By Rajaraman Sunderasan for Twocircles.net,
Between the theaters of war, the tribal population of the Bastar district of Chhattisgarh is under severe repression of the state forces. With the advent of Modi regime, the situations in these areas have become worse. At one level, the national media flaunts on Modi’s foreign trips where he signs MoUs with corporations and on another level, situation in Bastar has reached appalling heights with the breakdown of freedom of press and horrific human rights violations including the arrests of journalists and human rights activists on the basis of draconian acts such as Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act.
A month ago, Amnesty international released a report on throttling of freedom of expression in the state of Chhattisgarh. As one reads through the report, one realizes the fate of democracy under these repressive state forces who are reflecting nothing but, corporate interests. One of the journalists, I felt captured the situation in Bastar brilliantly when he said “If you are an honest Journalist in Bastar, you have a high chance of landing in jail”. Chhattisgarh jails are overcrowded with young men and women who have repeatedly tried to oppose the state forces. Silencing the freedom of press and criminalizing people has become a routine move of most of the political parties today who are trying to further the developmental agenda into tribal areas.
The recurrence of Salwa Judum, with a new face in the name of vigilante groups has become one of the main sources of criminal activities. The only thing that seems to have changed after the Supreme Courts ban on State sponsored militant group is probably the nature of evil. According to many fact finding teams, these vigilante groups, namely the Samajik Ekta Manch and Mahila Ekta Manch have been backed by BJP and top officials from the police department. At one level, what seems to be a counter-insurgency move by the state for eliminating Naxalites is clearly turning out to be a bed of horror and gross human rights violation, where the innocent tribal people are being inflicted with violence of a different order.
Although, the national commission for schedule tribes have confirmed the allegations on the special security forces, the special investigative team setup by the district police have not been able to move a single coin since the last four months. In fact, it is interesting to note that the report reduces the act of rape and violations to a mere serious breakdown of discipline amongst the security forces including the police and paramilitary. I think, there is a need to go beyond the conventional schooled ideas of discipline to morality and ethics in terms of our civilizational subconscious. An act of rape, which encounters actions like thrusting chilies upon the rectum as reported by the villagers, reflects a broader fundamental malaise in the society. In fact, one feels, one needs a new set of vocabularies to understand this nature of violence. A framework of law which is caught up between evidence and procedures lacks the grammar to understand this nature of violence.
The consumption of violence has become a state of normalcy in the way how we define societies at large today whether it is, issues related to development or communalism. In a way, this everydayness of violence has made violence look natural, as if it is a part, of the process. The acceptance of this very state of normalcy reflects indifference and raises fundamental questions in terms of how we understand justice in terms of our civilizational subconscious. I think the recent story of Hurre, a tribal women’s tragic death from the Badegudra village captures this notion of injustice. Hurre, who was at the last stage of her pregnancy went in search of her husband to the local police station, who was shot by the police mistaking him to be a Maoist. Hurre, was brutally mishandled when a policeman hit her with the butt of the rifle on her stomach. Hurre, with immense pain, and no option left had to return back to her village, where she gave birth to an underweight baby. The day after, hearing that her husband was in jail, she would go every day in the morning and wait outside the jail premises with the baby on her lap with an expectation to see her husband. Fortunately, with the help of activists like Soni Sori and Bela Bhatia, she could finally meet her husband in the jail. But it was too late by then, the struggle to meet her husband and the delivery had already worsened her health conditions. Hurre, unfortunately passed away on May 15 not only due to lack of medical facilities but more fundamentally due to the lack of human conscience in the administration and security forces.
In one of the recent meetings held at Bangalore, Puneet Minz, a tribal activist from Jharkhand put it brilliantly when he said “Violence as you think is not external, it has become an everyday ritual of some sought which the state reproduces on us through multiple ways in order to eliminate us completely”. This very fundamental lack of understanding of how the concept of nation-state reproduces violence needs to be analyzed and questioned before democracy as a way of life secedes from our everyday imagination.
(The author is a student at Jindal School of Government and is also the co-founder of a socially inclined youth group, Rhythm of Nation.)