By Sujeet Kumar, IANS
Raipur : What do the Maoist guerrillas want to prove by gouging out the eyes of policemen deployed in the terror fields of Chhattisgarh?
Police squads were horrified Thursday as they searched in the thick jungles of Dantewada district for the bodies of 12 colleagues who went missing after an hour-long gun fight with militants at the Tadmetla hamlet, some 500 km south of here, a day earlier.
The squads found all the 12 bodies, including those of eight special police officers (SPOs), near the site of the battle. The eyes of three of the dead men had been gouged out and their faces smeared with mud.
Shoes and socks had been removed from all the bullet-riddled cops. The rebels had also removed the police uniforms from most of the bodies and taken away the self-loading rifles (SLRs) and an AK-47 from the deceased.
“This is the second time in two months that the Maoists have committed a most brutal act. In the July 9 encounter, when the rebels killed 24 cops – including 16 paramilitary forces – in the same district in mortar attacks, some of the bodies were found with their genitals chopped off and stripped off their shoes and socks,” a senior police officer who led the search team told IANS on phone.
“We do not want to publicise this brutality by Maoists as it will lower the morale of policemen and SPOs deployed in the Bastar region,” he added.
Is the Maoist movement, which many say is a fight for poor peasants and workers, justified in crossing all limits of brutality? People are beginning to ask the question.
Police in Dantewada say Wednesday’s killings were an act of revenge by the Maoists against Hemant Kumar, a station house officer (SHO) of Jagargunda police who in February shot dead some rebels and led the police teams to rebel hideouts.
The police department had acknowledged Kumar’s heroism and promoted him out of turn from sub-inspector to SHO. On Wednesday, he was leading a 40-member “road opening party” and was gunned down with 11 others.
A police officer posted at the police headquarters here said: “Where are the human right activists? Why don’t they raise their voice against such extreme brutality? Policemen are also human beings, and they are simply doing their duty.”
“When we kill the rebels in gunfights, a lot of intellectuals in the country start questioning us and say they may be fake encounters. This hurts the entire police force at a time when Chhattisgarh is witnessing cold blooded killings of civilians and security forces ever since the tribal militia movement Salwa Judum was launched in June 2005.”
The militia movement in Bastar, which has seen the government arming civilians against Maoists, has forced more than 50,000 people, mostly tribals, to flee their ancestral villages and settle down in makeshift relief camps for fear of reprisal by the rebels.