. “I want to work for the development and upliftment of 110 castes under this category,” he says.
Recently, he bought part of his agricultural land in his village so his kids may go to good faculties. His son is in a polytechnic, learning a technology-related course, and his daughter is working in the direction of changing into a nurse.
After the jailbreak, the police demolished his home within the village. He now lives in an unpretentious however spacious home on Patna’s periphery, subsequent to the bypass highway. His spouse, Sharda Devi, seems after the family.
His late father, Phagu Prasad, was a marginal farmer. “My father was more leftist than farmer. He has been the biggest influence in my life,” says Kanu, wiping his golden-framed glasses, and placing them again neatly on his face. “When I was in school and used to massage his tired legs at night, he would tell me stories about Bhagat Singh, Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and the Russian Revolution,” he remembers. Kanu’s father was a part of the Communist Party of India (CPI) within the 1980s and later began taking part in ultra-left underground exercise. “In fact, he indoctrinated me into ultra-left ideologies,” reminisces Kanu, a graduate in History from Jehanabad’s Swami Sahjanand College.
In school, Kanu says he was eager on sports activities, and gained school championships in lengthy leap, excessive leap, and operating occasions. He received concerned in pupil politics and was elected as school president from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the coed wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was quickly disillusioned with right-wing ideologies due to the “divisionary politics of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the RSS”.
For monetary independence after he graduated in 1989, he began a training institute known as Navin Bal Vidya Niketan in Jehanabad’s Professor’s Colony, however needed to shut it down after what he calls “treachery” from the higher caste proprietor of the area he was operating it from.
The journey into Maoism
A collection of occasions upset Kanu. First, he says, the village strongman received his brother and cousin killed in a petty dispute. “I was falsely implicated in the case. Then my father was beaten to death in a land dispute by another village strongman and his men in February 1994; again I was implicated. But by that time, I had started taking part in underground meetings of Maoists in the area.”
“The oppressor who beat my father to death was killed by Maoist cadre. I left my village to be with them, their ideologies. You can kill a man, but you cannot kill an ideology,” philosophises Kanu, truculence gleaming via his puckish smile. His understanding of the ideology, an athletic physique, and the capability to rapidly study weapons, helped him rapidly rise via the ranks in a few years. He was made a member of the central committee of the Maoists, whose operations spanned States akin to Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh. Soon, he was made an space commander of the banned organisation, which continues to be in existence.
“Our fight was against oppressors, who at that time were landlords and zamindars. The Ranvir Sena would not spare women and children, but we [the Maoists] would only target able-bodied men,” says Kanu, whose identify by that point started for use as a approach of conserving folks indoors.
The State police introduced a reward of ₹three lakh to usher in Kanu. On August 28, 2002, he was arrested from Patna’s Bailey highway when his spouse was anticipating their first youngster.
He says he was “tortured for 24 hours” by the police. A senior police officer who interrogated him says, “He was a very tough nut to crack.”
He was later shifted to the Jehanabad jail, the place he learn books and organised fellow inmates, demanding higher dwelling situations and meals, and talking out towards corruption by jail officers. He quickly earned the respect of his fellow inmates and was feared by jail officers.
He additionally sat on starvation strikes contained in the jail to “press for his demands”, which finally received the jail inmates entry to raised meals, dwelling situations, and services akin to phone, tv, and medical care, he says.
The city’s residents throng the jail after the jailbreak.
| Photo Credit:
File Photo
Before and after the jailbreak
“Once I had a severe toothache and asked the jail authorities to shift me to Patna for better medical attention. The then District Magistrate (DM) visited the jail ward and humiliated me,” he says. He instructed the DM that he would get out of jail.
“We should have killed him [in an encounter] three years before 2005, when we arrested him in 2002,” says the senior police officer, who was concerned within the preliminary arrest.
After the jailbreak, Kanu says, “I went to an abandoned kothi (large stand-alone house) in a village in Jehanabad, from where I escaped on a vehicle inside the jungle.” The police had introduced a ₹5-lakh reward on him, and in 2007, he was re-arrested from the Burdwan railway station in West Bengal, whereas on his method to Gaya from Bokaro in Jharkhand, and shifted to Patna’s Beur central jail. He got here out of jail in 2019, however was arrested once more in what he says is a false case, and shifted to the high-security Bhagalpur jail. The Naxal chief was lastly a free man in 2022.
That 12 months, Kuldiep Singh, the then Director-General of the Central Reserve Police Force, mentioned at a press convention that Bihar was freed from left-wing extremism (LWE), and that the battle towards the Naxals was in its last levels.
Last 12 months, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, Nityanand Rai, instructed Parliament that the variety of LWE-related deaths had decreased from 1,005 in 2010 to 98 in 2022.
Through the dialog, Kanu will get many calls. After one, he’s offended: “My blood boils, and I think of returning to the jungle with a gun in hand again.” A labourer was killed by somebody with extra money and energy.
The Jehanabad jailbreak story was the topic of an internet collection, Jehanabad — Of Love & War, which started streaming on-line from February 2023. Kanu was consulted, however he says the ultimate product was weird.
He’s certain he by no means needs to affix politics, although he claims nearly all the key events have approached him. To run his dwelling, he operates as a small-time thekedar (contractor), however needs to reopen the teaching institute.
“Those days were regrettable. Now, I want to concentrate on education.”
