Girl from Dandakaranya may soon be doctor from China

On Tuesday at 1 am, on a flight from Hyderabad, Tejaswi left for China, to begin a five-year MBBS course at Hebei University in China’s eastern Hebei province. One of the very few babies to ever be born to Maoists in Dandakaranya (their number countable on fingers) is on her way to become perhaps the only offspring of a Naxal to have studied abroad.

“I fought with my friends for her. I could have never dreamt that one day she would fly to China,” Reddy remembers, at his Hanamkonda home in Telangana’s Warangal district.

In the first few years after Tejaswi’s birth all the Reddys could think of was how to raise her. By the time she turned two, they had realised that a life in the jungle amid guns and ambushes was no place for a child. So one night, Reddy quietly slipped out of the forest, crossed the Godavari and left her with his family in Warangal, unsure whether they would ever meet her again.

The two guerrillas would eventually see Tejaswi over a decade later, in 2008, after Reddy, by then a Central Committee member of the CPI (Maoist), decided to surrender for “personal reasons”. Saroja, a platoon commander, followed soon.

Reddy’s mother, who raised Tejaswi, didn’t let her know her parents’ past till they returned. “It was in the news, I remember,” Tejaswi told this reporter before leaving for China. “Then, grandmother told me my papa is coming.”

Reddy’s homecoming had been a major event. The only Central Committee member to have ever laid down arms, he had surrendered before then Andhra Pradesh home minister K Jana Reddy.

Few in the family recognised him when he arrived home, laughs Reddy. “Even my mother… I had to show her a mark on my leg.”
Theirs is a rich landlord family with politics in its blood. Reddy’s father, a Congressman, fought in the freedom struggle while his uncle was a senior Communist leader.

Reddy joined the Naxal movement during the 1970s and went underground in 1976 after his brother Murli Mohan Reddy was shot dead in an encounter during the Emergency.

In the early 1980s, he was among the first batch of selected Naxals to march into Bastar and help establish a guerrilla zone that the Indian State is still unable to breach.

Reddy remembers the struggle that followed to “reclaim my daughter”, by then 14. He told her about the Naxal struggle, and their belief in the cause. Tejaswi told him she was proud of his “fight for the people”.

Though happy about that, Reddy carries a regret. “Life was better inside (the forest). I was living for a just society, it gave me satisfaction. I am earning more now, but I participate in all evils.
Earlier I would beat up those who took bribes, now I am forced to give bribe.”

With interest in cinema, Tejaswi first wanted to be a filmmaker. She chose to be a doctor to “serve people”, she says. With several students from Warangal already studying at Hebei University, she opted for it.

Seeing Tejaswi off at Hyderabad airport, Reddy told her to study well, and to “not forget that you have to serve people”.

On Friday night, two days after she had reached Hebei, Tejaswi texted this reporter, “I lve my dad sooo muchhh.” She echoed what Aleida Guevara had written about her father: “The more I read (his life), the more in love I was with the boy my father had been.”

The iconic Latin American revolutionary is also Tejaswi’s WhatsApp display photograph.

Reddy misses Tejaswi already, and they Skype at least twice a day. When she was in a Hyderabad hostel preparing for medical entrance, he would visit every Sunday, carrying homemade chicken. For the next five years now, she will visit only once annually.

All his wishes for his daughter met, the 52-year-old says he has a last remaining one. Secretly relieved that she didn’t follow her parents into the jungle, Reddy wishes that after Tejaswi becomes a doctor, she will be able to serve tribals in forbidden Abujhmaad.

Then one day, he hopes, he will take her to her place of birth, a small village called Balibeda, near a river called Nai Berad. With a pause, Reddy adds, “I don’t know if she would ever be able to go there.”