Conflict, War & Displacement

Conflict, War & Displacement Accounts of Chhattisgarh & Batticaloa Subash Mohapatra Chathuri Jayasooriya 2007 October 2007 Published by: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group GC-45, Sector - III, First Floor Salt Lake City Kolkata - 700 106 India Web: http://www.mcrg.ac.in Printed by: Timir Printing Works Pvt. Ltd. 43, Beniapukur Lane Kolkata - 700 014 This publication is a part of the CRG research programme on internal displacement. The support of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement is kindly acknowledged. 2 Contents Conflict-Induced Displacement in Chhattisgarh Subash Mohapatra 4 The ‘Right to Return’ Chathuri Jayasooriya 36 3 Conflict-Induced Displacement in Chhattisgarh Analysis and Situation Report on The Displacement Camps in Dantewada ∗ Subash Mohapatra In the summer he was called to a meeting by Salwa Judum and told he would be beaten if he did not give up the names of Maoists in his village, he was not very interested in Maoism…he gave up the names. Two days later he was summoned to a meeting with the Maoists where he was beaten. In the Autumn Salwa Judum returned with police and told the villagers to leave or they would be violently forced to leave. Salwa Judum burnt the village. Now all the villagers from Kotrapal live in a relief camp. 1- Account of Baman member of Kotrapal Village 1.0 Background In response to an increasing number of people flowing into and residing in displacement camps in Chhattisgarh state, the Forum for Fact-finding Documentation and Advocacy sent two fact- finding teams to Dantewada to assess the current situation and conditions of the camps. Their findings, reported here, represent a realistic although politically obfuscated view regarding life in the camps and those who are caught in the crossfire of a complex and too often neglected conflict in Eastern Central India. According to a 2006 report of the Dantewada Police station, 76% (126) of all conflict related deaths in the district were innocent civilians. In addition, 62% of all reported injuries were also civilians (site report). Civilian deaths of this magnitude raise serious questions about the justification and methods of warfare by all parties regarding the conflict but also explain the movement of large portions of the civilian population. As of January 2007, over half of the 1354 villages in Dantewada district are now empty. A total of 57,528 villagers have been compelled to leave their homes and are living as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) within 23 relief camps throughout the southern tip of Chhattisgarh. An additional 45,000 to 60,000 villagers have abandoned their villages and migrated to nearby states. These displaced people are ordinary villagers who have been coerced both by fear of Naxalites and by the violent force of the government’s ‘Salwa Judum’ activists. In many cases, their homes were burned and their villages destroyed and subsequently pillaged. Often they left in a panic leaving behind their livestock, food stores and devastatingly their elderly family members. As one year comes to a dead end, and their fields lay fallow for yet another season a haunting question looms in the air, what does the future hold for these people? Will they ever be able to return to their livelihoods without losing their lives? ∗ Thanks are due to The Forum for Fact-finding Documentation and Advocacy, Raipur 1 In “Villages Across India, Maoist Guerrillas widen ‘peoples war’” by Somini Sengupta, The New York Times , April 13, 2006 2.0 Cause of Displacement To precisely demonstrate the cause of displacement in Chhattisgarh would require a discourse of extraordinary length. Additionally this effort would be hindered by a lack of access to accurate information from all parties involved. Instead, by way of introduction, this discussion will briefly touch on the motives and characteristics of the players involved in the conflict in an attempt to somewhat explain the complex predicament of the displaced. 2.1 Chhattisgarh State Chhattisgarh, the tenth largest state by area, was created out of the fifteen southern districts of Madhya Pradesh on the 1 st of November 2000. Prior to statehood, the area had developed a distinct socio-cultural regional identity based on the large and culturally robust population of tribes therein. This was accompanied by a sense of relative deprivation that had developed in the region. The new state of Chhattisgarh promised to bring back adequate attention and prosperity to a culturally wealthy but developmentally poor people. The new government had to negotiate with some existing problems that the state suffered and continues to suffer i.e., Naxalism. ‘Naxalism’ also known as Maoism and aptly named after a 1967 peasant uprising in Naxalbari village in West Bengal, has spread like a creeping vine through the rural, marginalized and tribal populations of east and central India for the past 40 years. The Naxalite ideology has easily found fertile soil in the underserved, vulnerable and often exploited Adivasi (tribal) people of the area. This has resulted in a widening swath of communist sentiment known as the “red corridor” running down the eastern edge of India encompassing at least 170 districts in 15 states and more than a quarter of India’s land mass. In a 2006 speech, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, described Naxalites as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country”. Yet the Government has publicly recognized its own fault in the conflict by not providing adequate development to the rural poor. Although a low-intensity conflict has been brewing for nearly four decades, recent years have seen a marked increase in the number of deaths and the intensity of the conflict particularly in the state of Chhattisgarh. According to estimates by the Asian Center for Human rights during the months of January to March 2007, 144 people have been killed in the conflict. Of those killed, 101 people or 70% of deaths occurred in Chhattisgarh, particularly in the southern most district, Dantewada 2. Under India’s constitution security is matter for the state rather than the central government as a result policies regarding the Naxalite problem are as diverse as the states that are affected by it. All too often policies have been inconsistent, haphazard and often ineffective and nowhere has this become more obvious than in the state of Chhattisgarh. Although the state suffers from a southern region that is considered “highly affected” by Naxalism, their neighbors to the southeast, Andhra Pradesh have a much larger geographical area that is considered “highly affected”. Yet Andhra Pradesh has experienced less than a quarter of the number of deaths as 2 Naxal Conflict Monitor: Evaluate anti-Naxal policies of Chhattisgarh government, A quarterly newsletter of the Asia Center for Human Rights, April 11, 2007, available at http://www.achrweb.org/ncm/NCM- VOL-02-01.pdf 5 Chhattisgarh. 3 Clearly there is some factor that exists in Chhattisgarh’s policies regarding Naxalism that is exacerbating the situation. 2.2 Adivasi: Caught in The Crossfire The Adivasis are tribal people primarily belonging to the Maria, Muria, Dhurwa, Halba, Bhatra and Gond tribe who represent nearly 80% of the total population of Dantewada district, the southern most district in Chhattisgarh. The Adivasis have lived peacefully in the ‘forests’ for thousands of years. They subsist primarily on agriculture and the collection of non-timber forest products including tendu leaves, Mahua flowers and char seeds. The simplicity of the Adivasi lifestyle and the abundance of their forest resources have been responsible for exploitation at the hands of the people to whom they appear vulnerable. As such they have been subject to a long history of marginalization and have repeatedly been the victims of unfulfilled political promises. The framers of the Indian Constitution recognized this vulnerability and created a special schedule (schedule V) to promote and protect their rights. The entire Dantewada district is under Schedule V of the Indian Constitution, which empowers and indeed binds the government to ensure good governance and enact special laws or amend existing ones in order to safeguard the interests of the Adivasis. Despite efforts to advance the cause of the Adivasi, the harsh reality is that laws protecting their livelihoods are rarely enforced. Indeed, the government has enacted discriminatory forest, mining, water and energy policies, which greatly limit their access to the resources that sustain their traditional way of life. The Adivasis are exploitated by corrupt officials. The government has miserably failed in providing as basic a facility as electricity. Even before the current eruption of violence the state government appallingly neglected the Adivasis. According to a 2001 census, about three quarters of Dantewada’s 1,220 villages are almost wholly tribal, 1,161 had no medical facilities, 214 had no primary school, and the literacy rate was 29% for men and 14% for women. Notwithstanding the negative consequences of neglecting all of these basic services, the government should be particularly wary of the consequences of inadequate education, which is known to leave people vulnerable to any number of radical ideologies that hint at promoting their social welfare. 2.3 Naxalites: Power Flows from The Barrel of a Gun As a communist movement, the overall aim of Naxalism is to create a classless, stateless society that negates the ownership of private property and is based on common ownership of the means of production. The primary difference between the Naxalites, whose political wing is known as The Communist Party of India-Maoist and others of the over seventy communist parties in India, is their uncompromising desire for revolution rather than government reform and their allegiance to violence and armed struggle as the sole means to achieve their ends. As they see it, the primary path to revolution is through Guerrilla warfare as laid out by Mao in his seminal work “On Guerrilla Warfare”.

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