From Chhattisgargh to Manipur: The many faces of Salwa Judum
Manipur will arm its civilians to fight militants: A Salwa Judum in the making? - May 3, 2008
Chhattisgargh’s purification hunt - By Shubhranshu Choudhary
4 farmers commit suicide everyday in Chhattisgarh - the highest in the country - By Shubhranshu Choudhary
Manipur will arm its civilians to fight militants: A Salwa Judum in the making?
May 3, 2008
The Manipur government has decided to provide arms and ammunition to the people of the state to defend themselves from militants.
Official sources said in Imphal on Saturday that the state cabinet, presided over by Manipur Chief Minister O Ibobi Singh, discussed the issue on Friday night at a meeting, which lasted for over three hours.
In the first phase, the people of Heirok and Chajing would be provided security by opening special posts, to be commanded by Special Police Officers.
The people of Heirok in Thoubal district had been demanding arms, following the killing of three people by militants on March 24.
The state government has been considering the possibility of providing arms and ammunition to the people since the past few days.
About 300 youths at Heirok and 200 youths at Chajing, commanded by police forces, will be recruited to provide security to the people. Each youth would be provided with Rs 3,000.
The modalities would be worked out by a police team, headed by a DIG, and the entire process was expected to start by next month, officials said.
The recruitment would be done under the guidance of the deputy commissioners of the concerned districts.
The Manipur Police Housing Corporation will construct barracks for the recruits and all of them would be provided with .303 rifles and motorcycles.
The volunteers, however, would not be allowed to venture out of the specified villages.
Meanwhile, two officials from the Union Home Ministry were presently in the state capital to take stock of the prevailing law and order situation.
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Chhattisgargh’s purification hunt
The state’s Adivasis are being treated like marionettes, as political, corporate and state-security interests seek to gain access to their land.
By Shubhranshu Choudhary
In early 2005, on a visit to Chhattisgarh, people kept telling me, “Tata is coming, something strange is going to happen.” It was not clear what exactly this obtuse prediction meant. But those vague murmurs turned to rumbles within just a few months. By June 2005, there was talk of a “spontaneous uprising” taking place against the Maoists. We were told that because the state’s Maoists had banned the collection of tendu leaves, used in bidi production, the people were in the process of “revolting”. It might have been an odd coincidence, but it was during that same month that two private companies, Tata and Essar, each signed memorandums of understanding with the Chhattisgarh government to set up massive steel projects in the state’s iron-rich Bastar District.
According to newspaper reports, people were gathering and marching from village to village, in an attempt to garner support against the Maoists. Local media accounts called it the start of another jan jagran abhiyan, a people’s-awakening movement. Despite the evidence of armed people taking part in these gatherings, newspapers were continuing to refer to what was taking place as a “peace movement”. Chief Minister Raman Singh and ‘supercop’ K P S Gill, Chhattisgarh’s former security adviser and the man who suppressed the Punjab insurgency, even went so far as to call the whole ordeal a Gandhian experiment.
Within days, the tone of the headlines had changed. While hearing about Maoist attacks on the Jan Jagran Abhiyan meetings, we suddenly also heard about villagers pouring into roadside camps that had been set up by the state – purportedly due to “fear of Maoist attacks”. By December, more than 15,000 people were living in those camps. By that time, the ‘movement’ had also been rechristened salwa judum, and local Congress party leader Mahendra Karma had taken up its leadership. Karma claimed that Salwa Judum meant ‘Peace March’ in the dialect of the Gond Adivasis, though some academics have said that a more accurate translation would be ‘Purification Hunt’.
That December, a report by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties included a damning accusation: that the Salwa Judum was not a spontaneous movement at all, but rather a government-sponsored programme. A report by the Communist Party of India (CPI) also stated that the Salwa Judum had been torching houses and killing people who refused to join them. Nonetheless, the local newspapers continued to describe what was going on as a spontaneous, peaceful people’s movement. Sitting in Delhi, it was certainly difficult to discern what was actually taking place.
Scorched-earth policy
Maoists, also called Naxalites, have been working to create a parallel power system in the Adivasi villages of the Bastar area for the past three decades. Starting very recently, however, a new phenomenon has been becoming increasingly clear. The traditional Adivasi leadership, whose authority was threatened by the new Maoist-created leadership (called sanghams), was making up the backbone of the Salwa Judum. Mahendra Karma himself came from an elite Adivasi family.
While visiting Dantewada District, also known as South Bastar, in February 2006, it became amply clear that it was in fact Salwa Judum members who were forcing people to move to the refugee camps – quite the opposite of what was being reported in the papers. In the camps I spoke with terrified people, many of whom backed up the findings of the CPI report: Salwa Judum members were going from village to village, forcing people to join with them. If the villagers refused to do so, they burnt their houses, even killing many who resisted. Nearly everyone in the camps told me that they wanted to go back home, but were too afraid of retaliation by the Salwa Judum. The state administration, meanwhile, was maintaining a familiar line: the people were remaining in the camps due to fear of the Maoists, and that they would go back once the Maoists were eliminated.
During a subsequent trip to Dantewada, the District Collector of Dantewada provided an official document called “Work Plan for People’s Jan Jagran Abhiyan 2005”. The pamphlet included a large number of details about the government’s support and plan to take the movement to new areas, but the mere presence of this literature led to a still more puzzling question: How could the government make a work plan for a ‘spontaneous’ people’s movement?
The ‘payback’ from the authorities for trying to do independent journalism seemed to be encapsulated in the experience of Kamlesh Painkra, an Adivasi journalist who had written in a local newspaper about the arson and killings by the Salwa Judum. Since doing so, he had lost his job; his brother, a teacher, had been thrown in jail on charges of being a Maoist supporter; and the rest of his family was living as refugees. Was what Kamlesh wrote true? Unfortunately, there was no time to investigate.
The strategy of systematically driving people into roadside camps actually has a name in English – “strategic hamleting”. Evidently, the same tactic had been tried in many other parts of the world during attempts to cut off guerrilla links to the populace. The same strategy had apparently been tried in Mizoram and Nagaland during the 1960s, but was a dismal failure. Instead of isolating the rebels, the killing of innocent villagers in aerial bombings and the forced eviction from their traditional villages engendered hostility towards the state, and generated more support for the rebel cause. Meanwhile, all of the police officers who were challenged denied that they were engaged in any ‘strategic hamleting’ whatsoever.
I tried to visit some of the villages that were said to have been razed by the Salwa Judum. But the roads to these villages were being blocked by the police and ‘Special Police Officers’, or SPOs, a shadowy group of civilians that the government had started recruiting for the Salwa Judum. Each member received a regular ‘salary’ of INR 1500. As such, no local would agree to accompany reporters to any burned-down village.
Eventually, however, two students from an Adivasi hostel in the state capital of Raipur, 500 km away, agreed to take me to their own village. They knew of an alternate route, where neither the police nor the SPOs would be waiting. After a long trek, we reached their village and witnessed the mayhem. People told us of repeated attacks by the Salwa Judum: They want us to leave the village and come to the camps. We ran away as soon as we saw them, but some of us were caught. By now, they have either been killed or been taken to the camps. These people were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and we saw sick patients who were unable to seek medical care for fear of the Salwa Judum. “We travel 80 km to get salt and oil,” said one elder. “We send old women and children to shops. We are frightened of the Salwa Judum: if they see us in the market, they will kill us.”
It was at this exact time that the Maoists publicly released a recording of an alleged conversation between the police chief of Bijapur, formerly part of Dantewada, and his subordinate. The police chief was reportedly heard saying, “Tell people that the state is giving three lakh rupees to those villages that join Salwa Judum. And if they do not do so, their villages will be burnt.” Later on in the same tape, the police chief orders, “And if you see any journalists, just kill them.” The government dismissed the tape as bogus, but some senior police officers later confirmed its authenticity, though off the record. Certainly, the government did not order any enquiry.
Tendu cover-up
During another visit to Dantewada, I came upon a group of fleeing villagers from Santoshpur, in neighbouring Bijapur District. They told us that members of both the Salwa Judum and the police had killed 12 people in their village. “Other than one, the other 11 had no connection whatsoever with the Maoists,” said one angrily. Families were also getting divided in this dirty war. One mother said, “My older son, who is now an SPO, came to kill my younger son, who is with the Maoists.” After our news reports become public, the state government ordered an enquiry into several of these and related events. But that probe merely found the culprits to be “unidentified people in uniform” –nothing but a veiled reference to Naxalites.
Still, a picture of what was actually happening was slowly emerging. We met a remarkable policeman who had been appointed to protect one of the camps. He claimed that his unit had killed 65 people during the previous three months, and his revelations were stark: “We do not know the language of the Adivasis. We accompany Salwa Judum to the villages. As soon as villagers see us, they run away. We kill whoever we get hold of. We are killing them like goats, like chickens, like ants, on orders from higher ups.” Here was a man clearly in turmoil amidst the state-mandated violence. “Please write about it,” he said. “I know I will be called for an enquiry, but I will tell my senior officers, ‘This is wrong, please stop it’.”
Running away has indeed become a widespread phenomenon in these affected areas of Chhattisgarh. We heard about terrified people leaving their villages in hordes, heading to neighbouring states. Though Chhattisgarh officials deny any such migration, the forest department of Andhra Pradesh has started burning the temporary houses of the displaced Adivasi camps. The High Court of Andhra Pradesh has recently ordered a stay on these forced evictions.
Sunil Kumar, a newspaper editor in Raipur, implies that there was much more to the current phase of anti-Maoist fighting than met the eye. “If you look at the timing of the start of Salwa Judum, it is not only the time of the MOUs with Tata and Essar, but it is also the time when an Adivasi was appointed the home minister of Chhattisgarh,” Kumar noted. “Salwa Judum is conceived and executed in the police headquarters. They knew it would result in bloodshed, and that is the reason they got an Adivasi appointed as home minister.” Following this intriguing correlation, there were other journalists who confirmed that they had received their initial tips on the start of the ‘spontaneous’ people’s movement from police sources. Thereafter, press notes continued to emanate from the fax numbers of police stations.
Few journalists seem to have managed, or bothered, to get to the bottom of the story. N R K Pillay is a veteran journalist based in Bastar who has tried. He says: “The so-called revolt against the Maoists in June 2005 was a combination of drought, a systematic siphoning of subsidised grain, and the rumour spread by a close associate of Mahendra Karma that Maoists have banned tendu-leaf collection. But the Maoists were merely demanding a better rate for the tendu leaf, and had never banned the collection.”
Qualms about tendu leaves notwithstanding, the industrialisation of Chhattisgarh continues apace. Chitranjan Bakshi, of the CPI, who led the first fact-finding team to investigate the Salwa Judum in September 2005, recalls intimations of a larger process afoot from the very beginning. “We wrote a letter to the prime minister but got no reply. Our national leaders raised it with Sonia Gandhi, but she remains unmoved. I wonder if it is the pressure of the companies who are going to gain at the end, when these Adivasis are pushed out of their lands.” Some CPI members have now gone to court with a list of 548 murders, 99 rapes and more than 3000 burnt houses, which they say were all perpetrated by the Salwa Judum. No police complaint was registered regarding a single one of these incidents.
Meanwhile, the work plan for 2006 handed out by the Dantewada District Collector said that Essar had been helping the state government to put up the roadside camps. The head of the state Planning Commission has announced that the government is now planning to turn these ‘temporary’ camps into permanent villages. Today, 59,000 people are said to be living in these camps. The government has now halted all provision for health, education and subsidised foodgrain in the original villages, on the deceptively simple explanation that all of the people are now living in the camps.
But even greater injustice lies in the fuzzy math behind these camps. The total population of this area was estimated at around 350,000. If 59,000 people are now living in the camps, then what has happened to the additional three lakh? Many may have fled outright, while many others are remaining in their villages – but both of these groups are currently almost entirely outside of the purview of the government.
Chhattisgarh is unique for the raising of the Salwa Judum as a vigilante force by the state to counter the rise of the Maoists – an attempt to pit locals against locals, and to absolve the authorities of the responsibilities of law and order. But if that much is clear, much else is not. Is this, after all is said and done, an attempt to get large companies access to mineral-rich areas that inconveniently happen to be inhabited by Adivasis? Is the Salwa Judum merely a strategy to fight Maoists, or it is it in truth the phenomenon that everyone was warning about three years ago, when they wondered, Tata is coming, what strange things are going to happen?
This article originally appeared in Himalmag
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4 farmers commit suicide everyday in Chhattisgarh - the highest in the country
By Shubhranshu Choudhary
| 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | |
| Maharashtra | 3.65 | 3.76 | 3.84 | 4.10 | 3.82 | 4.28 |
| Andhra Pradesh | 1.98 | 2.46 | 2.31 | 3.39 | 3.13 | 3.24 |
| Karnataka | 4.74 | 4.21 | 4.58 | 3.21 | 2.94 | 2.57 |
| Madhya Pradesh | 2.27 | 2.25 | 2.46 | 2.83 | 2.19 | 2.45 |
| Chhattisgarh | 6.97 | 5.83 | 4.93 | 6.33 | 6.29 | 6.49 |
Farmer Suicide Rate per 100,000 of population
Source: National Crime Records Bureau, which is the basis for nationwide studies on the subject.
Bandage gives immediate relief for a wound, but it is no cure for the deep malady — if there is one within. Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s budgetary move to waive off farm loans is like a bandage for an AIDS lesion. It may sooth the casual observer’s sensitivity to an eyesore, but would it help the patient? What is the doctor’s opinion and what damage shall be caused because of the cover up?
In Chhattisgarh, the problem is slightly complicated.
There is a general inability to acknowledge the lesion. There is no diagnosis here really; this may well be cancer or just dermatitis. There is fear of revelation through a biopsy — because a biopsy implies that cancer is a consideration.
And so we have public feeling being expressed by intellectuals on a public forum, which is not supported by any scientific fact. Is it acceptable? It does take away the possibility of a cure.
So shall we say a small prayer, take courage in our hands and open our eyes to reality?
The issue of farmer suicide has been in public domain since a decade, thanks to journalists like P Sainath. But Chhattisgarh was never highlighted as a problem state. It is a new state after all. Relief packages for farmers have till date gone only to four states — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala [Images].
Figures tell their own story — a worrying story. According to National Crime Record Bureau data of 2006, Maharashtra topped the number of farmer suicides with a figure of 4453 deaths followed by Andhra Pradesh with 2607 farmer suicides. Karnataka came third with 1720 deaths.
Chhattisgarh was ranked number four — 1483 farmer suicides or 4 deaths a day. The figure was much higher than the fifth state, Kerala.
Why then was Kerala acknowledged and not Chhattisgarh?
The Farmer Suicide Rate is obtained by a small mathematical calculation of dividing the number of farmers committing suicide by the number of farmers in the state, multiplied by 100,000. This means the figures are not in terms of percentage, but per lakh farmers.
The Farmer Suicide Rate is highest in Kerala, 142.9 per 1 lakh farmers. On this list Chhattisgarh is at number 3 with 33.7, just behind Karnataka with a figure of 36.4.
States with bigger number of farmer suicides, like Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, are behind Chhattisgarh in this table with figures of 29.9 and 19.2 respectively. But still no package goes to Chhattisgarh and no one talks about it either.
As another criterion, Professor Srijit Mishra of Indira Gandhi [Images] Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, calculates the figure of male farmers committing suicide per 100,000 farmers. He calls it Suicide Mortality Rate.
Kerala once again has the highest Suicide Mortality Rate between 2001 and 2005 with an aggregate of 194.7 male farmers per 100,000 farmers. Here Maharashtra (50.6) is just ahead of Chhattisgarh (44.8). Other states — Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh — follow Chhattisgarh with lower figures of 40.8 and 33.2 respectively.
Prof Mishra raised the issue of Chhattisgarh in his paper written in September 2007. He says Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala received adequate media attention and subsequent packages from the Centre, but that was not the case with Chhattisgarh.
Most dramatic figures come from Yuvraj Gajpal, a research scholar in McMaster University in Canada [Images]. He calculates the rate of farmer suicides per 1 lakh population. According to Gajpal’s calculation, Chhattisgarh has been topping the list every year since 2001.
For the year 2006, Chhattisgarh has a figure of 6.49 farmer suicide per 1 lakh population. Maharashtra follows with 4.28. Usual suspects are just behind — Kerala (3.35), Andhra Pradesh (3.24) and Karnataka (2.57).
In a nutshell, whichever method of calculation you choose, Chhattisgarh remains in the top five states for farmer suicides.
However, media and politicians in the state remain unconvinced.
Sunil Kumar, editor of newspaper Daily Chhattisgarh, claims: “Media in Chhattisgarh is not blind that four farmers commit suicide a day and we will not even come to know about it.”
Sunil Kumar recently wrote a descriptive article describing P Sainath’s work on farmer suicides from across the country as scare mongering, exaggeration and half truth. He, however, does not elaborate the basis of his conclusion.
Another journalist, Alok Putul, wrote a front page article Everyone loves a good fraud. (A dig at Sainath’s famous book Everyone loves a good drought). Putul calls the figures of farmer suicides a bundle of lies, claiming his study shows that only one farmer commits suicide in Chhattisgarh every year.
Sainath mocked: ‘This is like calling an election fraud if the results are not to our liking. Even Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has accepted the NCRB figures on farmer suicides as indicators and the basis of work in India, on the floor of Parliament. And if there is only one farmer committing suicide in Chhattisgarh every year, then I suggest farmers from US and Europe to shift to Chhattisgarh.’
A couple of Congress leaders have raised the issue in Chhattisgarh Vidhan Sabha. But big leaders from opposition Congress remain unconvinced. So there is no pressure on the Bharatiy Janat Party government to respond. It is possible that it is just a slip — and it is difficult to accept a slip, without implications of malice.
State Director General of Police Vishwaranjan stands firm. He tells journalists, “We have never sent these figures. There is no column for farmer suicides in the data we send to National Crime Records Bureau.”
NCRB officials do not want to be named, but are happy to point out: “We do not have any offices in states. We get figures from the states. If you are saying these figures are false, then please ask your state police chief why they are sending false figures?”
Chief statistician R S Chaurasia in State Crime Records Bureau, Raipur, sits few yards away in the same office as the DGP. He confirms that all figures in NCRB for Chhattisgarh were collected by them.
These are the facts. They do seem not make a good picture. Too bad.
Does it mean we should not explore the issue further? All that is required — an exploration, a study; the beginning of a deep enquiry into the malady.