The Indian government claims it is slowly
but surely winning the war against Maoist guerillas in India’s resource rich
forested regions, and has consistently dismissed widespread accusations of
human rights violations as propaganda by Maoists or their urban supporters. It
has also acted to preempt future accusations by jailing human rights activists
and lawyers working in these areas. But as a recent report by a government
appointed enquiry commission shows, these accusations are credible and need to
be addressed.
The Judge discounted testimonies by both
sides, and relied only on circumstantial evidence. The CRPF/police version was
dismissed because the lawyers for the villagers painstakingly picked holes in
their claims. The villagers’ testimony was deemed by the defense lawyers to be
belated. In fact, the circumstantial evidence corroborates everything the
villagers said. The defense charge on
delay is also completely unwarranted because the villagers spoke to the press,
they met the Home Minister in Delhi and wrote a letter to the Supreme Court,
all within days of the incident happening. That they did not file an FIR with
the police in fact works against the state, showing the complete and justified
lack of faith in the system. For one, the police was involved in the firing,
and two, the government’s own affidavits in the Supreme Court in the ongoing
Salwa Judum case have established that the police have never acted on
complaints from villagers.
The only point where the judge differs from
the villagers is in arguing that the meeting that the villagers were attending was
not an innocuous one to prepare for the seed sowing festival, because it was
held at night and some people with ‘criminal antecedents’ were present. But in an area where anyone can be arbitrarily
accused and jailed, people with criminal antecedents are a dime a dozen. As far
as the security forces are concerned, everybody is a “hostile.” Even after knowing school going children had
been killed, DIG Elango’s affidavit claimed (para 4.20): “we could find that 16
hostiles had been killed.”
Curiously, even after exposing the
violations by the security forces, the Judge rewarded the perpetrators. He did
not recommend any prosecutions, or compensation; only better training, better
gadgets and better intelligence for the forces.
The Congress, when in opposition, had
raised the issue of both the 2012 Sarkeguda massacre and the Tadmetla arson,
murder and rape a year earlier, as well as the accompanying attack on Swami
Agnivesh and Art of Living representatives. But immediately after coming to
power in 2018, they promoted IG SRP Kalluri, who
an internal CBI report found as culpable as the SPOs who were charged with
arson.
The Congress may have appointed high level committees
to look into releasing adivasi prisoners as well as examine the cases of
journalists harassed by the previous BJP regime, but there has been no progress
on addressing the landscape of widespread human rights violations, deaths,
rapes and arson caused by Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt, despite being
indicted by the NHRC in 2008 as well as by the Supreme Court in 2011. On the contrary, the government erected a
statue to Mahendra Karma, the Congress leader who worked closely with the BJP
government in carrying out the Salwa Judum.
In an internal closure report on Tadmetla
that the CBI hid from the Supreme Court, but which was subsequently leaked in
2018, the
CBI pointed to the larger systemic issues of deliberate obfuscation by the
security forces to ensure impunity, such as not keeping records of personnel on
particular operations or details of ammunition used, apart from deliberately
fudging evidence. Not surprisingly, there have been several more cases of fake
encounters even after the Congress took power, the most recent being of 2
villagers in the Munga jungle on 5th November.
The Supreme Court’s 2011 ban on the use of
surrendered Naxalites in frontline counterinsurgency has also been willfully
ignored by both the BJP and Congress governments, and the Court, often so
mindful of its dignity, has let this contempt pass without hearing for the last
seven years. A ‘final hearing’ of the
Salwa Judum case began in December 2018, but one year on, there have been no
dates for hearing.
As usual, the BJP is trying to deflect the
real issues raised by the Sarkeguda enquiry by claiming that the leak of the
report before it reached the Assembly was a breach of privilege. It is silent,
however, on the issues raised by the report – the callous killing of 17
innocent villagers under its watch.
The Congress can respond to the Sarkeguda
report in two ways. Either it can continue the existing policy of
counterinsurgency and impunity, which is the path preferred by the deep state.
Or it can choose to fulfill the mandate of the people by seizing the historical
opportunity to chart an entirely new path. The Congress should celebrate its
first anniversary in power in Chhattisgarh by announcing a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, which would catalogue and compensate all deaths, and
prosecute those responsible. Action against security personnel in Sarkeguda
must be the start, but must not be allowed to become the end.
