Naxal Terror Watch

The villagers of Dantewada have no choice but to chant the anti-Naxal mantra. Shivam Vij reports from Ranibodli, where Naxals killed 68 cops and Salva Judum volunteers

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.
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.

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.