The Trophies Of Operation Green Hunt |
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When rape is routine and there’s a paucity of condemning voices
If the security forces can treat dead women like hunting trophies, not only trussing their bodies to poles, but taking pride in displaying their kill, is it surprising that their behaviour towards the living is so atrocious? After every deadly attack by the Maoists, ‘civil society actors’ are summoned by TV channels to condemn the incident, substituting moral indignation for news analysis. And yet, the same media is strangely silent on police or paramilitary atrocities against civilians. |
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Security personnel with the body of a suspected female Maoist after the June 16 encounter in the Ranjha forests near Lalgarh | ||||
On June 9, The Hindu published stories of rapes in and around Chintalnar in Dantewada by special police officers (SPOs) of the Chhattisgarh government. To my knowledge, no one’s asked P. Chidambaram, Raman Singh or the Chhattisgarh DGP to condemn these incidents or even asked what they are going to do about it. These are people in positions of power, who are elected or paid to uphold the Constitution, and the ‘buck stops with them’, not with ordinary citizens. If channels can run all-day programmes on justice for Ruchika Girhotra, why not for the adivasi girls who were raped and assaulted in and around Chintalnar between May 26-28? Is it because they are not middle class and their plight will not raise TRP ratings? Or because they are considered ‘collateral damage’ in the war between “India” and the “Maoists”—who, not being part of “India”, are presumably from outer space—that TV commentators advocate? While rape is often described as a weapon of war, it is not uniformly practised, and indeed nothing distinguishes the two parties in a guerrilla war more than their attitude to rape. In her careful analysis of sexual violence during civil war, the political scientist Elizabeth Woods points out that while it was common in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, sexual assault was less frequent in El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Peru. In the latter cases, the vast majority of rapes were committed by the government or paramilitaries, this also being a primary reason why women were motivated to join the insurgents. The rebel armies—who carried out other violent acts, including the killing of civilians—almost never committed sexual violence, including against female combatants in their own ranks. In Mizoram, women recalling the regrouping and search operations of the 1960s described only rapes by Indian soldiers and none by the Mizo National Front. One said to me, “It is as if the vai (outsider) army was hungry for women.” Today, despite government claims that the Maoists sexually exploit young women, the distinction between insurgent and counter-insurgent is clear for the women of Dantewada. They are safe from one army (the PLGA) but not from the other (the Indian paramilitary and SPOs/police). And in any war to win hearts and minds (‘WHAM’), surely this is not an unimportant distinction. After the 76 CRPF men were killed at Chintalnar, many in the media pointed to the complete lack of intelligence on the ambush. What kind of intelligence do they expect from villages from where young girls are picked up and kept as sexual slaves in Salwa Judum camps? In July ’08, I recorded two testimonies from the village of Mukram, right next to the site of the attack. These, along with several others, were submitted to the nhrc, which was investigating the situation on behalf of the Supreme Court, and to the National Commission for Women, but till date, nothing has come out of it. But this is how the testimony of Kawasi Lakhmi (all names of victims changed) went: “I was four months pregnant and was visiting my parents’ house in June 2007 when Salwa Judum leaders and SPOs attacked my village. It was about 9 or 10 pm and I was sleeping when they surrounded my house. They beat up my parents and dragged me to the main road. From there, along with Hidme and Madvi Unga, a 20-year-old boy, I was taken to Jagargunda camp. There I was kept for a week and raped every night by different SPOs. I do not recognise the others, but I recognised Bhima aka Ramesh of Jonnaguda village and Somdu of Kunder village. “We (the two girls) were kept locked up in one house and Unga was kept separately. We were given only a little food and not allowed out at all, except to relieve ourselves. My clothes fell apart in tatters and my jewellery was taken away. After a week, I was given a small cloth to cover myself. Unga was badly beaten and was ill for a long time. Hidme and I were also ill and could not work for two months. The Chintalnar police took money from our families for having saved us.” The benevolent police of Chintalnar had told the girls’ families that they had sent a wireless message to Jagargunda camp and the girls were safe. In return for this, they had extracted Rs 1,500 from each family. The same SPOs appear in other testimonies, such as this one from Kottaguda: “Around April ’07, Salwa Judum, SPOs, police officers and CRPF men came to our village. I was on my way to fill water while Kosi was at home at this time. The Judum and security forces caught us, called us Naxalites and forcibly took us to Jagargunda camp. There they kept us in a room where SPOs raped us several times during the next few weeks. We can recognise them and know some of them by name also because they are from nearby villages, like Bhima of Jonnaguda village, Somdu of Kunder village, Dasru of Millampalli, Nanda of Lakhapal village and Muka of Nagram village.” Another common pattern that emerges is of gangrapes by SPOs on combing operations. For the young girls, who have so little to begin with, the loss of jewellery and clothes is an important part of the narrative. And yet their resilience in the face of horror is remarkable. A 17-year-old I met in Arlampalli village recounted: Nothing brings out the hollowness of the government’s claim on WHAM more than its stand on sexual violence. Rapes cannot be justified as actions done in the line of duty. Unlike an encounter, there is no question of who fired first. Even if rogue police or armymen commit rapes, a concerned government can take steps to identify and punish the guilty. And yet, the record on this is abysmal, from Kashmir to Manipur to Chhattisgarh. In practice what emerges is that, rather than WHAM, the Indian government is following a ‘cost-benefit approach’ aimed at making the costs—including starvation, murder, torture and rape—far higher than any benefit the public might gain from supporting the guerrillas or remaining neutral. (Nandini Sundar is the author of Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar 1854-2006.) from Outlook India
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