Deep inside the forests of Bastar in southern Chhattisgarh, Maoist insurgents drawn from local Adivasi communities have been locked in a low-intensity war with the Indian state for nearly four decades. This year, Chhattisgarh police claim to have made a major breakthrough in the conflict, killing 141 Maoists in 38 encounters, higher than any annual tally seen in the past, barring 2009.
This series brings you the stories behind those numbers by travelling to the sites where the encounters took place and speaking to the families of 37 of those killed.
Around noon on April 4, the Bijapur district hospital compound was overflowing with people: elderly men, women with breastfeeding babies, infants chasing their mothers and clinging to their dhotis, young boys running after every police vehicle that drove in.
Two days before, the police in this southernmost district of Chhattisgarh claimed to have killed 13 Maoists in a gunfight in the Korcholi-Nendra forests near Gangalur village.
Their bodies had been brought to the Bijapur district headquarters, along with village residents who had been detained as part of the security operation. Although the police had not officially declared a number, locals said 25-30 people had been detained from seven to eight villages in the area.
It was in search of their family members that the residents of these villages had poured into the hospital compound.
“I have come looking for my brother,” said Hemla Lachhu, a young man from Todka village. “He was with the party, and we knew he had gone for a meeting.” By party, he meant the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), which has been waging an armed insurgency in the forests of Bastar for decades, with both cadres and leaders drawn from the local Adivasi communities that live there.
Unga Parsi’s family had come from Kawadgoan village to look for him. They said he had joined the party less than a year ago.
The honesty of the villagers was striking – when asked if their missing family member was with the party, they promptly answered with a straightforward yes or no. There was no attempt to hide an affiliation with the insurgent group. But, equally, there was no hesitation in declaring that a missing person was a civilian, not a Maoist.
“We have come looking for our chacha, Chaitu Potam,” Bodu Potam from Korcholi village said. “Wo Naxali nahi hai, uski to biwi aur chhe bachhe hain.” He is not a Naxali. He has a wife and six children.
Potam had first gone to the Bijapur police station in search of his uncle. While he did not find him there, he spotted other familiar faces. “We met Sarila Potam, a girl from our village,” he told me.
As we were talking, the police officer in charge of the Bijapur thana arrived, and the people gathered in the hospital compound rushed towards him. “Ek minute, ek minute,” he cautioned the approaching crowd. “Look here first,” he said, pointing to a large stocky man in a white T-shirt who had pulled out his mobile phone. Displayed on its screen were close-up photographs of the dead.
Unlike the practice followed in other encounter cases, the Bijapur police had not released photographs of those killed in the Korcholi-Nendra gunfight as part of its press statements. Instead, it had displayed to local journalists 13 body bags lying alongside an array of weapons – light machine guns, .303 rifles, 12 bore rifles, barrel grenade launchers, codex wires, cartridges, vessels, walkie-talkies, Maoist literature, solar panels. There were also daily-use items like soap, toothbrush, oil, creams, medicines.
At the hospital, when the policeman finally held up his phone to show photos of the dead, many winced at the sight of their bloodied, battered faces. Said Bodu Potam, in frustration: “Kuchh pehchan me hi nahi aa raha.” It is hard to recognise anyone. “The faces are swollen, there is blood all over.”
Soon, masked hospital staff opened the doors of the morgue, pulling out bodies still wrapped in plastic bags, laying them on the floor. As the edge of the plastic sheet covering them was pulled back to reveal their faces, the villagers stepped forward tentatively, with women using their sari pallus and men their gamchas to cover their noses to ward off the stench.
Within minutes, some had spotted their family members among the dead – Chaitu Potam was one of them. As Chaitu’s sister and wife broke down, Bodu Potam consoled his weeping aunts.
After the bodies were identified, the police noted down the names of the family members in a register and took their thumb impressions. Ambulances were called in. The bodies were loaded onto them and sent home.
Four days later, I followed, biking through the forests of Bijapur to get to the villages where the dead came from. The police, in its press statement, had described what had happened as a “muthbhed” or encounter. But conversations with villagers revealed a more granular account of how an early morning police ambush on a Maoist meeting on the Masumeta hill had spilled over into the foothills, where an annual village festival had concluded the previous night. Festival visitors and their hosts, still waking up from slumber, were caught off guard.
Among those who died in the gunfire, not all were Maoists, the villagers said. More surprisingly, as I discovered, among those declared dead, not all were dead.
A festival and a meeting
The village of Nendra lies about 35 km south of the Bijapur district headquarters. It falls under the jurisdiction of the Gangalur police station. Surrounded by several forested hills such as Masumeta, Gorgonmeta, Reten, Marker, Pendemeta and Kaaurmeta, the village is home to about 60 families.
On April 1, Nendra hosted the annual festival or karsaad held in honour of a local deity connected to the Kunjam clan, known as Kohla Kosum Pen Devi.
Thousands of people from villages spread across the Gangalur and Basaguda areas had descended on Nendra to take part in the festival, said Sonu Lakku, the perma or community priest. The festivities took place in permapara, the hamlet where the perma lives. The ceremonial rituals went off peacefully in the morning, he said, followed by dance and drinking at night.
But next morning, around 4.30 am, everyone woke up to the sound of guns booming on the nearby Masumeta hill.
As soon as there was light in the sky, Lakku recalled rushing to the ground where the deity was kept. Sukku Masa, the gaita or village priest, and a few other men had accompanied him. They brought the deity into the temple – an open quarter made of thatched roof. Then, to their alarm, they saw security forces descend from the hills.
In southern Chhattisgarh, residents of forest villages like Nendra, which lie in Maoist-dominated territory, tend to be fearful of the security forces – for good reason. Several times, as judicial enquiries have established, security forces out on Maoist operations have ended up gunning down civilians instead.
And so, as they saw the security personnel coming down from the hill, Lakku said he and the other men ran towards the forest, only to be intercepted by another set of security personnel. Raising his arms in the air, Lakku recalled yelling out at them: “We are the perma and the gaita of the village, don’t shoot at us.”
The security forces did not shoot. Instead, they nabbed the six men, tied their hands, and made them walk single file. The perma said his wife Nonni Sannu, holding her infant, tried to intervene, imploring the police not to take her husband, but she was hit and shooed away.
The six men marched quietly all the way to a security camp in Palnar.
Unknown to them, the security forces had begun storming the village.
Villagers contest police claims
One of the homes that the police reportedly raided was that of Kamli Kunjam, a deaf-and-mute girl with mental disabilities, according to her family.
That morning, Kamli was resting at home, recovering from a stomach ache, said her mother, Somli Kunjam, when a small group of security personnel, including women, barged into the house around 9 am and dragged her out.
When Somli protested, pointing out that Kamli was unwell, she said the women security personnel told her that if the need arose, they would take her to a hospital.
Kamli’s grandmother Joggi recalled seeing the personnel lead her granddaughter away, not along the village path, but through a forest route. This made her fearful about her granddaughter being subjected to possible sexual assault.
When Ayte Kunjam, Kamli’s sister-in-law, went into the forests the next day, she found Kamli’s bangle.
Kamli never returned. The family later discovered the police had listed her among the Maoists killed in the encounter.
Denying that her daughter was a Maoist, Somli Kunjam said if the police had suspected her daughter of wrongdoing, why had they not arrested her, why had they killed her instead? Breaking down in tears, she sang a dirge in her daughter’s memory: “Who will call me yayo [mother]? I wish death had come due to your illness, not in this cruel way.”
In its press statement about the encounter, the police claimed to have killed 13 Maoist cadres from company no 2 of the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
But the villagers had prepared another list, according to which 10 of the 13 killed were Maoists. But three others, including Kamli, were civilians.
Another civilian, according to the list, was Chaitu Potam, the 25-year-old whose family members I had met in the hospital.
Now, at home in Korcholi, a neighbouring village of Nendra, his wife, Somi Potam, said that she had found it difficult to identify her husband among the battered faces at the hospital, till she saw his toe.
On the morning of the encounter, like others in the village, Somi said she and her husband had woken up to the sounds of gunfire from Masumeta hill around 4 am, at the rooster’s first crow. After the guns fell silent around 7 am, she said Chaitu ventured into the forest – it was mahua season, and the father of six children did not want to waste a morning sitting at home. Every year, during the mahua season, Adivasis collect flowers that have fallen from mahua trees to dry and sell them in exchange for other commodities at nearby markets.
Somi said she would have joined her husband later in the day after cooking and feeding her six children, but word that the security forces were out in the area held her back.
Chaitu did not return that day. Next day, when the police circulated a statement about 13 deaths in the encounter in the Korcholi-Nendra forest, his family panicked and rushed to Bijapur.
On April 4, they found his body in the hospital morgue, wrapped in plastic, with the police identifying him as a Maoist. Somi said she protested on the spot, telling the police that her husband was a civilian, but they did not listen to her. Quietly, she returned with his body.
Scroll contacted the Bijapur police superintendent to seek his response to these allegations. He did not respond to calls or text messages.
Asked if she planned to seek justice for her husband’s killing, Somi said: “I would, if I get support.”
Made to load dead bodies
Away from the village, hours after they had been detained by the police on the morning of April 2, the perma Sonu Lakku said he and the other five men spent the night huddled together in Palnar camp.
Around 7 am the next morning, they were asked to load 11 bodies into two large SUVs – five bodies in one and the remaining six in the other, Lakku recalled.
Around noon, two more bodies came in, one of which they recognised as that of Kamli Kunjam, which to their surprise was in a Maoist uniform. Although Kamli’s face was battered – as if someone had hit her with stones, recalled the perma, punching his face with his fist to show how her face had been disfigured – he was able to recognise her from her eyes and the way her mouth was set.
The other body was of a young man from the nearby Metapal village, who Lakku said was a Maoist.
Most bodies were hard to recognise since the faces were battered, bruised, covered with blood, he noted. As they spoke among themselves about the state of the bodies, the police heckled them and asked them to quickly load the bodies, he recalled.
The bodies were driven to Jaitlur from there they were taken by chopper to Bijapur, while the six men travelled by road to the district headquarters. They spent four more days in police custody before they were released on the morning of April 7.
Shot at close range
The six men were not the only ones that the security forces had detained.
As a police statement released on April 5 noted, a man named Sudru Kunjam and two women named Ayti Punem and Malti Kunjam had been “rounded up as the three were trying to run away as they saw the force”. Another two men, Aytu Punem and Enku Punem, had been arrested since the police had a warrant pending against them, the statement added.
But the police statement was silent on another detention.
On April 4, in the hospital compound, Chaitu Potam’s nephew had told me that he had seen a young girl named Sarila Potam inside the police station. On April 8, I met her family at their home in Korcholi. They told me that the police had picked up Sarila on the morning of April 2, while she was pounding rice at home.
Sarila’s grandmother Jogi Potam made a shocking revelation: she said that after the guns fell silent in the nearby hills, around noon, a woman, wearing a green floral print saree, hurriedly walked into their house and began to change her clothes. Asked if the woman was a Maoist, Jogi said she had no clue – this was the first time she had seen her.
Soon, security personnel followed in her footsteps. Entering the house, they pulled out the woman, took her to the backyard, made her wear a Maoist uniform, Jogi recounted. Where did the uniform come from, I asked. The security forces were probably carrying it, she said.
The police dragged the woman away. They also took Sarila, who was sitting on the porch, pounding rice. The two were taken some distance away, Jogi said. But she and her daughter-in-law were able to watch them from behind a tree. She recalled seeing the security personnel surround the woman. Next, Jogi heard a gunshot. The woman had been killed.
Pausing her account here, Jogi went back inside her house and pulled out the clothes the woman had worn – a green-coloured sari with blue floral prints, a red underskirt and a red-checked shirt.
Sarila had survived. I met her the next day after she was released from police custody on April 7. Sitting next to her mother under a tree, the girl, was quiet and spoke only when asked. She said the police had taken her away in another direction, some distance away from where they shot the woman who had entered their house.
It was unclear why the police had taken her in custody. In the police station, Sarila said she shared space with a girl from another village. The two were given some dry ration which they cooked. One day, a policeman who spoke Gondi asked her to turn around and beat her, until she fell down, she said.
She knew her father and mother had come to the thana everyday to meet her. But the police had not given them access, until she was released on the evening of April 7.
Dead on police records
Days after the upheaval, there was anger in the villages about the police action. In Korcholi, villagers said among those who had fled to the forest to escape the security forces was a man called Pappu Padam. Two nights later, his body was found in the forest – while hiding, he had possibly fallen from a tree and died.
In Nendra, the perma asked: why did the security forces enter the village to terrorise us? Could it be because the Maoists had come to participate in the village festival, I asked. No, insisted the priest, the Maoists were not present in the village. However, he acknowledged that they were camping in the Masumeta hill nearby.
A detailed account of the Maoist meeting came from – believe or not – a man featured on the police list of the 13 dead.
He lived in a village near Nendra. Along with a Gondi translator, I went to the village looking for his family, expecting to find them in bereavement. Instead, villagers told me, with a laugh, that the man was still alive.
He was catching fish in a nearby lake when we reached. The Gondi translator went down to the lakeside to explain the purpose of our visit. Requesting that no photographs be taken, and his name not be revealed, he sat down on a large stone to narrate his side of the story.
On the evening of April 1, as the festival was concluding in Nendra village, he said the Maoists summoned a few villagers to the nearby Masumeta hill, where they had been holding an internal meeting for three days.
Along with others, the man reached the spot late in the night around 9 pm. He estimated there were 150 uniformed Maoists there, and 50 civilians like him. He was unsure what the Maoists wanted to discuss with the villagers – all he knew was that the meeting was to conclude the next day.
The previous day, a wild bear had attacked the group. So when the security forces stealthily came up the Masumeta hill that night, the Maoists mistook the disruption for another wild bear attack – till the gunfire broke out.
The first bullets killed two Maoists almost instantly, the man recalled. Other Maoists fired back at the security personnel. In the ensuing chaos, the village man lay low for a while until he found an escape route through the forests. The Maoists, too, managed to slip away.
“The forces were upset that they could not get as many Maoists in their ambush and so they ran berserk into the villages,” the man recalled. It didn’t help that the Maoists too took refuge in the villages, he added.
By the time the man emerged from his hideout after two days, he discovered that the police had declared him to be a dead Maoist. Who took the body that was labelled his from the hospital, I asked. He laughed. His wife collected the body of one of the Maoists killed. “We all gave him a burial in the village,” he said.
He was not the only survivor on the police list of dead, he said, surprising me even further. A senior woman Maoist that the police claim to have killed is in fact alive, he chuckled.
Unwilling to offer more details, he got up to leave. While he returned to the fishing nets, I came back with more unanswered questions.
All photographs by Malini Subramaniam.
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