Along the NH 43
from Raipur to the strife-torn Dantewada district lies Jagdalpur, where
survivors of the March 15 massacre of police officers are recuperating.
One of them is Poyam
Lakma, who escaped along with two others in Ranibodli. So when did Lakma
become a ‘Special Police Officer’ (SPO) with the Chhattisgarh
government as part of the Salva Judum? Two years ago. How? “The
Salva Judum people came to the village and said villagers could become
SPOs.” Just that? What was his personal motivation to join the
Salva Judum? Was he forced to or did he really want to wage war against
the Naxalites?
Lakma, who has a
bullet injury, freezes, gesturing towards the next survivor: ask him.
The other survivors are more forthcoming about driving the Naxals away
and bringing peace to Dantewada. They loot and plunder, they don’t
let us work for the government, how would we earn, and besides we are
all fighting for the country.
In Bhairamgarh Block
deep inside Dantewada, Sukli Soma lives in a Salva Judum camp. Her son
Sudru is an SPO at the Bhairamgarh police station, which looks more
like a military academy. The Salva Judum has managed to make many Naxals
surrender, she says, at least the ones from her village. Her neighbour
Lachchu, though, says he was better off in his village, on the other
side of the Imravati river. There isn’t enough rice to eat here
in the camp, and rarely does he get work under the National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act.
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Iron
in the soul: The room in which the police were sleeping
when the Jan Militia of the CPI (Maoist) attacked
Photos Shailendra Pandey |
But that’s
all he would volunteer. “Why do you ask so many questions? What
will happen if you write?” Don’t ask, especially the difficult
questions. Did he join the Salva Judum out of his own volition? Is he
a free man here? Does the Salva Judum commit atrocities on suspected Naxals?
After this barrage
of queries, Lachchu rushes back into the camp.
Unlike Lachhu,
Lakma and Sukli, Shivram Yadav is not a tribal, but he too lived across
the river, in Bail village. “The Naxals,” he says, “would
collect food and money house to house, saying they would kill government
officials for our benefit.” Now at the camp, Yadav can’t
even muster the courage to visit his village a few kilometres away.
At the Bhairamgarh
police station, Central Reserve Police Force personnel play volleyball
as the sun prepares to set. The Salva Judum SPOs, who are readying for
the evening vigil, refuse to be photographed. While the adivasis are
not known to open up easily, the police have drilled into them not to
speak to journalists and activists. This has made Dantewada one of the
most difficult places for journalists; many have had their cameras snatched
away by SPOs.
Travelling through
Dantewada, there are several things that stand out. The roads: the Border
Roads Organisation has been building some of the best roads here. An
attempt at development to prevent the the Communist Party of India (Maoist)
from using the adivasi’s discontent.
You will see the
schools every few kilometres along the highway. These are mostly run
under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the Centre’s scheme to increase
literacy. Adivasis are known to be amongst the most resistant to education,
and the Abhiyan has built “ashrams” or small boarding schools
that house children from remote villages. Every Salva Judum camp has
a school. Although resistant to modern education, tribals increasingly
see the benefits of it thanks to reserved jobs. Sukli Soma in the Bhairamgarh
Block, for instance, is most happy that her granddaughter has started
learning Hindi.
Many tribals feel strongly
about driving the Naxals away. The police say the people are their
weapons |
The village of
Ranibodli has one such girls’ school, separated from a Salva Judum
camp by half a football field. Sometime ago the government ordered the
resident students to move out to another nearby school, but 30 girls
and a teacher stayed on. The rest of the building was occupied by an
operations unit comprising the Chhattisgarh Police and Salva Judum SPOs.
Two bunkers on the roof, and two on the veranda at the back, with “Bastar
Tiger” written on them, had sentries keep watch at night. At 2am
on March 15, about 500 men surrounded the building and an exchange of
fire followed until the sentries ran out of ammunition. The Naxals then
hurled petrol bombs into the rooms where the police were sleeping. Those
who came out were beheaded with a pharsi. Other units in the area were
alerted but they arrived two hours after the Bastar guerrillas had killed
the Bastar Tigers. Some say the delay was deliberate: troops didn’t
want to find place in the list of ‘martyrs’. Even now, there
is no crpf or police posted there: the abandoned school is a symbol
of the state government’s attempt to explain the massacre away
as an exception in what it says is the successful experiment of Salva
Judum.
Unprintable photographs
of the 49 bodies — the toll has now gone up to 68 — taken
the next day by local journalists show heads matched with torsos. The
floor is caked with dried blood, charred remains of beds and even two
motorcycles that were deliberately burnt. In one corner of a room where
the fire didn’t reach, dozens of letters by SPOs asking for leave
lie in a heap. One SPO used to take leave so often that they shunted
him out. It is now suspected that he was an informant.
Information is what
the Salva Judum is about, more than the gun. The presence of villagers
as SPOs in police teams helps identify the ‘sangham’ members
— their fellow villagers who are part of the lower rung of the
Naxal military cadre. They bring some of them from the interiors and
make them surrender, while others are just killed. It is also true that
areas where Salva Judum has been organised see less Naxal activitity,
meaning they have been frustrated by the Salva Judum even if not to
the extent the state government claims. The war in Dantewada is not
so much about massacres. Both sides insist it is about hearts and minds.
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Easy
fodder? The villagers shot dead by the Gidam police station
SHO for their ‘involvement’ in the Ranibodli massacre
Police File Picture |
| |
The security efforts
here are not geared at combating guerrilla warfare |
Letters in that
heap say an SPO is being appointed because the jan andolan against Naxalism
needs more security. Beneath the rhetoric of jan andolan, the contentious
Salva Judum, the Chhattisgarh government’s hollowness with security
efforts is visible. There is no more than one police station per thousand
kilometres and the security efforts are not geared at combating the
kind of guerrilla warfare the terrain offers the Naxals.
One of the victims
of the Ranibodli massacre was Ramchandra Enka, 25, whose wife points
to another reason why Salva Judum has found some support. Enka would
give her wife a thousand rupees and keep the rest five hundred of his
salary to himself. His wife and father speak the usual things against
Naxal harassment and in support of Salva Judum, but our cab driver is
making small talk with a neighbour who says she sent her son out of
Dantewada because he was being forced by the police to join the Salva
Judum.
After the Ranibodli
massacre, the state home minister told the press that the massacre would
be ‘avenged’. Intense ‘combing operations’ by
eight battalions of police are taking place in a radius of 50 km around
the village. There are unofficial reports of an exchange of fire between
the Naxals and the police near Shangri village. Five Maoists are said
to have died, a .303 stolen rifle recovered, but no casualties on the
side of the police. It is in such ‘combing operations’ that
the Salva Judum is said to commit atrocities: they are accused of burning
and indiscriminately kill people in entire villages seen to be with
the Naxals. There are even accusations of rape.
Two years ago Gidam
police station was looted, a similar combing operaion had taken place.
The Naxals just walked in, started firing and looting. The new Station
Head Officer RL Senger learnt the security lesson: a zigzag of barbed
wire is the most common strategy to delay the entry of attackers into
a building, giving the sentry enough time to fire and flash the message
on the wireless. The Ranibodli school didn’t even have this. But
Senger did another smart thing: he even managed to find a few Naxals
in a village nearby and shot them. They were harvesting the field —
pretending to do so, claims Senger — and he shot them just after
they had perpetrated a bomb blast. “There may be some mistakes,”
says Senger, “just as the media may make some mistakes in reporting
about the Salva Judum.” The local papers had reported the controversy
over the ‘fake encounter’. Instead of an inquiry, Senger
got a President’s medal. “People,” says Senger, “are
the biggest weapons.”
Local journalists
have been muzzled into ignoring the Salva Judum’s excesses and
journalists reporting Naxal atrocities have paid their price: one was
even shot dead. There is a pro/anti Salva Judum divide amongst journalists,
most of whom don’t even know the Gondi language and do not hire
translators to get the adivasis’ version. Local journalists may
never know what happened in the ‘combing operation’ after
the Ranibodli bloodbath and those who may know about it may not be able
to write it. The tribals of Dantewada, then, are only the second biggest
casualty of the strife. The biggest casualty is truth.
