In Chhattisgarh’s Abujhmad forests, Maoists run kangaroo courts. Recently, they executed three men, then four more, for the same crime. No one complains and no FIR is filed because the area is out of bounds for the Indian state
Supriya Sharma | TNN
The Moist press note that arrived at a newspaper office in the first week of March said: “Shikhshakarmi ke naam pe kalank Kamlu Varda ko janata ke hathon maut.” Or that primary school teacher Kamlu Varda had been executed. So had two other men.
Kamlu Varda, 30, had done well for a Madia adivasi. He had spent eight years teaching, had a monthly salary of Rs 7,700, and a cycle on which to travel the 10 km from Kutul, where he lived with his family, to Dhurbeda, where he worked. Both villages are in Abujhmad, a forested plateau in Narayanpur district in southwest Chhattisgarh.
Everything seemed to be going swimmingly until one morning in the middle of February. The Maoists showed up at Kamlu’s door and took him away. Days later, the district collector of Malkangiri was abducted by Maoists in neighbouring Orissa. The collector’s abduction made national headlines for 10 days. Kamlu’s abduction did not make it even to the local papers, until February 24 — the day the collector was released.
Narayanpur superintendent of police Mayank Srivastava explains police inaction on the Kamlu case. “The rumours are persistent but Kamlu’s family has not filed an FIR.” He adds that investigation would, in any case, have been impossible, as there is no police force in Abujhmad.
Abujhmad, which means unknown hills, is perhaps one of the last of India’s uncharted territories. A 4,000-sq-km sprawl nearly as big as Goa, it shows up on Google Earth as a dense green carpet. Visitors describe it as forbidding terrain, its rugged hills and valleys are crisscrossed by streams that turn into angry rivers during the rainy season.
The Maoists moved in here in the eighties. With barely any sign of the government and not a single police post, it did not take long for them to call Abujhmad a “liberated area”, ruled by the Janatana Sarkar or people’s government.
Most of what transpires inside Abujhmad never makes it to the outside world. Kamlu’s abduction wouldn’t have either, but for the fact that two other men went missing around the same time. Pramod and Mulchand, both drivers, had told their families they would be away for work for a few days but did not show up for weeks. The suspense was killing. Until the first week of March when the press note was sent by Rakesh, spokesperson of Madh North Bastar Joint Divisional Committee of CPI (Maoist).
It said the three men had been executed for a crime committed a year ago. The drivers were part of a gunda giroh (criminal gang) and had allegedly raped and killed two “Janatana Sarkar workers Comrade Kumli and Comrade Chaiti.”
Were the men guilty? There was some ambivalence in the two drivers’ backgrounds. Pramod was rumoured to have misbehaved with a girl from Abujhmad and his mother Sukli Bai claims he married her but eventually, she ran away. Was the young woman one of the two alleged victims?
Mulchand’s mother Duleshwari Bai innocuously admits he watched TV all day because he stopped working “last year. He used to drive a tractor in Abujhmad. But then something happened, he stopped going out.” It may be coincidental but the Maoist press note claimed that’s when Comrade Kumli was raped and killed.
So much for the drivers. Kamlu was in a different category. By all accounts, there were no skeletons in his closet. Even the Maoist note did not describe him as part of the gunda giroh, merely claiming he sheltered it and had been a police informer since 2004.
Lies, say Kamlu’s fellow teachers, insisting he “was killed because he dared to defy them.” They recount Kamlu daring to object when “the dada log (Maoists)” turned up at school and took away rice meant for the children. Then again, in 2007, Kamlu was teaching in Mohandi village and objected to the Maoists using the school playground for executions.
The impression that Kamlu died for his defiance of the Maoists is reinforced by another story. On February 10, as they do every year, the Maoists were celebrating Bhumkal, the 1910 adivasi rebellion but Kamlu refused to attend, “saying they were hindering development. The next day, they took him away,” goes the account.
It is difficult to cross-check anything because there is no access to Abujhmad. Meanwhile, the local newspaper reports that another four men killed by the Maoists. And once again, the families do not come forward to complain, no police FIR is filed. Why were they killed? The question is answered by Gudsa Usendi, Maoist spokesperson. He told this correspondent on the phone that six people had been picked up, of whom four had been executed on March 23 after a jan adalat of 3,000 people had found them guilty of the murders of Comrade Kumli and Comrade Chaiti. But weren’t three men already killed for that crime?
“It was a gunda giroh,” insisted Usendi. “They confessed to their crime. We have video recordings.”
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