Combating a different kind of terror

The morning after terror tore into the heart of Mumbai, I was in a taxi, driving down from Kurnool, a commercial town some 200 km south of Hyderabad, towards a village close to the Andhra-Karnataka border. I asked my companion, a social worker, if she felt on edge after the blasts.

She looked at me incredulously. There was a hint of a smile. “Not at all. I feel totally safe. Nothing big happens here. Nothing ever will. Why would terrorists attack Kurnool?”

For three days, as I traveled through small towns and villages in the Rayalaseema region, I repeated my query. Each time, I got the same answer: “It won’t happen here. We are not important enough.” The receptionist at my hotel , my cab driver, the field extension worker, and all others appeared singularly untouched by the fear that was gnawing at the hearts of so many of us. Many of us, who live in cities that have faced repeated terror attacks, have been bludgeoned into viewing deaths from terrorism as the ‘new normal’. Here, in small-town India ‘where nothing big happens’, as my friend put it, however, reactions were different.

The people I met were convinced that their nondescriptness, was their greatest strength — their shield against terror attacks.
There were times I felt I had fallen off the ‘breaking news’ map.

In my hotel, cable TV connected me to the horror and grief of Mumbai — the dead, the disabled, their families, and everyone else with a ringside view. On a sodden Wednesday evening, three explosions had taken place at Dadar, Zaveri Bazar and the Opera House, shaking India’s commercial capital once again.

The images were gruesome; the debates on television followed a familiar pattern. But ‘terror’ was not a talking point in the places I was traveling through. There was struggle, fear and anxiety, but about different things. The one common link between the India that made news and the one that did not was the will to survive and carry on against all odds.

In Upparapalli, a village in Kurnool district, young girls showered rose petals on us, and sang songs capturing their fears and hopes as we walked into their school.

Child marriage was a huge problem in this poverty-stricken area, I learnt. But local activists had mobilised teenage girls into ‘balika sanghs’ (support groups for girls) and many had begun to put up resistance against the practice.

We met Savitri, a 15-year-old girl whose marriage had been stopped at the nick of time through the intervention of her classmates, her headmaster, the village sarpanch, Unicef staff and others. Savitri told us of her plans to study further. “I will not let anyone marry me off. If my parents try to do it, I will report them to the police,” said Pushpalata, another 15-year-old.

The girls we met lived with terror, albeit of a different kind. Social pressures and poverty threatened to fell their hopes and blast their lives with perhaps as much ferocity as explosives that decimate so many innocent people.

But they had not let terror beat them down. Away from the glare of TV cameras, they were learning how to cope and manage life’s troughs, supporting each other all the while. Sometimes, they triumphed. Like Savitri. I looked at the faces around me, at the field worker who was working for 15 hours a day even as her mother lay in the intensive-care unit of a hospital.

The terrain she navigated every day was a conflict zone, even if there were no shrapnel. She had learnt to make her way through it, taking others with her.

A Mumbai boy who was interviewed on TV said he and his friends had gone back to school the day after the blast because they did not want terrorists to crow they had won.

Hundreds of kilometres away, Savitri and the girls I met offered the same message. In small-towns and in big cities, country side and the urban jungle, ordinary people show they are becoming skilled at fighting terror, no matter what shape it takes. They don’t have a choice. And as teenagers are telling us, terror need not always have the last word.

Patralekha Chatterjee is a Delhi-based writer and can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com