Maoist massacre in Chhattisgarh is a bitter lesson

The Congress which dominates the UPA coalition at the Centre, the rootless human rights group peopled by the likes of Binayak Sen and Arundhati Roy, and the Supreme Court which decided that the Salwa Judum campaign against the Maoist menace in Chhattisgarh was illegal, are collectively responsible for May 25 ambush in Bastar district, which claimed 27 lives.  Former Union Minister VC Shukla is still battling for his life in a Gurgaon hospital; another 30 persons were injured during the ambush.
Senior Congress leader Mahendra Karma, a tribal who founded the Salwa Judum and was possibly the principal target of the attack, was among those killed when a convoy of party leaders was ambushed in the thick forests of Sukma. Several local Congress leaders were killed; the State unit chief and his son were abducted and found dead later.  Maoists are well entrenched in the Bastar jungles. In January 2013, Indian Air Force personnel trying to evacuate an injured Chhattisgarh police constable had to abandon him when Maoists hit and damaged their Mi-17 helicopter, forcing it to land in the south Bastar jungles.
In April 2010, Maoists trapped and killed 76 members of a CRPF team in two separate ambushes in the Dantewada jungles. Four days before this, Maoists killed 10 policemen in a landmine attack in Odisha; in March 2007, they killed 55 security personnel in that State. In October 2010, they sabotaged the Gyaneshwari Express near west Midnapore district, West Bengal, claiming 150 lives.
Despite the Maoist depredations, some senior Congress leaders ran a campaign against Salwa Judum, ably supported by the secular-socialist brigade. Maoism’s genesis as a private militia of an expansionist religion was fully exposed after the murder of Swami Laxmanananda in neighbouring Odisha.
But in September 2007, former Chief Minister Ajit Jogi spearheaded the attack on Salwa Judum and vowed to repeal the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act 2005 if voted to power. The National Commission for Women (NCW) also criticised Salwa Judum and the condition of women and girls in the State Government-run relief camps in Dantewada. Mahendra Karma had rebutted the NCW report as farce, adding, “Jogi should better visit Bastar to find out the existing reality instead of disapproving the Campaign.” Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh criticised then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s anti-Maoist strategy after the massacre of CRPF jawans, saying Maoists were only “misguided ideologues who have lost faith in the system and feel that the only way to deliver is through the barrel of a gun.”
But the Supreme Court of India, in its July 5, 2011 Judgement in Nandini Sundar & Ors vs State Of Chhattisgarh (writ petition civil no 250 of 2007) called the movement “a regime of gross violation of human rights in a manner, and by adopting the same modes, as done by Maoist/Naxalite extremists”. The Bench rebuked the Chhattisgarh Government for claiming, “the powers to arm, with guns, thousands of mostly illiterate or barely literate young men of the tribal tracts, who are appointed as temporary police officers, with little or no training, and even lesser clarity about the chain of command to control the activities of such a force, to fight the battle against alleged Maoist extremists”.
In its submission before the Court, the State Government pointed out that between 2004 and 2010, the State witnessed 2298 attacks by Naxalites, in which 538 police and para military personnel were killed; besides 169 Special Officers, 32 Government employees (not police) and 1064 villagers. But the Apex Court disapproved of the recruitment of poorly educated tribal youth as Special Police Officers to assist the anti-Maoist operations (for which the Union Government provided 80 per cent financing). It ordered an immediate end to the use of SPOs in any manner or form for controlling, countering, mitigating or otherwise eliminating Maoist activities in the State. The Union of India was also directed to cease funding recruitment of SPOs for any form of counter-insurgency activities against Maoist groups.
The Court also ordered the State Government to recall all firearms issued to former and current SPOs (guns, rifles, launchers). It ordered the State Government to make arrangements to provide appropriate security, and undertake measures needed to protect the lives of those previously employed as SPOs, as they could be targetted by Maoists. At the same time, all alleged criminal activities by Salwa Judum activists were to be investigated and FIRs filed.
Considering specific complaints made by Swami Agnivesh, the Supreme Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the alleged violence against Swami Agnivesh and his companions in March 2011 in the villages of Morpalli, Tadmetla and Timmapuram in Dantewada district.
This was possibly one of the dullest Judgements ever written by the Supreme Court. There were homilies on the national developmental model of grabbing the land of tribal and poor villagers to exploit natural resources therein, which is unexceptionable in itself. But nowhere did the Court make a direct co-relation between specific mines (say, coal) and displaced and dispossessed tribal confronting and resisting the State (as villagers did in Singur and Nandigram, West Bengal). Indeed, earlier this month, the Supreme Court permitted the South Korean giant Posco to mine iron ore in Odisha’s Sundergarh district despite virulent opposition from villagers whose crops were uprooted by the State Government and land forcibly possessed.
Neither the petitioners nor the Court offered any reasons why violent Maoists were operating in the region, or took cognisance of the fact that the local tribal resented them and wanted to get rid of them. Mahendra Karma’s murder is an occasion for the nation as a whole to introspect.

Source : Niti Central