Exposing Death Squad Murders in Chhattisgarh

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.”

Revolutionary Land Reform: Essence and Aim

This article was originally published in the Red Star and has been made available on Banned Thought.

Revolutionary Land Reform : Essence and Aim

Krishna Das Shrestha

The economic problems that are being faced by the feudal and semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries in the world, is basically an agrarian problem. Nepal belongs to the same category of these countries and the main economic problem that Nepal has to solve in the present situation is the land-problem. The solution of this problem is the most democratic task, which is a very difficult and painstaking task as well.

The Nepalese Revolution is now passing through the democratic stage and we call it the stage of bourgeois democratic revolution. Accomplishment of this democratic revolution is essentially and basically anti-feudal revolution. The main economic foundation of feudalism is feudal land system, and unless this foundation is destroyed, feudalism will not and cannot be demolished at all. This indicates the necessity of revolutionary transformation of the existing land-relations and what we call revolutionary land reform signifies mainly this very transformation. As a matter of fact, the establishment of peasants’ land ownership by abolishing feudal land ownership is the soul and main essence of democratic revolution. To do this is to accomplish agrarian revolution, and it is the way to solve the existing land problem democratically in the interests of the peasant masses. To set up peasants’ ownership over the land is the main essence of the theory of ‘land to the tillers’.