Date: 14 August 2010 Subject: When family is the frontline -Javed Iqbal
When family is the frontline | Maoists | | Indian Express<http://expressbuzz.com/magazine/when-family-is-the-frontline/196986.html> Javed Iqbal <http://expressbuzz.com/searchresult/javed-iqbal> First Published : 14 Aug 2010 09:18:00 AM IST In Bastar, the war against the Maoists has had a devastating impact on families. It’s been brutal, uncompromising, unforgiving, and the battles aren’t just fought in the jungles — this a war where villages are battlefields and homes are the trenches. Your family is a weapon and a target. Both sides play this game and the victims are hapless innocents.Kosa Mangli was a Special Police Officer from the village of Hirapur in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh. The Maoists axed her father Mangoo to death soon after she became an SPO during the first few months of the Salwa Judum. They threw his body a kilometre from the police station where she was posted. A year later, they killed her mother Lakhi. Kosa is no longer a SPO. She was taken into the regular police.Such incidents are not isolated events, nor are the families of combatants a target only for the Maoists.Padmakka w/o Balakrishna, resident of Ramnagar, Hyderabad was arrested in August 2007 in Bijapur, and booked under section 302, 149 of the IPC, and 27 (1) of the Arms Act. No evidence was produced against her and she was acquitted of all charges on August 10, 2009, and the Bilaspur High Court ordered her release from the Central Jail, Raipur.She then disappeared from custody.Her lawyer waited for the whole of August 11 and the jail authorities claimed she was released on August 12, 2009. He would file a Habeas Corpus petition against the state of Chhattisgarh, fearing for her life, and demanding she be produced.In reality, two days after she was acquitted of all charges, she was re-arrested from the Central Jail and booked under Sections 147, 148, 307 of the IPC, and section 25 and 27 of the Arms Act, and remanded to judicial custody.Whom the law does not seePadma w/o Balakrishna was now identified as Padma w/o Rajana, a resident of Bhopalpatnam, Bijapur. She was shot dead in an encounter on October 15, 2006, in the Ballampalli forest. This Padma was a Mangi squad commander and a known Maoist. A warrant for her arrest was issued on October 4, 2001, by Chief Judicial Magistrate AS Chandel. It was executed by ASI Ravindra Yadav on August 12, 2009, when he arrested the recently-acquitted Padma w/o Balakrishna.On August 20, Padma went on a hunger strike in prison, to demand her rights to inform her advocate and her family of her situation. She also demanded to write a letter to the magistrate who remanded her. She was granted those rights, but continued to languish in prison until early this year in a case against a long-dead Padma.On March 10, she was to be produced in court, but ‘the authorities said there was no escort’, according to lawyer VV Balakrishna, who was carrying evidence of the death of Padma w/o Rajana — the testimony of her son and husband, their photos in Telugu dailies speaking about their Maoist-mother. But the truth cut no ice, two more Padma ‘cases’ were now attached to Padma w/o Balakrishna.Why all this? Was this just a simple case of mistaken identity? No — her husband Balakrishna, aka Bhasker Rao, is a known Maoist and member of the Andhra-Orissa Border Committee.The treatment meted out to family members of known Maoists has a long history in the Red Corridor, especially Andhra Pradesh. Padma is just another instance of the abuse of a legal system that neither protects one’s rights nor establishes the rule of law. Indeed, instances such as these give the Maoists arguments to challenge the legitimacy of the state.And you don’t need the mainstream media to tell a Maoist-husband how his wife is kept in jail. They know all about it, and use every instance of state terror, frequently and vocally, to justify counter-violence.Senior Maoist leader Ramanna, one of the masterminds of the Tadmetla encounter (on April 6, when 76 CRPF jawans were killed), in a telephone interview with Tehelka magazine had stated, ‘‘The security forces are now torturing and raping innocent tribal women and girls.’’ (He was referring to the recent allegations of rape by security personnel in the villages around Chintalnar.)Sacrificial pawns‘‘I know most of (the jawans) are from poor families. Some of them are also tribals. But that is no excuse for atrocities they are inflicting. We will conduct a similar ambush like the one we did at Chintalnar and Chintagufa and teach them a lesson.’’And to avenge rapes allegedly committed in Dantewada district, 26 died in Narayanpur district on June 29, the very day Ramanna had issued his statement. This brutality and intensity of blind terror shows no sign of subsiding.‘‘I may have never seen combat, but this, this is as bad as it could get.’ said head constable RN Bhairagi of Maharani Hospital in Jagdalpur, ‘It just keeps getting worse.’’Over the last few months, every other day wounded, dismembered and dying jawans from Narayanpur, Dantewada and Bijapur districts would arrive at his hospital; the closest to the theatre of war. And it wasn’t just one or two wounded men, who stepped on landmines, or had their faces and limbs blown off whose last moments he has witnessed. It's been 76 killed; 8 killed; 31 killed; 26 killed, and that’s just been since April.War against loved onesOf course, this brutality that shatters families, creates widows and leaves fathers and mothers without their sons, is an everyday part of life for the adivasis, especially since the fratricidal Salwa Judum-Maoist terror campaign tore friends and families apart.‘‘Woh, mera bhai lagta hai,’ (He’s like a brother to me), said M, from a village in the ‘liberated-zones’’, about one of the leaders of the Salwa Judum in Konta — Soyam Mukha. ‘‘How?’’‘‘We studied together.’’‘‘Do the dadas (the Maoists) know about this relationship?’’‘‘If they did, I’d never be able to live at home.’’Today, apart from the dreaded ‘encounters’, the adivasis are frequently subjected to beatings, interrogation and as they are released on the spot itself, it is seldom reported. During combing operations, forces often interrogate villagers (out of procedure), beat, threaten, and force them to act as guides through the jungle (out of need).To state the obvious that is not obvious anymore: nobody appears to notice that these aren’t criminals the state is at war with, these are families. These are people face to face with a brutal police force with their mothers and grandmothers, daughters and infant sons.These are farmers who till their land, parents who work to feed their children. Maoists themselves often comprise of husband and wife squad members, often eventually widowed, to be then driven by more blind vengeance. Many who’ve gone underground even leave behind families, who are constantly under surveillance and aware that every phone call and meeting place could mean a death-trap.“She made her choice, as a Gandhian I may disagree with her views, but I have to accept her,” says K, husband of a Maoist, whom he hasn’t even seen in more than a year.Adivasis, of course are all suspected Maoists, by a simple twist of fate, an accident of geography — you just happen to be living for centuries on the highest-value iron ore, and the Maoists come and visit you once in a while, and refer to your village as a ‘liberated zone’.‘‘The forces need to go comb further in the jungles,’’ Said, Ajay Singh, a Salwa Judum leader from Bairamgarh in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh in March of 2009.He was complaining that the government had abandoned the Salwa Judum and the police didn’t conduct their operations properly. But someone took his advice, and there were combing operations in September and October, 2009, further in the interior villages or the ‘liberated zones’ of Gompad, Nukaltong, Velpocha, Gacchanpalli, Pallecharma, Gattpad, Tatemargu, Pallodi. This was when numerous reports of innocent civilians being killed surfaced in the media.Justice turned upside downFor instance, as reported by the New Indian Express in November 2009, 18-month-old Kattam Suresh of Gompad lost three of his fingers, his 20-year-old mother, his eight-year-old aunt, and both his maternal grandparents when the forces raided their village in the first week of October 2009. He was last seen detained in Konta police station along with his father on January 14 this year.‘‘The DGP is not listening....The point is when you are given an assignment the first thing you need to do is become a part of the solution. The illegal killings have contributed to the problem. So if you are party to it then you become a part of the problem,’’ CRPF Special Director General Vijay Raman said recently.He didn’t mention where these ‘illegal killings’ took place. But do families permit a ‘legal’ killing of their loved ones?Yet what should be the last option (an escalation of fratricidal violence), has become the first option for the government. - -- Adv Kamayani Bali Mahabal +919820749204 skype-lawyercumactivist "After a war, the silencing of arms is not enough. Peace means respecting all rights. You can’t respect one of them and violate the others. When a society doesn’t respect the rights of its citizens, it undermines peace and leads it back to war.” -- Maria Julia Hernandez www.otherindia.org www.binayaksen.net www.phm-india.org www.phmovement.org www.ifhhro.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "humanrights movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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