Bloodbath mars anti-Maoist
'success' By Sudha
Ramachandran
BANGALORE - India's
anti-Maoist operations are under fire again.
It appears that 19 "hardcore Maoists" who the
government claimed were killed in an encounter
with the Chhattisgarh police and the Central
Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on the night of June
27-28 were in fact unarmed civilians. About a
dozen of those killed were below 16 years of age,
and at least one of them just 12.
What
officials jubilantly declared at first to be one
of the biggest successes of India's war against
Maoists was described by a social activist, Swami
Agnivesh, who has acted as a government-appointed
interlocutor with the Maoists, as "cold-blooded
murder", the worst massacre of civilians in the
nation's post-independence history.
The
incident happened at Sarkeguda, 400 kilometers
from Raipur, the state capital, in Bijapur
district in the eastern Indian state of
Chhattisgarh, which is
the epicenter of the ongoing military operations
against the Maoists. Chhattisgarh is rich in
minerals but the tribals who live there are among
India's poorest. They have borne the brunt of the
war between the security forces and the Maoists.
There are different versions of what
happened that night.
In the early hours of
June 28, the CRPF said, "19 hardcore Maoists" were
killed in an encounter in Bijapur's dense jungles.
But soon after, accounts - quite at odds with the
police narrative - began trickling out of those
dense jungles. These accounts drew attention to
the horrific killing of villagers by the police
that night.
Realizing that their
"encounter" was snowballing into a major
controversy, the CRPF quickly revised its version,
claiming that "Maoists and their sympathizers" had
been killed in the "encounter".
Sarkeguda,
Kottaguda and Rajpeta are three small tribal
settlements consisting of fewer than a hundred
huts altogether. These were among the villages
that suffered terrible violence in 2006 when
government-created local militias called Salwa
Judum killed people and looted and burned down
their homes. More than 600 villages were emptied
out as terrified tribals fled into neighboring
states. It is only after the Supreme Court ordered
the disbanding of Salwa Judum - it continues to
exist in other forms and different names - that
the villagers slowly returned. They were
rebuilding their lives - constructing their homes,
cultivating their land and sending children to
school - when terror returned in the form of the
CRPF to Sarkeguda, Kottaguda and Rajpeta.
The three villages are separated from one
another by a small clearing. It was in this
clearing that the villagers had assembled at
around 8pm that night for a meeting. The meeting
began late. At around 11pm, the villagers say,
they were surrounded by police who began firing at
them. The firing went on for hours.
CRPF
sources say they had come to know of a Maoist
meeting that was to be held on the night of June
27 at Silgerh near Sarkeguda. An operation was
planned to strike at the Maoists. According to the
plan, about 800 troops stationed at Basaguda,
Chintalnar and Jagarmunda would converge from
three directions at Silgerh.
Troops from
the CRPF camp at Basaguda are reported to have set
off that night at around 9pm. As they advanced
toward Silgerh, they came upon a congregation of
people at Sarkeguda.
According to the
CRPF, Maoists at the meeting opened fire and the
police retaliated. An encounter ensued in which
"Maoists and their sympathizers" were killed. Six
CRPF personnel were wounded, four of them
suffering gunshot injuries.
CRPF director
general Vijay Kumar told the media that the police
had been ambushed by the Maoists and that they had
retaliated as per the standard operating
procedures.
"We had to protect ourselves
after so many [police] were injured in open fire,"
he said. Expressing concern that the Maoists had
used the villagers as human shields, he claimed
that twice his troops "retreated on seeing women
and children in the front".
Villagers
insist there were no Maoists at the gathering;
neither had the Maoists called the meeting. They
say they had gathered to discuss an upcoming
festival related to the sowing of crops.
However, 12-year-old Chhotu Hakka of
Sarkeguda, who was shot in the knees, told news
channel NDTV correspondent Sreenivasan Jain that
there were three or four Maoists present at the
meeting that night. In hospital and isolated from
others in his village, Chhotu appears in the news
clip to be unaware of the line his village has
taken - or was made to take by the Maoists - that
there were no Maoists around that night.
CRPF officials have pointed to bullet
injuries sustained by their personnel as evidence
of an encounter. While The Hindu has reported one
villager as surmising that the police might have
accidentally shot one another when they surrounded
the village, the latter have countered that by
pointing out that the bullets that caused injury
were of the kind the Maoists use.
Piecing
together the various accounts, it seems that the
CRPF operation was based on faulty intelligence.
When troops from Jagarmunda reached Silgerh that
night, they found no Maoists there.
It
does seem that Maoists called a meeting of
villagers at Sarkeguda and lay in ambush there.
When troops from the Basaguda camp passed
Sarkeguda, the rebels fired at them, knowing well
that the trigger-happy CRPF would retaliate and
end up shooting into a crowd of innocent
villagers. The CRPF walked into a Maoist trap that
night.
What followed was a massacre.
It is hard to understand why the CRPF
fired as it did. Surely it was aware that village
meetings here are often of "indeterminate nature",
writes Shoma Chaudhury in the Tehelka
newsmagazine. "They know villagers are often
summoned by Maoists for public hearings: These are
orders that cannot be refused. If they didn't know
whom they were firing at that night, why did they
not retreat rather than shoot to kill at random?"
Had the government simply admitted the
terrible mistake the next morning, it might have
limited the damage. Instead, a cover-up operation
followed, adding salt to wounds.
The
manner in which serious charges appear to have
been fabricated and slapped on some of the dead to
prove that "Maoists" were indeed killed that night
has fueled outrage.
Home Affairs Minister
P Chidambaram, under whose charge the CRPF falls,
has defended the operation, as has the chief
minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh.
Interestingly, the two belong to rival political
parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) respectively.
Chidambaram has
come under criticism not just from activists and
civil society but also from his own colleagues in
the Congress party. Federal Tribal Affairs
Minister Kishore Chandra Deo has described the
operation as a "fake encounter", and Congress
politicians in Chhattisgarh have described it as a
"botch-up". A report by the Congress' Chhattisgarh
unit has listed and named seven children among
those killed. No Maoists figure in this report.
This is in sharp contrast to the statement issued
by the home minister last week wherein he claimed
that three Maoists were killed and, barring one
15-year-old boy, the dead were all adults.
Neither the state nor the Maoists have
come out looking good from the incident at
Sarkeguda. Clearly, both have little regard for
the tribals they claim to be liberating or for the
young lives they have snuffed out.
Two of
the "top Maoists" who were killed that night were
Kaka Nagesh, 15, and Madkam Ramvilas. They lived
in a government hostel for schoolchildren and had
come home for the summer vacation. Being among the
villages' few educated boys, they were tasked with
the responsibility of figuring out how much each
villager had to contribute for the seed festival.
Nagesh and Ramvilas were present at the meeting to
share those figures.
Earlier this year the
two were among three students of Kottaguda village
selected to visit the port city of Visakhapatnam
for an educational tour. Their experiences at
Visakhapatnam left a deep impression on the boys.
It fired in Nagesh a dream to become mariner. As
for Ramvilas, "He wanted to be a lawyer when he
grew up," his sister says.
Given their
excellent performance in the government school
they attended - the two were said to be the
brightest in the school - they might have indeed
achieved their dreams.
On the night of
June 27-28, the CRPF and Maoists ensured that
those dreams died young.
Sudha
Ramachandran is an independent
journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.
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