Little did I know that the seven of us would be branded "Maoists' when we set off for a protest rally against posco in Orissa on April 1. We had reached Bhubaneswar a day earlier and booked a taxi to Dhinkia, a hamlet 10 km off Paradip port. A local boy travelling with us sounded out the prospect of having to walk down the last kilometre by the coast to "avoid trouble'; he had information that a police vehicle was doing rounds of the area.

But that wasn't necessary. The night provided us with enough cover to reach our destination. Later, we were told that 25 armed platoons of Orissa police had been deployed in the area. On April 1, we marched towards the Balitutha bridge near the plant site along with thousands of villagers. A steely resolve, mixed with seething rage, was writ large on their faces as they shouted " posco hatao, Orissa bachao'.

Hundred metres short of the police barricade, the protest turned into an uproar. Women broke into a run and brought the 20-feet high bamboo barricade crashing down. The security cordon stood around watching helplessly.

The headlines of Samaj, a local daily, the next day read: "Maoist women enter Dhinkia at night.' It insinuated the events at Balitutha to the Maoist women. We dismissed the tag as the state's paranoid obsession with the red brigade. We realized it was strategic rather than instinctive