Memorandum to the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee - Human Rights Subcommittee on the Violation of Human Rights and State Violence against Indigenous Peoples in India
On 18 November 2025, the Indian government triumphantly declared the killing of Madvi Hidma, Indigenous Adivasi activist and leader of Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with his comrade and life partner, Madakam Raje, and eleven other people in a so-called ‘encounter’. With this military “victory,” the Indian Government reiterated it was successfully moving towards the Interior Minister Amit Shah’s deadline of ‘31 March 2026’ to end the revolutionary peoples’ movement in India. This declaration is part of the Indian government’s repressive policies targeting Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims, Christians and other marginalized communities, to facilitate the expropriation of land and natural resources by corporations close to the government.
We unequivocally stand with the indigenous villagers and human rights defenders, and India’s civil society, who have strongly noted that Hidma and the others were captured unarmed and taken to the Maredumilli forests, Andhra Pradesh, where they were tortured and killed extrajudicially in two groups over two days. Since January 2024, under the military ‘Operation Kagaar’ the Indian Government has been conducting massive extrajudicial killings of its Indigenous Adivasi peoples under a rewards-for-killing policy for its security forces. With the deployment of 60,000 paramilitary forces, air forces, drones and armored vehicles, officially mobilized against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) with the goal of eliminating it "by March 31, 2026" Adivasi communities are being attacked to forcibly evict them from their lands in order to facilitate the entry of mining corporations. Among those killed are Basavaraj, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) together with twenty eight other people and other senior leaders of the party including Chalapathi, Modem Balakrishnam, Pragya Manjhi, Sahadav Soren, Madvi Hidma and Ganesh Uike.
Villagers and civil society have repeatedly noted that these killings are often preceded by capture and torture, but are described by the state as an ‘exchange of fire’ or ‘encounter’ between security forces and insurgents. Of the more than 550 people killed in 2025, the majority were killed in the eco-sensitive, biodiverse, mineral-rich forested hills of the Bastar Division in south Chhattisgarh, home to numerous Indigenous Adivasi communities, together with other states such as Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha and Jharkhand.
The official Bastar Police Action and Outcome Report 2024–2025 notes that in 2024 alone, while reported ‘encounters’ doubled from 68 in 2023 to 121 in 2024, killings increased tenfold, from 20 to 217. Many of the bodies of those killed extrajudicially have been left to decay and become infested with maggots, making identification by family members nearly impossible. Some bodies were forcibly burned to erase evidence of capture and torture and to prevent large numbers from attending public funerals. Madvi Hidma and Madakam Raje’s bodies were returned to Hidma’s village of Purvati in Sukma District, Bastar, for quick cremation, again erasing the evidence of torture and extrajudicial killing.
By treating CPI (Maoist) domestically as non-state armed actors but not acknowledging the State’s counterinsurgency operations as “non-international armed conflict” under international humanitarian law, India evades its obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol II. Instead, a domestic policy of extra-judicial killings, unconditional surrender and ‘reintegration’, including the rearming of surrendered Maoist cadres as the paramilitary force ‘District Reserve Guard’, is openly promoted.
Although the Maoist revolutionary movement in India is rooted in Indigenous socio-political exploitation, the Indian government continues to evade political negotiations and reconciliation, because it would entail centering social justice and recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights to resources, which is against the interests of the mining and industrial corporations who see Bastar as a site for mineral extraction. Instead, the approach of ‘unconditional surrender’ or ‘be killed’ targets Adivasi communities as a whole, with the aim of isolating and drying up support for the insurgent movement that has resisted the entry of corporations.
Militarization now permeates every aspect of Adivasi lives and livelihoods in Bastar in the form of surveillance, restricted movement, fear and threats of arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence. Human rights violations by militarized security forces are compounded by the complicity of the executive, legislature, and judiciary, in which peace remains elusive even as the government promises it to the people. The indigenous Adivasis remain among the most impoverished Indian peoples. Human development indicators, including literacy and health, in Bastar’s seven districts are among the lowest in the country.
It is in this context of increasing state-corporate exploitation alongside diminishing Indigenous existential agency that Bastar continues to be a key site of indigenous peoples’ socio-political struggles against the state violence that excludes any opportunity for social justice. This includes the deliberate dismantling of youth-led mass mobilizations in Bastar that were demanding implementation of their constitutional rights and an end to the human rights violations in the region, sweeping arrests of Adivasi youth leaders/activists under charges of ‘terrorism,’ and the wholesale militarization of Adivasi-inhabited regions.
In these ways, the Indian Government is systematically erasing indigenous land rights and human, civil, and political rights in order to facilitate corporate interests. Over the last decade, the Indian Government has consistently violated the right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution as well as India’s obligations under international laws and charters. Together with this, the Indian government has systematically and consistently subjected religious minorities, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, and the scheduled castes (Dalits) to violence in the form of pogroms, lynchings and sexualized violence. Dissenters and critics of the government, including academics, advocates, journalists, activists and students, who have protested against this situation have been subjected to arbitrary arrests, detentions, prolonged imprisonment under draconian anti-terror laws, leading to an overall destruction of human rights in India.
Therefore, we urge the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee - Human Rights Subcommittee to call on the Government of India to immediately:
End all forms of violence, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, and torture and end state militarization in areas inhabited by indigenous Adivasi peoples;
Institute independent judicial inquires into the circumstances of all the extra-judicial killings carried out in the name of Operation Kagaar, and hold State military and police forces accountable for their actions;
Initiate dialogue and political engagement with the Adivasi communities to genuinely address the demands for constitutionally guaranteed autonomy, human rights, land rights, and rights over natural resources.
And strongly center and demand the respect of human rights, especially the rights of minorities and marginalized populations, in all EU-India engagements including the proposed EU-India Free Trade Agreement.
