Naxalism in Chhattisgarh

IN relation to the valuable articles regarding naxalite activities in Chhattisgarh and Salwa Judum (Cover Story, Frontline, September 21), I would like to say that a team from the National Commission for Women visited the district of Dantewada earlier this year and submitted a report to the Commission which is now public.

Four important points noted during that trip and recorded in the report are as follows:

1. It was noted that the tribal people who were living in the camps visited by the NCW team were totally dependent for doles or for employment on the administration. Most of them had no access to their own land because of the displacement and could not go back to the villages for fear of naxalite reprisal.

Therefore, if doles or employment provided by the administration were stopped for some reason, they were reduced to a state of destitution. Thus, independent cultivators were turning into paupers as a result of being herded together in the camps.

2. The report noted that while the Salwa Judum was supposed to be a spontaneous movement from the grassroots, there was no doubt that the so-called Salwa Judum camps were being fully supported by the administration. In the Salwa Judum meetings, it was compulsory to send one member from each family living in the camps. This suggested not a spontaneous peoples movement but an element of enforcement. It was also noted that the makeshift structures within the camps were in the process of being converted into permanent ones.

3. The report further noted that some of the so-called Special Police Officers, both boys and girls, recruited from among those residing in the camps, were very young. They were given arms after a brief period of training and then made a part of the anti-naxal force. The report noted that not only did this make them a soft target for naxalite reprisal but it disrupted their studies and deprived them of opportunities of learning any other vocation except war.

4. The NCW team visited Jagdalpur Jail and found a very large number of young women undertrials who had been imprisoned there for several months on the charge of having naxalite connections. They complained to us that some of them had been arrested not by the police but by Salwa Judum activists, and there were complaints of being beaten up and molested at the time of arrest. There was no system of legal aid and in spite of the fact that nothing had been proved against them so far, they were still being kept in jail simply on suspicion of such connections. It seemed to us that even if some of them had naxalite sympathies, release and rehabilitation would be a far better way of weaning them away from these than keeping them in prolonged confinement without trial.

Apart from everything else, there seemed to be cases of gross violation of human rights here.

We had sent this report to the Chhattisgarh government but have so far received no response. In the meantime, the trend described in the articles published in Frontline seems to corroborate the concerns expressed by us in the report. I thought we should publicise the contents of our report as much as possible to contribute to informed public opinion in this matter.