Soni Sori, activist and champion of Adivasi rights from Bastar, Chattisgarh, was the first speaker at the ‘Stop The War on Adivasis’ public discussion held on 23rd August. Her speech was translated into Kannada by Khalil ur Rehaman.
The first thing to ask, Soni Sori noted, is why Operation Kagar is being waged on the Adivasi. Why are the Adivasi being branded as Naxalites to be targeted and why was the recent operation being staged around Karegutta Hill? The answer is simple – Karregutta is rich in top quality iron ore. The Adivasi, who have an economic, spiritual, and ecological relationship with the land, stand in between the integrity of the land and the industrial exploitation. The State has clubbed the Adivasis and Maoists to remove all resistance clearing a path for indiscriminate war on the land and its people.
Soni Sori noted the role of the media and its intense focus on Karregutta in fueling the bloodlust against those branded Naxals. “Will killing Naxals one by one bring an end to Naxalism?” she asks. One cannot kill an idea with bullets, and Maoism is an idea. So long as the State commits atrocities against its people, Maoists will spring up from amongst the oppressed. The only acceptable solution is for the government to end its brutal abuse of indigenous lands and its denizens.
She spoke of her own resistance through vichaar aur kalam (ideas and writing), without which she herself might have taken up arms to defend Adivasi lives and land. It is not easy for a woman to pick up a gun, she notes. In a place like Bastar, women are forced to protect themselves against unparalleled sexual exploitation by the police and the armed forces, through any means possible. Protecting themselves, with or without guns. does not make these women Maoists. The women are subjected to constant rape and threat of rape by officials at police camps at Sukma, Dantewada, Narayanpur, and other districts in the region. The police also unleash terrorism against their captives by forcing male captives to forcibly have sex with female captives. They are terrorised by these whims of the police. The captives, particularly the women, are then blackmailed and shamed into breaking ties with their communities. Soni asks why these captives are not returned home on release from custody. Even within villages, police set up temporary tents and force their way into houses to rape women with impunity. The police often strip women and pass abhorrent comments on their private parts before sexually exploiting them. Those who resist this sexual exploitation are killed. In a recent case from Bijapur, a woman was killed for resisting the State’s personnel to enter her house and rape her. If this were not the state of things in Bastar, why does the government not allow a fact-finding committee into Bastar – Soni asks. For every instance of rape and sexual harassment experienced by the women of Bastar, they have many more instances of sexual abuse that have been prevented through traumatized vigilance. Women are forced to sleep in trees, ditches, even in ant-infested fields to try and escape rape by armed forces. They are forced to jump into rivers and pretend to bathe in order to evade capture. This gets increasingly risky as monsoons swell up rivers, and the police are often unlikely to leave these women alone even in such times. She is tempted to safeguard these women by keeping them with her. But employment is hard to find for many women so many find themselves still stuck without protection. Soni Sori has attempted to mitigate this situation by offering a compromise to the police – the women accused of being Maoists will be held in the village itself, instead of being surrendered to the camps; however, the State has not complied with this request. Besides sexual atrocities, the State has also stepped up its murder of the people branded as Maoists. In a single offensive in the Kagar war, the State recently killed 31 people. After the fame and bounty that followed for the officials, the least the people of Bastar asked was to release the bodies of the fallen. Not only did the State refuse to release the bodies of the fallen for over a week after their reported deaths, but refused to perform post-mortems with civilian witnesses. The dehumanization of the people of Bastar continues even in death, as family members must exchange parchis (receipts) to receive the bodies of their loved ones. Some bodies were already tightly shrouded and directly taken for their last rites, without giving families the chance to even identify them. One body was never released. They have no doubt been subjected to torture at the hands of their captors. Others who were eventually allowed to be identified and released to families had maggots and worms eating their faces already, making some unrecognizable. The decomposed state of these bodies could have been avoided if the State had followed procedure and held them in freezers. For all the mineral wealth extracted by the National Mineral Development Corporation in the Bijapur district, the least they could have provided were morgue freezers, she notes – but it would be uncharacteristic of the NMDC to invest back in the region in a way that benefits its people.
In the name of development, the NMDC now wants to build a railway line to Karregutta, at the cost of eviction of 15 villages. The people have suggested a bus route and roads instead, but the government plans for Karregutta are clear – to hand it over to capitalists like Adani and Jindal. The people of the region will resist the exploitation of their sacred hill so long as they draw breath. The State knows that the only way they can win and open up this train track is if they systematically eliminate the Adivasi and the forests, because without the Adivasi, there is no forest, and without the forest, there are no Adivasi.
Whatever Modi states in his speech about development for the Adivasi is nothing more than a joke. Even before reaching a hospital, any injured person in the region is likely to die. There was a recent case of three youths bitten by snakes not receiving any treatment locally. Despite indigenous knowledge of curing, one of the youths succumbed to his injuries, because the medicinal herbs needed would require the villagers to fetch them from the forest at night. A camp of security forces lay in the middle of the route, which guaranteed that any passersby would be shot and killed. If captured, these personnel are known to cut off limbs and genitalia of these villagers publicly. They do not even spare pregnant women or children. Pregnant women of Bastar cannot even sleep as babies in their wombs react to the bombs and shelling that goes on throughout the night in this area.
Lastly, Soni Sori requests to bring Manipur-like media attention to Bastar as the government executes its stated plan of eliminating Maoists in the region before the end of the year. She hopes that people in the country as well as the people gathered at the event, will keep asking the right questions.
