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The Seshachalam Killings and Red Sandalwood: A Chapter in the Long History of Police Encounter Murders in Andhra/Tamil Nadu

April 10, 2015

Recently, the Warangal-Nalgonda border in Telangana and the Seshachalam forest near Tirupati in Chittoor district of AP was witness to an “encounter” which resulted in the death of 20 poor woodcutters at the hands of the Andhra Pradesh police. The Human Rights Forum has demanded a CBI murder investigation; the APCLC has alleged a fake encounter.
The killing of 20 poor woodcutters by the Andhra Pradesh police was not unprecedented. Sanhati has been carrying reports which tell a fairly long running account of arbitrary arrests, fake encounter murders of the poor in the forests bordering Andhra and Tamil Nadu. All this has been going on with an underlying political story.
The smuggler rackets run by the opposition political party honchos are targeted, while those of the ruling party are given protection. Not even the honchos of the opposition parties are taken to task. Labourers who form the lowest rung of the smuggling network are arrested or simply bumped off. Most of these foot soldiers who have been killed or jailed over these years are poor peasants, belongings to scheduled tribe or “denotified and nomadic tribe” communities. After taking loans from agents, they go on a perilous journey to fell and transport red sandal logs, hiding from the police all the time, which would be sold to overseas customers who will prepare aphrodisiac out of sandal wood. On occasions, they are pulled down from the bus en masse and shot dead.
According to M K Kumar, APCLC,

The crisis in agriculture and allied sectors is the main cause for the tree cutters to migrate across the state boarder into Seshachalam forest for illegal red sandal cuttings. Thus the root is linked with social and economical crises.

We reproduce here two reports on red sandal wood smugglers, which were published in 2014 and 2015.

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1. Red sandal labour killings in the name of protecting national resources – M K Kumar, APCLC (2014)

2. Report by National Campaign for Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Human Rights on the Killings of Poor Woodcutters (2015)
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