It’s a ramshackle bus, lit inside by a naked bulb hanging from the roof. It leaves Warangal’s Ghanpur station market, where a series of shops sell fat chickens. It then takes a right turn and heads east to cross the Godavari River, and keeps going till it enters Chhattisgarh near Bhadrachalam. Inside, about a dozen boys—in their late teens and early 20s—doze peacefully on each other’s shoulders. It’s the early 1990s and one of the boys is Shambala Ravinder.“I used to put up People’s War (PW) posters on walls, run errands for senior leaders,” Ravinder tells me. Soon, he ran into cops and was “beaten to a pulp”. Afraid of dying and also tired of the systematic “exploitation” by landlords, he boarded the bus that night and headed to Chhattisgarh to join the CPI-ML-PW or Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist People’s War or People’s War as it’s commonly called.
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