Blood spilled as love bloomed in a Bihar village’s Maoist trenches

A relationship in the trenches, so to speak, grew into love and they decided to run away together

Kumartadi is eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that can only exist in a forest. An 8km dirt road, traversable only by two-wheeler or on foot, is the only meandering path in, framed by a thick, dark cover of green. For all of those eight kilometres, there is no electricity pole or drinking water pump, not one school, nor one primary health centre.

Ranjit Koda, Sunita Devi and their son. (HT PHOTO)

Kumartadi is haunted by death.

At its entrance are the burnt remains of two thatched homes, blown