
Singaram’s Karam Kanni denies her husband, killed on January 8, was a Naxal
This article originally appeared on Tehelka Current Affairs.
The Jungle Justice Of The Trigger Happy
The Indian armed forces and paramilitary death squads have long murdered revolutionaries in “fake encounters” — where brutal murders and rapes are officially treated as shootouts. And, as part of this, the pro-government forces have been engaged in a series of terror campaigns aimed at villagers in Maoist political strongholds. This is the classic counterinsurgency tactic of “dry up the sea to catch the fish).
In this case, “Salwa Judum” death squad kills 19 people claiming they were Maoist activists. The Maoist “Naxals” say the dead were villagers targeted as part of a government terror campaign. The author, Ajitsahi, walks 40km in the jungles of Chhattisgarh to hunt the truth. Photographs by VIJAY PANDEY
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MADKAM DEVA is a tribal, the sort characterised romantically in social science schoolbooks and museum artifacts illustrative of India’s remotest jungle peoples. There is nothing charming though about the chilling tale of a bloodbath he recalls staccato, walking barefoot as always in the sprawling southern forests of Chhattisgarh, waving at the deep red blood clots thickened on fallen leaves, still enough food in them for frenzied golden ants two weeks after human gore was spilled here. Deva’s blood would be here, too, had he not ducked the machinegun fire in a nanosecond, leapt behind the shrubbery like frightened deer, and bolted through the cascading landscape.
“They made us stand in a line and ordered us to bow our heads,” Deva says of those terrifying moments between life and death. “I was the last and that gave me just enough time to escape.”