[Reader-list] Nandini Sundar on her experience in Dantewada

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*Police states, anthropology and human rights*


Nandini Sundar

[The author is Professor of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi
University.]

                                                                         3rd
January 2010


Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Professor of Political Science, Delhi University and I
have just returned  (January 1st) from a visit to the police state of
Chhattisgarh. Ujjwal had gone for research and I had gone for a combination
of research and verification purposes to assess the livelihood situation of
villagers for our case before the SC, both entirely legitimate activities.
In Dantewada, we had checked into Hotel Madhuban on the 29th of December
around 2 pm without any problems, only to be told later that night that the
management required the entire hotel to be instantly emptied out because
they were doing some puja to mark the death anniversary of the hotel owner.
We refused to leave at night, and were told we would have to leave at 6 am
instead because the rooms had to be cleaned. As expected, other guests
checked in the next morning, puja notwithstanding.


At Sukma, we were detained by the police and SPOs at the entrance to the
town from about 7.30 till 10 pm, with no explanation for why they had
stopped us, and no questions as to why we were there or what our plans were.
We were denied lodging – all the hotel owners had been told to claim they
were full and refuse us rooms, and the forest and PWD departments had been
advised not to make their guesthouses available, since ‘Naxalites’ were
coming to stay. Indeed, the police told us that these days Naxalites had
become so confident that they roamed around in jeeps on the highways. Since
everything was mysteriously full in a small town like Sukma, the police
advised us to leave that very night for Jagdalpur, some 100 km away. We
decided instead to spend the night in the jeep, since we did not want to
jeopardize friends by staying in their homes. Later, we contacted friends
and they arranged for us to stay in the college boys hostel, since students
were away on vacation.


At midnight on the 30th, 6-7 armed SPOs burst into our room at the college
hostel, guns cocked, and then spent the night patrolling the grounds.
Evidently, the SPOs have seen many films and know precisely how to achieve
dramatic effect. They were also trying to open our jeep, presumably to plant
something. The next morning we were followed by seven armed SPOs with AK 47s
from Sukma in an unmarked white car, and this was replaced at Tongpal by
twelve SPOs, in two jeeps. None of them had any name plates. Given that we
could have had no normal conversation with anyone, we decided to do all the
things one normally postpones.  In twenty years of visiting Bastar, for
example, I have never seen the Kutumbsar caves. Everywhere we went,
including the haat at Tongpal, the Tirathgarh waterfall  and the Kutumbsar
caves, as well as shops in Jagdalpur, the SPOs followed us, one pace behind,
with their guns poised at the ready. Two women SPOs had been deputed
specially for me.  The SPOs also intimidated our jeep drivers by taking
photos of them and the vehicle.


DGP Vishwaranjan claimed on the phone that it was for our ‘protection’ that
we were given this treatment since there was news of Naxalite troop
movement, and has gone on to say (Indian Express, 3rd Jan), “anything can
happen. Maoists can attack the activists to put the blame on the police. We
will deploy a few companies of security forces for the security of the
activists.”


Clearly all the other tourists in Tirathgarh and Kutumbsar were under no
threat from the Maoists – only we, who have been repeatedly accused of being
Naxalite supporters, were likely targets. As for the police ensuring that we
got no accommodation and trying to send us from Sukma to Jagdalpur in the
middle of the night, such pure concern for our welfare is touching.  The SP
of Dantewada, Amaresh Misra, was somewhat more honest when he said he had
instructions from above to ‘escort’ out ‘visiting dignitaries.’ The
Additional SP shouted at us to be more ‘constructive’ – not surprisingly,
though, with 12 swaggering SPOs snapping at one’s heels, one is not always
at one’s constructive best. The next time, I promise to try.


The SPOs in their jeeps followed us some way from Jagdalpur to Raipur, even
when we were on the bus. In addition, two armed constables and an SI were
sent on the bus to ensure we got to Raipur. We overheard the SI telling the
armed constables to “take us down at Dhamtari” but fortunately this plan was
abandoned. Poor man, he narrowly missed getting a medal for bravery, and as
the good DGP tells the readers of the Indian Express, it would have been
passed off as an attack by Naxalites. On reaching Raipur, the SI was
confused. Shouting loudly and forgetting himself, as bad cell connections
are wont to make us all do, he said “The IG and SP had told me to follow
them, but now what do I do with them.”? The voice on the other end told him
to go home. We flew out of Raipur the next morning. In real terms, this was
a rather pointless exercise for the CG govt, since we were scheduled to come
home the following day anyway, bound by the inexorable timetable of the
university and classes. But symbolically, it allowed the SPOs to gloat that
they had driven us out.


The CG government obviously wants to ensure that no news on their offensive
or even on the everyday trauma of villagers reaches outside. Many villages
have been depopulated in the south, both due to the immense fear created by
Op. Green Hunt and the failure of the monsoons this year. All the young
people are migrating to AP for coolie work. There are sporadic encounters –
the day we were in Dantewada (29.12.09), two ‘Naxalites’ were killed in the
jungles of Vechapal and three arrested. A week before seven people had been
killed in Gumiapal. Who is getting killed and how is anyone’s guess. The
Maoists are blockading roads with trees and trenches, and killing
‘informers’. There is compete terror, fear and hunger throughout the
district.


While the CG govt is busy providing us ‘protection’, it has refused to
restore the armed guard that was taken away from CPI leader Manish Kunjam.
He has had credible reports that his life is under threat, and he may face a
replay of the Niyogi murder, because of his opposition both to forcible and
fraudulent land acquisition by multinationals like Tata and Essar and to the
Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt. Manish Kunjam, whom I have known since
the early 1990s, is the single most important mass leader in the area who
has been independent of both the state and Maoists, and taken a stand on
various issues. Despite Raman Singh assuring the CPI leadership that this
would be done, the DGP has refused to act.


It is also remarkable that a government which can waste so many armed SPOs
for an entire day and night on two people who do nothing more dangerous than
teach and write, has been unable to catch the SPOs who are responsible for
raping six young women. Despite the trial court finding the SPOs and Salwa
Judum leaders prima facie guilty of rape and issuing a standing arrest
warrant on 30.10.2009, even two months later, they are ‘absconding’. Some of
them even give public speeches, but they are invisible to the police. In the
meantime, when Himanshu reported that the rape victims  were kept for 3-4
days in Dornapal thana and generally terrorized, the Chief Secretary’s
response was to accuse him of running an ‘ugly motivated campaign.’ All good
men these, good fathers, good husbands, good citizens. So was DGP Rathore
and all the honourable men who defended him, promoted him and awarded him
despite what he did to Ruchika. Unfortunately for these adivasi girls, they
are not middle class, so no media campaign for them.


Bastar can no more get rid of me than I can get rid of Bastar. In 1992,
because I attended meetings to observe the protests by the villagers of
Maolibhata against the steel plant that was proposed to be sited there, the
government denied me access to the local archives. But it was the government
which then fell, and my book on Bastar, *Subalterns and Sovereigns*, was
published by 1997. In 2004, four of us were stopped in a village while doing
a survey of the Lok Sabha polls by village level sympathizers of the
Maoists. They retained Ajay TG’s video camera, for which the brilliant CG
police later arrested him. In 2005, Salwa Judum activists stopped us as part
of the PUDR-PUCL factfinding on Salwa Judum; in 2006, as part of the
Indepdendent Citizens Initiative, Ramachandra Guha, Farah Naqvi and I were
stopped and searched in Bhairamgarh thana by out-of-control SPOs, and
Ramachandra Guha was nearly lynched inside the station, while the thanedar
was too drunk to read the letter we carried from the Chief Secretary. My
camera was taken away by a Salwa Judum leader, and returned only months
later. In 2007-8, the then SP, Rahul Sharma, fabricated photos of me with my
arms around armed Maoist women and showed them to visiting journalists and
others to try and discredit my independence. He later claimed, when
challenged, that the photos were of one “Ms. Jeet’ and it was he who had
verified the truth. In 2009, Ajay Dandekar (historian), JP Rao
(anthropologist) and I narrowly escaped a mob of around 300 Salwa Judum
leaders, police and SPOs, who, however, took away JP Rao’s mobile phones, a
camera charger and vehicle registration documents from the parked jeep. The
police refused to register our complaint and detained us for questioning for
a few hours, even though we had got the consent of the District Collector
and the Mirtur CRPF contingent to visit Vechhapal.

For anthropologists, our professional life is often difficult to separate
from our personal – our research depends on developing deep friendships with
the people we ‘study’. In the twenty years that I have been visiting Bastar
off and on, I have acquired a range of acquaintances, friends and people who
are like family members, whose concerns are my concerns. This does not in
any way diminish one’s commitment to independence and objectivity. As
Kathleen Gough said in 1968, when the American Anthropological Association
was debating whether to pass a resolution against the war in Vietnam,
‘genocide is not in the professional interests of anthropology.’