War on want

Published on Friday 27 February 2009 13:46

MADKAM DEVA walks about 20 paces off a dirt footpath that cuts through a verdant forest, finds the place where large orange ants crawl over a dark, decomposing maroon stain, then points to another a few metres away. This, he claims, is where he saw one villager, then a second, cut down by police bullets and collapse on to the forest floor. "I'm scared they'll come after me now," says Deva, who doesn't know his age but guesses he is around 20.

His account of what happened in this remote corner of eastern India on January 8 boils down to this: police rounded up 24 villagers, told them they were going to a nearby station for questioning, then lined them up for execution en route. Five, including Deva, escaped.

Deva's story is backed up by the others who escaped, by villagers who say they saw police dressed in fatigues and carrying automatic weapons sweeping through their homes that morning, and by the parents of the victims, who describe their children being dragged away.

Superintendent Rahul Sharma, the most senior police officer in the Dantewara district of Chhattisgarh, provides an equally vivid account of what happened, but one that is completely contradictory to Deva's. "It was a very genuine encounter," says Sharma, who recounts how his men came upon a group of armed Maoists and engaged in a firefight. None of the police died, though he says one officer took shrapnel from a grenade to his hand.

Two very different sides of the same story – one that is taking place with increasing frequency in India. Now numbering in the thousands every year, 'encounters' or 'encounter killings' are shoot-outs between the Indian police or army and any criminal element, from terrorists to petty thieves. Human-rights activists claim that encounter killings can also be stage-managed – when police place a gun in the hands of a dead person, leading to what is known in this part of the world 'fake encounter killings' – and that these are used to bolster the statistics for police response to the tide of terrorism that is sweeping India. India is second only to Iraq in the number of deaths from terrorist attacks (see panel, overleaf).

Encounter killings not only highlight an increase in terrorism, but also the widening gulf between those who have and those who do not. As increasing numbers of Indians migrate towards the mega-cities, many seem to accept that civil liberties must take second place where public safety is concerned. And, with encounter killings, it tends to be the civil liberties of the poor and those in rural areas that are most at risk.

India's limited forensics capabilities make investigating the claims of either side – if two sides are even left standing – hard to verify. And the national media often parrots the police version of events, allying itself with a middle class that is increasingly fearful of rising crime and the threat of terrorism.

Determined to see a strong Indian security apparatus flex its muscle, the Indian media lionises 'encounter specialists' – police who specialise in shootouts. Although there are many films that portray villagers as the heroes, Bollywood is also taking its cue from the media in its treatment of encounter killings. One of the most famous is Ab Tak Chappan, in which an honest cop, Sadhu Agashe, makes a name for himself by killing criminals in sting operations instead of locking them up in prison. And while the glamorised film version is a box-office hit, it is a far cry from the reality of encounter killings – especially this recent one in Chhattisgarh.

Human-rights activists say the killings are not only a violation of the rights of the poor but also a major challenge to the integrity of India's legal system. "Encounters are staged," says Vrinda Grover, a New Delhi-based lawyer and human-rights activist. "It is the only way (for police] to get awards and promotions." He says that when an investigation proves a shoot-out was a 'fake encounter', it can take between five and seven years for the culpable officers to be arrested. "The courts do not give priority to these matters," says Grover.

But the shootings on January 8 are proving to be an exception. Perhaps because it was the largest-scale killing in recent memory, the highest court in the state has ordered an investigation into the incident, starting with autopsies of 12 of the victims.

While some commentators believe the authorities will still manage the outcome, those people most affected – the villagers and relatives of the dead – feel they have little connection to India's legal process, or any other aspect of the state for that matter. "The fact that the victims are these tribals living in a remote jungle area shows that the middle class is not really concerned about the poor," says Bela Bhatia, from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, who has been closely involved in research in southern Chhattisgarh. "Unless it affects them directly, the reality is that they don't speak up."

Meanwhile, the police are still adamant that they were rooting out dangerous terrorists on January 8. They are saying the victims were Naxalites – Maoist insurgents. The account of Sharma is, perhaps not surprisingly, corroborated by police officers and conservative politicians. "This is absolutely a fake allegation – that (the police] killed defenceless people," says Sharma, who claims he has lost 60 officers in the past year fighting Naxalites. Officers recovered five guns – old battered rifles – but experts agree that professional Naxalites are almost always better armed than the police.

In places like Singaram, where mobile-phone reception is non-existent, forests are dense and the only way of getting around is on foot, the insurgents often have the upper hand. Civil servants like Sharma, often feel like aliens in these parts of India, where the majority of the population is tribal. Unable to speak the local language or provide substantial development – that's the job of other, far-removed departments elsewhere – police officers are forced to make their name through security, defined crudely through the ratio of insurgent-to-police killed. "Right now it's a negative attrition rate," he says. "More policemen are dying than Naxalites, and that has to be reversed. We need to hit them, and hard. The ideal attrition rate is four to one. This is crude, but we are working in a crude situation." Sharma says he needs at least 1,000 more trained officers, as well as stronger legislation.

Police stations here operate under a siege mentality, covered in concentric circles of razor wire – more Baghdad than Bombay. Injured police officers have to be evacuated by helicopter because the roads are too dangerous. Some tell of paying bribes to join the police (in order to extort money once they reach a position of power), and paying further bribes to get transferred to a less hostile environment.

Apart from the time of day the attacks happened (around 3.30pm), one of the only facts both the police and villagers seem to agree on is that the Indian government has virtually no presence in the area. "We want development," says Karam Malla Patel, chief of Singaram village. "We want electricity, but we don't know what to do about it. The people in this village have never seen the city."

His village of 50 families is a low-slung collection of dry fields, where cattle and chicks amble freely and men shimmy up skinny palm trees to harvest a natural wine called toti. For their part, villagers familiar with the victims concede that a few – but certainly not all – were Naxalite sympathisers, albeit part of the general militia rather than the hard-core leadership. Their roles would include organising meetings, collecting protection money and keeping tabs on who was working with the police. The main question now is whether they were gunned down in a forest clearing to send a message to those higher up, or were killed in a firefight with officers.

The police counted 15 bodies, while the victims' families say there were 19; officers claim 84 of their men were involved, while villagers insist they saw twice that number; police say their patrolling party swept along the edge of the villages, while residents say officers came inside their homes and looted everything from cash and jewellery to chickens. The facts should become clearer in the coming weeks, as the survivors, lawyers and human-rights groups are pressing for a high-level inquiry into the killing.

Two weeks after the encounter, Naxalites blocked the few roads that connect Dantewara with the outside world. Cutting down trees and stacking them on roads, and looting and burning cargo trucks that travel through the district, they left behind posters, banners and pamphlets naming Sharma as the man responsible and calling for his head.

Sitting back in his office, Sharma now takes calls from frantic truck-owners afraid to transport their goods through the area, asking for police protection. Overseeing an already overstretched and undermanned force, he declines. He reflects on a possible long-term solution to the problem of villagers embracing revolution. "My answer is television," he says. "Once they are exposed to an ideology of the mainstream, they will give up arms."

While modern technology and better links with the outside world might help to improve the lot of villagers in some ways, Sharma's belief that TV will help solve the problem might be a misguided one. For in big cities, suspected criminals being chased by police have developed a new technique. They try to make it into the nearest TV station in the hopes that the coverage will save them from being gunned down in the street. The hyper-competitive 24-hour news channels are happy to oblige – and already have on several occasions, leaving the audience to apportion blame.

If Deva and his villagers are to be believed, the authorities might be glad there was no such opportunity in Chhattisgarh.

Modern Maoists: the politics behind the bloodshed

AMONG 1960s revolutionaries Maoism came to be regarded as the ultimate political ideal.

In some quarters in the West, especially during the late 1960s, it became optimistically regarded as the ultimate political ideal.

The success of last year's rebellion in Nepal has drawn renewed attention to Maoism for the first time in decades. Then, a Maoist organisation – the Communist Party of Nepal – led an insurgency which was successful in toppling the Himalayan country's autocratic king.

As a result, Maoist groups are building support across South Asia. They are now influential in a number of Indian states, from Bihar to West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. In the Philippines, the New People's Army is leading an armed struggle and growing in strength.

The Communist Party of India (CPI) was founded on September 21, 2004, after the Communist Party of India People's War merged with the Maoist Communist Centre of India.

In addition to being referred to as Maoists, the CPI are often referred to as Naxalites, after the Naxalbari insurrection by radical Maoists in West Bengal in 1967.

The Maoists of today bear very little relation to the Communist Party of China. Indeed, they tend to believe that Mao Tse-Tung's ideas were betrayed by the Chinese leaders before they could be fully or properly implemented.

Most Maoists outside China see the Chinese government's reworking of Maoism as little more than an ideological justification for the capitalist road taken by the regime's post-Mao economic policies.

The CPI is regarded by some as a left-wing extremist entity and a terrorist outfit by the Indian government. Several of their members have been arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The group is officially banned by the state governments of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, among others. But the party has protested these bans, pointing out that its members are fighting against an oppressive and sometimes violent regime. Indeed, the Maoists are seen by some as freedom fighters – and as a result are building support across India.