O
It well represents what Modi wants to
do to his subjects.
The stage is being
set for history of an extremely infamous variety to be repeated in
the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. Almost 50 years after the Indira
Gandhi government’s strafing and bombing of Aizwal in Mizoram (then
Assam) from March 5 to 13, 1966 with the help of Indian Air Force
(IAF) planes, the Modi government is preparing to use the IAF once
again to launch aerial attacks on its own citizens. The Chhattisgarh
police has announced that it, along with the IAF, has recently
“conducted successful exercises” in preparation for the launch of
what are being called “retaliation attacks from air“, as part of
anti-Maoist operations in the area. Given that air strikes, by their
very nature, are indiscriminately destructive, this latest policy
decision of the central and state governments is indicative of the
brutal lengths to which they are ready to go for crushing the Maoist
movement in the area and clear the ground for the entry of corporate
capital. An already bloody conflict is poised to get bloodier. Ample
indication of this was on display in the casual cruelty with which
the “successful” exercises themselves were conducted.
“On October 13,
three IAF helicopters flew over a specified area of Bijapur [district
in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh] and practised strafing. Senior
officers of the IAF and anti-Naxal operations of the state police
participated in the exercise.” This shockingly bland statement came
from RK Vij, Chhattisgarh’s additional director general of police,
anti-Naxal operations seven days after the operation. There had been
no previous announcement that such an exercise was to be conducted,
nor had there been any warning issued to the local tribal population
to evacuate or avoid the area to be strafed. Collateral damage to a
few Indian citizens during the strafing is perhaps small change for a
government that has obviously made cold-blooded calculations of
deaths in hundreds and even thousands which aerial attacks anywhere
in the world has always resulted in.
According to the
Oxford dictionary, strafing, which Vij has said was practicsed on
October 13, means attacking repeatedly with bombs or machine gun fire
from low-flying aircrafts. Bombing of its own territory and people is
something rarely done by modern day states who claim to have
democratic credentials. Even if it is done, it is denied. In the case
of Aizwal, Indira Gandhi had claimed that the IAF was only used to
drop men and supplies. It was only in the 1980s that the fact of air
strikes was officially accepted. Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems
to have abandoned such niceties. The careless manner in which the air
attack plans have been announced and the implementation commenced
resemble the act and intent of a monarch trying to brazen things out.
The etymological origin of the word strafing is in the German strafe,
meaning punish. It well represents what Modi wants to do to his
subjects.
Behind the calculated
hauteur however, there is also the realisation that today’s world
also has a fair number of dissenters, who may not willingly fall in
line. There are a handful of journalists who remain dedicated to the
values of their profession and insist on reporting the truth. There
are the human rights-walas who take chapter three of the Constitution
somewhat seriously and try their utmost to squeeze out some
democratic space within the otherwise repressive set-up. There are
even some rare lawyers that struggle to get rolling the rusted wheels
of a cynical judiciary. All such elements would have substantial
opposition to aerial attacks and could set up real obstacles to their
implementation by the government. Most fearful would be their ability
to take the truth of the conflict zone to the outside world.
In anticipation
therefore, there has been, over the past few months, a concerted
effort by the police and allied agencies to evict or incapacitate
anyone who may question them and thus sanitise the areas in and
around the places earmarked for aerial attacks. Journalists have been
targeted, particularly those with a record of truthfully reporting on
the ground situation without acquiescing to administration demands to
publish only the versions given by the police.
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On July 16, 2015,
Somaru Nag, an adivasi journalist with the Rajasthan Patrika was
detained and tortured, and shown to be arrested only after three days
of illegal custody. Santosh Yadav, a freelance journalist filing news
reports with several Hindi newspapers, including Dainik Navbharat and
Dainik Chhattisgarh was the next to land behind bars. He had, over
the last one year, been often harassed by the police and was once
even stripped and threatened with torture in June 2015. Since he
refused to back down despite the warnings, he was on 29 September,
2015 taken away on the pretext of the IGP wanting to meet him and was
then implicated in an encounter case in August 2015. Amnesty
International India, which has called for a stop to this intimidation
of journalists, was told by Yadav’s lawyer that the charges against
him were fabricated and that “Santosh Yadav has been a contact
person for national and international journalists and was crucial in
getting media attention to the plight of adivasis in the
conflict-torn region. He has also been instrumental in helping
adivasis get legal aid.” It is, therefore, quite understandable
that the administration would want such a person out of the way
before the aerial attacks start.
Meanwhile, the
lawyers who are defending Nag and Yadav are themselves under attack.
They belong to the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group (JagLAG), which came
into existence in July 2013 as the result of brainstorming of human
rights activists, academics and lawyers in New Delhi and Chhattisgarh
who wanted to provide legal help to the people of Bastar. As soon as
they started proving effective in providing legal aid to the locals
and started producing studies of the large numbers rotting in jails
without any evidence against them, they proved a threat to both the
police, as well as the lawyers who had for many years profited from
the misery of falsely implicated prisoners. In April 2015, the IG
(Bastar) SRP Kalluri issued an open threat that he would act against
NGOs helping the Maoists – meaning the legal help JagLAG was
rendering to tribals implicated in Maoist-linked cases. Now both the
police and the Bastar Bar Association have combined to try and ensure
that “outside” lawyers (the JagLAG lawyers are registered in New
Delhi) are prevented from practising in the local courts. In the case
of JagLAG too, their ability to tell the world outside Bastar about
the rampant human right violations there makes the administration
uncomfortable and it would definitely like to see them evicted before
the air strikes commence.
As the government
makes its plans and prepares for an all-out war not everyone is
keeping silent. Democratic rights organisations like PUDR and PUCL
and some senior lawyers have come out in JagLAG’s support. The
journalists of Chhattisgarh have formed a Sanyukta Patrakar Sangharsh
Samiti and held protests in the capital Raipur against the police
action on the journalists. They have directly accused Kalluri of
preparing for genocide in the region. The Delhi Union of Journalists
too has come out in support of journalists being victimised in
conflict areas. The latest to condemn the arrest of journalists is
the state Congress chief who has decried the reign of “administrative
terror”.
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