The Trophies Of Operation Green Hunt

Outlook Opinion
The Trophies Of Operation Green Hunt
When rape is routine and there’s a paucity of condemning voices


If the security forces can treat dead women like hunting trophies, not only trussing their bodies to poles, but taking pride in displaying their kill, is it surprising that their behaviour towards the living is so atrocious? After every deadly attack by the Maoists, ‘civil society actors’ are summoned by TV channels to condemn the incident, substituting moral indignation for news analysis. And yet, the same media is strangely silent on police or paramilitary atrocities against civilians. On June 9, The Hindu published stories of rapes in and around Chintalnar in Dantewada by special police officers (SPOs) of the Chhattisgarh government. To my knowledge, no one has asked P. Chidambaram, Raman Singh or the Chhattisgarh DGP to condemn these incidents or even asked what they are going to do about it. These are people in positions of power, who are elected or paid to uphold the Constitution, and the ‘buck stops with them’, not with ordinary citizens.

Gunda Dhur ki Talaash Mein, Penguin 2009

Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological history of Bastar 1854-2006, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007 (2nd edition), (1st edition 1997, OIP 1999).

 

Anthropologists are often accused of wanting to keep tribals or indigenous people as museum pieces. Subalterns and Sovereigns shows how misplaced this charge is, arguing that forested and hill areas like Bastar have never been outside the ‘mainstream’ of history, and that the flattening out of local politics to create the appearance of isolation and homogeneity is essentially a product of colonialism and post-colonialism. The choice today, as in the past, has never been one between ‘tradition’ and ‘modern civilisation’ or between ‘development’ and ‘backwardness’, but over alternative visions of democracy.

 By exploring the expansion of the state in Bastar over the past century and a half, and resistance to the particular forms it has taken, this book has been part of redefining the way in which history and anthropology are thinking of tribal India.

Based on an unusually rich combination of field and archival research, deployed in methodologically innovative ways, the book is divided into three parts: the ethnohistorical first section portrays the pre-colonial economy and polity, showing also how the significance of kingship and Bastar’s famous Dussehra festival have changed over time. The second part uses more standard archival sources to explore critical rebellions, yet these too are countered by oral histories of the same events. This section documents the growing restrictions on popular access to land and forest, the multiple historical understandings that shaped the encounter between different actors, and the relationship between colonial anthropology and contemporary laws. The final section, `Uncertain Futures,' highlights the contradictions faced by tribal societies today. The book is brought up to date for the second edition, by an afterword on the ongoing Naxalite movement and the government’s counterinsurgency efforts in Chhattisgarh.