News reports of the anti-Naxal operations in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh last week raise serious questions of human rights of poor tribal people which are seldom kept in view whether we speak of fighting insurgents or ordinary developmental activities in the tribal belt of central India. It seems fairly clear that last Thursday’s anti-Maoist offensive, mounted jointly by the state police and the CRPF, went horribly wrong. Twenty innocent men, women and children of the Kotteguda panchayat area, who were at a meeting to discuss sowing operations, were shot dead.
This bespeaks a truly disturbing failure of intelligence in which armed wings of state forces move against presumably armed elements of society on the basis of motivated or faulty intelligence which may be nothing more than shoddy guess-work. The social and political costs of a botched operation of this nature are enormous. It is the defenceless poor who die. If the past is anything to go by, nothing much will happen after the initial sympathetic noises die out, testifying to the notional democracy we are in danger of becoming. No less troubling is the consideration that the credibility of the state suffers a setback in such situations and gives the Maoists political and psychological advantage in the invisible war that has raged across central India for some years, and is sharpening with issues of exploitation of mineral rights in the lands of our tribal people coming to the fore.
In the present instance it should also be borne in mind that the information in the public domain is intriguing and raises pertinent questions whose answers will depend on our understanding of the behaviour of the police and the paramilitary forces toward innocent villagers and the Maoists whose credo is inseparable from anti-state violence. While innocent people have been killed — 19 on the spot and one in hospital later — it is understood that six men of the government forces also sustained bullet injuries. The magisterial inquiry that has been ordered can be hamstrung from the start. When the news first broke of a “successful” anti-Naxal operation in which it was claimed 20 hardened terrorists had been killed, Union home minister P. Chidambaram lauded the achievement of the forces. Now he has to bear the humiliation of the Chhattisgarh state unit of the Congress Party publicly rebutting him. In the circumstances, it may be appropriate if a retired high court judge, preferably from outside the state, conducts the inquiry. And this must be done because a democratic state cannot be at war against its own tribal people, but only against armed Maoist insurgents who claim to take up their cause.