When Brother Fights Brother

By Ajit Sahi

YOU WOULD bet on any screenshot of Singaram village to clinch a picture postcard contest. There is a surfeit of National Geographic moments here. As the sun warms up behind the thick forested hills, sinewy village acrobats glide up the toddy trees to tap their day’s white poison; someone hurries to the monthly cockfight 12km south, a throaty fat bird with an angry frown pinched tight in his underarms; the tireless granny shifts cots about and noisily sweeps her mud hut’s porch. Teenagers here guess their ages by when they broke their moustache or began menstruating. Older, they forget even that. Asked for a past event’s time, people wave at the sky to show where the sun had been that moment. As night falls, a hushed darkness cloaks the village, which has never known electricity. Embers of firewood glowing in faraway huts round off the idyllic picture. For backpacking trekkers ever on the lookout for an off-the-beaten track, this should be it.

It isn’t. Singaram’s tragedy lies in the ruins of its school that no one has entered in years, in the abject terror of forest officials who turned their backs on its development a decade ago, in the roads destroyed by the raging Maoist insurgents, the Naxals, to stop the “others” from coming in ever. It seems utterly unbelievable on a visit, but the singular truth about Singaram and hundreds of such villages across thousands of square kilometres in south Chhattisgarh is the overwhelming and brutal violence that rules them, matching some of the worst militia-ravaged parts of the world such as in Colombia, Sudan and Iraq.

If anything, this is CNN country twentyfour seven, not that India’s news organisations are much interested in the rural violence here. Locals say heavily armed Naxal women and men boldly roam the region in battle fatigue and freely swoop on villages for nightly rests and daytime meals, but especially for their signature monthly meetings. They levy taxes on trades such as on the tendu plant leaves used for rolling bidis. They also kill “traitors” — anyone they think is a police informer or an ideological opponent, or the worst: a double agent — often by beating them for hours and slashing their throats in full view not just of hundreds of villagers but even the dying woman’s or man’s spouse, children and parents.

THE NAXALS control 40 percent of Dantewada, basically its remote areas,” says Rahul Sharma, Superintendent of Police (SP) of this district in south Chhattisgarh. “The government controls a similar size. Both are fighting on the rest 20 percent.” Human rights activist Himanshu Kumar, who runs the NGO Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in Dantewada’s villages, laughs at Sharma’s figures. “The Naxals control everything except the few towns in this region,” says Kumar, whose organisation helps those it believes are innocent victims of police brutalities or are falsely accused as Naxals. To be precise, says Kumar, the Naxals control three-quarters of the 1,350 villages in Dantewada and the adjacent Bijapur district, which was carved out of the larger Dantewada in August 2008.

Read more

Comments are closed.