Breaking the circle of violence By Sudeep Chakravarti

Photo: Satish Bate/HT

A ghoulish anniversary was marked this week in the ongoing story of Chhattisgarh and the Maoist rebellion that has thus far escaped conflict resolution. (Imagine the headline: Peace breaks out!)

Four auxiliary policemen, state-sponsored vigilantes by another name, were abducted by Maoists in southern Chhattisgarh on 13 July. Their bodies were found strewn across a road, near Kutru in Bijapur district, two days later.

Their killing marked the 10th anniversary of the birth of Salwa Judum, a chilling, cynical vigilante enterprise that set tribal against tribal in a counter-Maoist strategy funded by government and business alike.

Ten years ago, to deny Maoist rebels sanctuary, resources and recruits in southern Chhattisgarh, such vigilantes in concert with police and paramilitary forces destroyed homes and stores of grain. They killed non-combatants: men, women and children. Rape and maiming were commonplace. Dismemberment and disemboweling were practised. Torture and intimidation were everyday occurrences. Forcible displacement was on an epic scale. What began as a ploy to leverage local resentment against Maoist diktat administered by the barrel of the gun became cannibalistic.

The rationale was provided by the state government. A government of Chhattisgarh document from 2005, excerpted in my book Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, argued: “… to end the problem of Naxalites”—here used interchangeably with Maoists—“it is not enough to kill Naxalites but more important to crush and destroy their system operating at the village level.” The blueprint added: “Although sometimes because of reasons beyond one’s control some excesses do take place and some innocents do get affected. But keeping in mind the overall context of major operations, it is important that the higher ups remain silent…”

They did. It took a Supreme Court order in 2011, in response to a suit brought by human rights activists, to formally disband Salwa Judum, which translates as purification hunt in the Gondi language. But its members, signed on as special police officers—including several minors; I have interviewed some—under law mandated by the government of India, continued as Koya Commandos. Further censure led to their recruitment in Chhattisgarh’s police force by diluting recruitment norms. They function as guards, scouts, informants and local hoods with assault rifles who sometimes extort for a living.

Maoists consider them lowest of the low: traitors to their own kind—tribal folk, for whose rights and development Maoists also claim to be fighting—to be hunted down and mercilessly killed. They have done so for 10 years. A little over two years ago, in May 2013, they ambushed and killed Congress leader Mahendra Karma, a lynchpin of Salwa Judum. This May, Karma’s son Chhavindra escalated his Maoist threat profile by announcing his intention to launch Salwa Judum II, calling it Vikas Sangharsh Samiti—loosely, the society to do battle for development.

The fact that it fizzled out, and both local Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress officials alike took a stand against it, is welcome. It could have renewed a cycle of bloodletting in which non-combatants typically paid the highest price in life, limb and livelihood. Yet, there is irony embedded in the name. Each side in the conflict claims to speak on behalf of the downtrodden and dispossessed, and take up arms to protect them, and yet see them as little more than collateral damage in the greater scheme of things. Inhumanity feeds on inhumanity in the name of peace and prosperity.

For all their sanctimoniousness, Maoists are routinely brutal, in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere. Vehicles have been blown up with non-combatants in them. Maoist kangaroo courts against those who do not toe their line, or suspected traitors, continue. Booby-trapping the bodies of slain state troopers to blow up in the face of colleagues who arrive later—and so, take more of the enemy down—is accepted as guerilla warfare. A Maoist press release likened such a tactic, specifically in an instance in which explosives were inserted in the slashed torsos of troopers, to postmortem practices by pathologists. Railway tracks are sabotaged with the intention of targeting both goods and passenger trains.

You could call such a thing low-intensity conflict, or rebellion born of disenchantment and anger at the desecration of democracy and human rights. I prefer to call it butchery. This circle of violence by Salwa Judum, and against Salwa Judum; for the state, and against the state—all in the name of innocents even as it kills innocents—must be broken.

That state is called peace. It begins with peace talks.