{"id":73221,"date":"2009-04-04T20:00:09","date_gmt":"2009-04-04T14:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=73221"},"modified":"2009-04-04T20:00:09","modified_gmt":"2009-04-04T14:30:09","slug":"bloodsport-in-the-jungles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/bloodsport-in-the-jungles\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloodsport in the jungles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nowhere
Nowhere to go?<\/strong> Naxals leave after meeting TEHELKA. They insist their voilence will herald the Revolution
Photo:<\/strong> Shailendra Pandey<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nTHEY SCREAMED and waved their guns as they set the granary on fire,\u201d says Sanni, a tribal woman in south Chhattisgarh, standing by the burnt-out heap that was her harvest until two nights ago. \u201cMy son ran away and isn\u2019t back.\u201d He was lucky. The attackers took away two other villagers. No, says Sanni, the attackers weren\u2019t Naxals, the Maoist rebels who have waged an armed rebellion for three decades. \u201cThey were from Salwa Judum,\u201d she says.<\/span>
\nTen weeks after the police and members of the Salwa Judum, a controversial police-backed militia, killed 19 people early January in the forests of the neighboring Dantewada district, NGOs have reported a spurt in such attacks at places in south Chhattisgarh. Sanni\u2019s village is in Bijapur district, which was carved out of Dantewada last August. Her village is located 5km north of the Indravati, one of the three big rivers in the region. The two districts together have thickly forested plains and hills across an area in excess of 15,000 sq km. They are also the parts of India most heavily affected by the Naxals.<\/span>
\nThis is decidedly ghost country. As we cross the river where it is thigh-deep to enter what is referred to on both sides as the \u2018war zone\u2019, village upon village appears abandoned. \u201cFor fear of the Salwa Judum,\u201d explains one of our fixers. They are accompanying us to a meeting with a Naxal leader, Rengam, whose \u201cjurisdiction\u201d, as a leader of the underground Communist Party of India (Maoist), it is claimed, covers about 75 to 100 villages.<\/span>
\nThe Naxal superstructure is said to resemble a batch of concentric circles: the innermost being the most powerful leadership, located in the remotest forests, forever on the move. The \u2018zone\u2019, \u2018area\u2019 and \u2018range\u2019 commanders people the middle: the levels of the classic pyramid management structure. These are reportedly the backbone: the hands-on, day-to-day direct leaders of the cadres, leading assaults and tracking the goings-on in the villages on their watch. The outermost circles comprise the \u2018sympathisers\u2019, who do not wear uniforms, freely interface with the \u201coutside world\u201d on the basis of their identity of the average villagers, but are the \u201ceyes and ears\u201d, the runners for the \u201cbrothers\u201d inside. When police claim they have killed or arrested Naxals, it is believed they are mostly these outermost cadres. Of course, the Naxals claim that the police arrest or kill only the innocent people.<\/span>
\n[box]
\nNaxals Claim<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u2022<\/strong>\u00a0Chhattisgarh police forced the tribals to join the Salwa Judum militia and take up arms<\/span>
\n\u2022<\/strong>\u00a0Salwa Judum burnt crops and homes, raped and killed women, forcing people to move to camps<\/span>
\n\u2022<\/strong>\u00a0Those who want to go back to their villages are threatened<\/span>
\nGovernment Says<\/strong><\/span>
\n\u2022<\/strong>\u00a0Naxals burn villages and kill tribals but falsely accuse Salwa Judum of their crimes<\/span>
\n\u2022<\/strong>\u00a0Naxals oppose development, including schools and hospitals<\/span>
\n\u2022<\/strong>\u00a0The police have been tasked to finish off the Naxals<\/span>
\n[\/box]
\nAfter walking three hours with the \u201csympathisers\u201d, we were made to rest another two, and then handed over to a new group whose members, though not in uniform, wore shoes (the average tribal walks barefoot), carried a radio transistor, and held sharp, curved knives. Two of the five had guns under their arms. It was only at 6pm, 10 hours after we started walking, that we reached a village where a group of 20, led by Rengam, was waiting for us. As we later returned to our base station that night, walking back the 20km through the dark jungles, a fixer laughed, \u201cNeither the Naxals nor the Salwa Judum would believe that you outsiders were boldly walking here this late.\u201d<\/span>
\nTwo days later, a day after Holi, we got word that another set of Naxals was waiting to meet us elsewhere in the Dantewada district. As this was an outlying area with a far greater chance of the police, the paramilitary and the Salwa Judum turning up, a much stricter \u201csanitising\u201d procedure was employed before we could be face to face with Kunjam, another Naxal leader (See interview). Here, the mystery of the transistor was solved. As it was abruptly switched on and a Hindi film song pierced the stillness, the Naxal leader appeared in two minutes. It was a signal for him.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the Chhattisgarh police vow to crush the Naxals, Ajit Sahi meets the rebels in their lair and finds them angry and waiting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8626,8839,8840,1181,8841,8750,6204,8842],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}