Indian State's Anti-Maoist Crackdown
Chhattisgarh Accused of Extrajudicial Killings and Aiding Resource Plunder
Five major left parties wrote a joint letter Monday 9 June to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding his immediate intervention to stop the ongoing extrajudicial killings in central India, taking place under the pretext of fighting the Maoist insurgency. They also demanded the restoration of the rule of law in the region and an end to natural resource looting.
The central Indian state of Chhattisgarh and the broader area, where the majority of such killings are taking place, have large forested areas and are rich in minerals. The region is also home to a large part of India’s indigenous population. For decades now, the area has served as the base for the armed resistance movement against the Indian state, led by CPI (Maoist).
The left parties, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), and Forward Block, in their letter demanded that the central government initiate talks with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and find a political solution to the conflict instead of carrying on with the “inhuman policy of killings and annihilation.”
Accusing the armed forces of misusing their powers and acting outside the law in the name of fighting insurgents, the left parties also demanded that all alleged Maoist leaders in custody be brought before a court and tried according to the rule of law.
Rights of Indigenous peoples
The statement also urged the prime minister to stop the militarization of the region and respect the rights enshrined in the Fifth Schedule of the Indian constitution for the Adivasis (Indigenous peoples of India).
The statement alleges that the rights of the Adivasis “are being systematically violated and forests and minerals of Chhattisgarh are being subjected to indiscriminate corporate exploitation with disastrous implications for environmental stability and livelihood of the local people.”
Various other organizations and individuals have issued similar statements demanding the immediate cessation of all hostilities against the Indigenous peoples of the region, along with its demilitarization.
Activists have also demanded accountability for officials implicated in systemic violations of internationally recognized and constitutionally guaranteed human rights, carried out under the pretext of combating insurgency. Some even called for the invocation of war crimes proceedings against the responsible officials.
Operation Kagar
Though the Indian state’s war against the insurgents in the region is as old as the Maoist resistance movement, the current state government in Chhattisgarh and the central government of India—both led by the ultra-right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—launched an unprecedented joint military operation last year. They claim to be ridding the country of such violence forever.
Reports suggest that apart from thousands of local police personnel, more than 20,000 paramilitary personnel have also been deployed in the southern districts of the state—which has a total population of just 30 million—to “neutralize” a few hundred Maoists.
The armed forces have been given operational freedom and are reportedly supplied with Heron drones, manufactured in Israel, for surveillance of the densely forested areas and to launch targeted attacks against the Maoists, also known as Naxals.
Indian Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah has repeatedly praised the armed forces for killing Naxals and proclaimed that the operation, known as Operation Kagar in Hindi, will make sure that by the end of March of next year India is “Naxal-free.”
Even Modi has praised the security forces for carrying out the killings, claiming they will lead to peace and development in the region.
Various estimates put the number of people killed since the beginning of Operation Kagar above 400. The government claimed 31 Naxals were killed in one special operation alone, between 21 April and 14 May.
However, many of these killings have occurred under suspicious circumstances, with activists claiming that innocent people are being murdered in the name of Maoists.
The Indian state has also been accused of suppressing peaceful dissent by arresting leaders of the movements for land rights and environmental protection in the region and declaring the peaceful groups such as Moolvasi Bachao Manch (Save the Indigenous Peoples Movement) as illegal.
Indian state’s war against its own people
The Narendra Modi-led government has not only ignored the repeated offers for negotiation and unilateral ceasefire made by the CPI (Maoist), but has also been accused, by the activists and left parties, of using the anti-Naxal operation to target and silence the peaceful opposition to colonial projects and the loot of local resources in the region.
Activists have claimed the state has offered millions of rupees in bounty for every “Naxal” killed, with no regard for protecting the innocents. This has resulted in large numbers of alleged fake encounters and extrajudicial killings of people arbitrarily labeled Maoists. Apart from the allegations of killings in fake encounters, there have also been allegations of large scale arrests of innocents, torture in custody, and the destruction of villages in Chattisgarh and adjacent states by the security forces.
A statement jointly issued by various international human rights bodies last month claimed that the Indian state has been using large-scale violence against the Adivasis in the region to put down the stiff resistance of the people against increased attempts by the government to allow the exploitation of their natural resources by private companies.
These so-called development projects have caused the large-scale destruction of forests and the broader environment of the region, increased encroachment on Adivasi lands, and the forced displacement of people, activists claim.
Adani Power, an Indian multinational power and energy company, was allowed to cut down hundreds of acres of the Hasdeo forest in Chhattisgarh last year, despite mass protests. Several other such projects are facing popular opposition by environmental and Adivasi rights groups.
The rights groups and left parties assert that people in the region have a protected right to wage peaceful struggles under India’s various laws, such as the Forest Rights Act (FRA), the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, and Panchayat (Extension to the Scheduled Area) Act, 1996. These laws recognize the special rights of Indigenous peoples over local resources and make it mandatory to acquire their consent before those resources are used for any purpose.
Questioning the Indian government’s claim of Operation Kagar being an operation against armed insurgency, Meena Kandasamy, activist and poet wrote in Frontline last month that “the ‘naxal’ has become a convenient bogeyman, a spectator whose dimensions can be inflated or deflated according to the political needs of the moment, enabling endless war against Adivasi bodies while corporate excavators tear into their lands.”
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