‘Haan haan Naxali,’ asserts Aman Kachchap, a 25-year-old Adivasi rapper from Jharkhand, who has turned the supposed ‘insult’ thrown at him by fellow students in a Ranchi school on its head, owning it as a tag often attached to the tribal community.
“I have tried to explain to the society that if one talks about one’s rights: water, forest land, then one is called Naxalite. And if this is so, then yes, I am a Naxal,” Kachchap tells Outlook’s Md. Asghar Khan, also reciting parts of his verse, written in the Nagpuri dialect of Jharkhand.