Soni Sori, activist and champion of Adivasi rights from Bastar, Chhattisgarh, was the second speaker at the Voices from the Margins event, in a discussion moderated by Ramneek Singh.
Soni Sori first spoke about the forcible displacement of Adivasi people in Bastar. The Adivasi resistance to land acquisition in the region is an extension of the ‘Jal Jangal Jameen’ movement as for even matters such as felling of trees or laying roads. This is in contravention to the PESA Act (1966) which affirmed the absolute authority of Panchayat Raj on matters related to adivasi lands and their welfare. However, this “democratic” government routinely disregards its own laws and chooses extra-legal routes to exploit these lands and its people. Soni also underlined the fact that the fight against land grab is an endless affair, for instance in the case of iron ore mining by Adani Enterprises & NMDC in Dantewada district’s Bailadila range, whose Nandraj Pahad is not just revered as a deity by locals but is also essential in maintaining the water-table in the region, the Congress government of Chhattisgarh put a halt to the project in 2019 after region-wide protests erupted, but the subsequent BJP government has found loopholes through which these lands are now parceled off piecemeal to private entities. In the face of such dispossession, the Adivasis have stepped up their fight against this slow and violent exile, but so has the State. Soni also addressed the militarization in Bastar and the brutal sexual violence meted against Bastar’s women. With growing paramilitary and police forces, Bastar has destabilized into a zone of extreme violence. While the go-to excuse by the State for all violence in this region is “Naxalism”, the State has made no attempts to bring Naxalites to the table to safeguard the people of Bastar – that is the State’s design, as it does not want a compromise with so-called Naxal militants; what it wants is an excuse for increased militarization and occupation with a view of corporate loot of the land. On the contrary, the State has formed and worked with violent militia like Salwa Judum. Adivasi civilians, including pregnant women, children, the disabled, the elderly, are routinely picked up by armed forces, gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, burnt, dressed up as militia, and their corpses discarded far from their homes. The deaths and incarceration of Adivasis are also commercialized – with police and paramilitary forces seeking compensation from the State amounting in lakhs per person for detaining and killing people that were hitherto never counted amongst Naxals. The disappearance of such people is either loved ones, before the body is placed on the pyre. Some corpses are visibly raped to death, marred by acids, and blown apart by bombs. Soni asks where else in this country does the State drop bombs and use gang-rape with impunity, as it does in Bastar. Rape is also used to terrorize the women of Bastar to turn informant for the police, which is akin to death sentence in these parts for men and women alike. The State’s emphasis that it should be Adivasis who dialogue and compromise with Naxals is ridiculous, Soni says. If the State, in all this time, with all its might, hasn’t brought Naxals to the table, how is the poor Adivasi caught in the crossfire supposed to do that?
There were three more key issues that Soni highlighted – the first, the State’s war on the children of Bastar, with the view of a genocide, not unlike Israel’s in Gaza. The second, was the increased bombing of Bastar. The use of bombs in Bastar disproportionately affects children oblivious to the dangers of such devices. The State has also declared the only decent schools in the region to be Naxal-training centres and the locals live in fear of finding their children dead in an encounter or bombing. The list of children killed in Bastar since January 2024 is long, and includes a 6 month old baby who was killed in a “crossfire”, a teenage deaf-mute girl was gang-raped to death, and a 2 month old foetus was killed in its mothers’ womb. Pollutants and effluents have made their way to the soil, air and waters of Bastar, increasing illnesses and miscarriages, and denuding the forests. The third key issue was the step-up in militarization and surge of state-sponsored violence in Bastar since the start of 2024. The State’s dangerous desperation to grab this land is clearly visible in how the Center has turned deaf to the pleas of the people and has shirked accountability for the rising death toll; but also in how arms are supplied to the paramilitary and police forces in Bastar, and the underhanded ways in which land and mining rights are being transferred to corporations. The recent news of the government’s decision to displace 52 villages for an Army Maneuver Range inside the forests of Abujhmad in Bastar should be concerning. More militarization will lead to more Adivasi deaths. Soni asks us to raise our voices from wherever we are, against this “development”, in the most pressing manner.
Soni also intended to elaborate on the increasing systemic hatred towards Adivasi Christians, but was cut short due to paucity of time.
Her discussion was accompanied with a slideshow of photos and videos straight from the conflict zone that the mainstream media actively keep away from the people.
