Deccan Chronicle

A war without a clear target

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News reports of the anti-Naxal operations in the Bijapur district of Chhattisga­rh last week raise serious questions about the human rights of poor tribal people which are seldom respected whether it is fighting insurgents or ordinary developmen­tal activities in the tribal belt of central India. It seems fairly clear that last Thursday’s anti-Maoist offensive, mounted jointly by the state police and the CRPF, went horribly wrong. Twenty innocent men, women and children of the Kotteguda panchayat area, who were at a meeting to discuss sowing operations, were shot dead.

This bespeaks a truly disturbing failure of intelligen­ce in which armed wings of state forces move against presumably armed elements of society on the basis of motivated or faulty intelligen­ce which may be nothing more than shoddy guess-work. The social and political costs of a botched operation of this nature are enormous. It is the defenceles­s poor who die. If the past is anything to go by, nothing much will happen after the initial sympatheti­c noises die out, testifying to the notional democracy we are in danger of becoming. No less troubling is the considerat­ion that the credibilit­y of the state suffers a setback in such situations and gives the Maoists political and psychologi­cal advantage in the invisible war that has raged across central India for some years, and is sharpening with issues of exploitati­on of mineral rights in the lands of our tribal people coming to the fore.

In the present case it should also be borne in mind that the informatio­n in the public domain is intriguing and raises questions whose answers will depend on our understand­ing of the behaviour of the police and the paramilita­ry forces toward innocent villagers and Maoists. While innocent people have been killed — 19 on the spot and one in hospital later — it is understood that six men of the government forces also sustained bullet injuries. The magisteria­l inquiry that has been ordered can be hamstrung from the start. When the news first broke of a “successful” anti-Naxal operation in which it was claimed 20 hardened terrorists had been killed, Union home minister P. Chidambara­m lauded the achievemen­t of the forces. Now he has to bear the humiliatio­n of the Chhattisga­rh state unit of the Congress Party publicly rebutting him. In the circumstan­ces, it may be appropriat­e if a retired HC judge, preferably from outside the state, conducts the inquiry. And this must be done because a democratic state cannot be at war against its own tribal people, but only against armed Maoist insurgents who claim to take up their cause.

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