A dead body in the forest, injured children, and other unanswered questions about Bastar encounter

A bloated body lay in the bushes, brimming with flies.

On December 19, a week after the Chhattisgarh police claimed to have killed seven uniformed Maoists in the forests of Narayanpur district, I had trekked to Kummam village where four of the dead belonged to. Their bodies had been buried by the time I reached.

Their families told me they were ordinary villagers, not Maoists, and that they had been killed by the security forces in the bushes close to their farmland.

The villagers took me to the spot where the killings had happened – it was a two-and half-hour trek from the Kalhaja-Donderbeda forests, the official site where the police claimed to have exchanged gunfire with the insurgents on December 12.

While we were exploring the area, an unexpected stench hit us. As we stepped closer, covering our noses, we spotted the decaying body of a young man. He was wearing a two-toned blue t-shirt and shorts. His head was turned to one side, his hands splayed out, one leg folded. There was a large hole in his head, and maggots covered his eyes.

The villagers recognised him as Nevru Oyam, the son of Gudsa Oyam, the patel of Kummam village. Gudsa was among the four from the village who had been killed in the police firing on December 12.

With the discovery of his son’s body, the death toll in the controversial encounter rose to eight. And the questions surrounding the police version of the events thickened.

Divergent accounts

Kummam village is part of the Rekawaya panchayat of Narayanpur’s Orchha block. The block lies in Abujhmaad, literally the unknown hills. A largely unsurveyed region, it has been used as a base area by the guerillas of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

In 2024, Chhattisgarh police launched an anti-Maoist offensive under the banner of “Maad Bachao Abhiyan” – Save the Maad campaign.

As part of it, the police claim to have killed over 100 Maoists in and around Abujhmaad. This is nearly half of the 217 deaths that the police have declared as insurgent killings in Bastar in 2024.

Many of these deaths, however, have been contested by the families of those killed, as Scroll has reported previously.

But it is the December 12 encounter that caught wider public attention, largely because four children injured in the police firing were brought to a nearby hospital by Adivasi leader and activist Soni Sori. Initially the hospital noted that the injuries were caused by an “unknown foreign article”. Subsequently, when one of the minors, Ramli Oyam, was taken to a hospital in Raipur, doctors retrieved a bullet lodged in her neck.

Responding to the furore over the injured children, in a press statement released on December 17, the police claimed that the injuries were caused by splinters from crude grenades fired by the Maoists. The statement alleged the Maoists had thrown a human protection ring around senior cadre Karthik alias Dasru, and the children were part of this ring.

A statement released by the Maoists on December 13 acknowledged that Karthik was a senior leader of the CPI (Maoist) – aged 62, he was unwell and had been assigned an attendant, Ramli Madkam. Of the seven killed, according to the statement, only Karthik and Ramli were Maoists. The remaining five were ordinary villagers.

To independently investigate these claims, I trekked to Kummam and Lekawada, another village where a person had been killed in the police firing. At the end of the arduous journey through a hilly forested terrain, what emerged was a startlingly different account of the encounter than what the police had offered. In both the villages, people said the security forces had shot at unarmed people at close range.

Hiding in the grass

Kummam is a small hamlet of about 13 houses, all belonging to members of the Oyam clan. Like other Adivasi farmers living in this part of Bastar, they practice shifting cultivation, known as penda kheti, by clearing a new patch of forestland every couple of years.

The current penda – or temporary farm – of the village is about an hour’s trek uphill.

Every year in September, as the rainy season ends, members of the village move to this patch of land, where they have built temporary homesteads. They stay there till March, harvesting their crop of kosra, a local millet, by reaping, threshing and cleaning the grain.

In 2024, persistent rains meant the cycle was delayed, Aytu Oyam, a man in his fifties explained, as he sat perched on a rock next to his temporary homestead, surrounded by other villagers.

Late evening on December 10, after the villagers returned from the farm to their temporary homesteads, they heard three consecutive explosions, each separated by five to seven minutes, he said. This was the first sign they picked up of the presence of the security forces in the area. The villagers grew worried.

The next morning, keen not to lose precious time in the harvest season, they resumed their farming activities. But the sound of gunfire grew closer, and a stray bullet scraped the head of Sonu Oyam, an eight-year-old boy who was playing close to the penda. Some of the young people of the village then decided to go and hide in the nearby forest – a common response in a region where civilians fear the security forces might target them, perceiving them to be supporters of the insurgents.

Nine of the sixteen who fled to the forest were girls. The seven others included Nevru Oyam, the son of Gudsa Oyam, the patel; Motu Oyam, Aytu’s son; and Kohla Oyam, the father of three children, aged five, four and two years.

Also part of the group was 19-year-old Manish Oyam, who took me to a patch of forest, thick with waist-high date shrubs, which locals call chhind ghaas. It was here that he and the others spent the night, he said, crouching down to demonstrate how the group took refuge in the grass to avoid being seen by the security forces.

Despite the canopy cover over the grass, the next morning, the group’s presence was detected. Manish suspects it was because of “the small plane” that flew over them – possibly, a drone used by the security forces.

As the security forces grew closer, they surrounded the group from all sides – barring one opening to the left. Manish claims to have overheard the conversation between two security personnel, who were talking in Gondi. The first one asked if the people who were hiding in the grass should be caught or killed. The second one, according to Manish, replied: “Everyone should be shot.”

Possibly hearing this, Motu panicked. He stood up and ran towards the opening on the left, Manish said. He was hit by a bullet at the back of his shoulder. Kohla was next – one bullet hit him in the chest, another hit him in the abdomen. While both Motu and Kohla had run towards the opening, Manish ran in another direction and managed to escape unhurt.

Others were not so lucky. A young girl named Somari was caught by the forces and killed, Manish said. Later, Nevru Oyam’s body was found about 200 meters from the spot – Manish said he too may have been shot dead while escaping. Nevru’s father, Gudsa Oyam, was not among the sixteen who had hid in the bushes. Although he had left the temporary homestead and followed them, they eventually lost track of him, Manish said, when asked how Gudsa was killed.

Several others were injured, including eight-year-old Sonu, and 17-year-old Ramli, who fled the firing spot along with three other girls, Sudri, Sunila and Tulsi.

When I visited the area, Ramli was in Raipur, getting treated at a hospital. But I ran into the other three girls on the way to Kummam. Although they had escaped bullet injuries, they had cut and bruised themselves while running away.

The girls showed me their injuries as they narrated an account of the firing, which was later corroborated by Manish and the others in the village. “We would have been killed had we decided to stay on,” Tulsi said.

Strikingly, the girls recalled that while they were escaping, they had run into a uniformed policeman and a policewoman. Neither of them stopped them or asked them any questions. “We just bent our heads and continued to walk as fast as we could,” said Sudri.

An abandoned baby

Back at the temporary huts of the Kummam villagers were Kohla Oyam’s children – Bimla, 5, Suklal, 4, and Rainu, 2. Before he fled to the bushes, Kohla left them with two older children, their neighbours – Binesh, 7, and Konda, 9.

“He told the children to stay put where they were and promised to return as soon as the police left,” Manish Oyam recalled.

The father possibly assumed that the security forces, even if they raided the penda and found the children, would leave them unharmed.

However, as they heard the sound of gunfire, the children grew terrified and ran away. Unable to carry Rainu, they left the little one in the forest.

When the firing ceased, women and elderly people rushed out from their field in search of all the missing, including the children. On December 13, the next day, the children were found while they were returning to the homestead. They had spent the night in the forest. “They even encountered a wild bear which brushed past them without harming them,” said Budri, Kohla’s wife, as she drew her children close to her.

But, on December 13, Rainu was still missing – as was Kohla. Word reached Kummam that an abandoned child had been found in Lekawada and had been taken to Tadopot village. Budri rushed to Tadopot. Midway in the two-hour trek, she was reunited with Rainu, near Palli village.

But the joy of finding her child was short-lived. At Tadopot, people showed her the police statement that was circulating on social media. It had photos of the dead bodies found. One of them was that of her husband, Kohla.

“What have I looted from the government that it has looted so much from me?” Budri said, in Gondi, looking drained. “How am I going to carry on with my life?”

“Had I not had any children, I could have still lived with someone,” she continued. “But who will accept me with my three children?”

Firing near a rivulet

In Lekawada village, Masa Oyam, in his fifties, narrated the story of how Rainu had been entrusted in his care – by a policeman.

“I was on the farm on the 12th…when a policeman handed over the child to me around 4 pm,” he recalled. The policeman, speaking in Hindi, told Masa he had found the child in the forest. Masa, speaking in Gondi, told him the child was not his. The policeman dismissed this – he thrust the child into Masa’s hands and walked off.

Like Kummam, Lekawada too is a small hamlet of about 10 houses, roughly about a two-hour trek through thick forest. Its residents too practice shifting cultivation or penda kheti. It takes an hour of trekking through the hills to reach their penda farms, which are spread out in different locations, said Lachchu Oyam, a young boy. His family’s penda farm was on a patch of land called Ayenel.

On December 12, his father, also named Masa Oyam, his mother Sudni and his younger brother Seethram had left home early to reach Ayenel by 6 am. About 20 others from the village were working there.

Masa, along with his 14-year-old son Seethram, went to a nearby rivulet Penguda Nala to fetch water for mud-plastering work. The father and son were accompanied by Masa’s sisters-in-law, Lakke and Puse, and brother-in-law Gora Goppa. When they reached the nala, they were shocked to find themselves surrounded by security forces, who were just 500 metres away, said Lakke. They froze. Seconds later, two bullets hit Masa, one at the level of his chest, the other a little below. As Masa fell, the others ran away as fast as they could. While running, Seethram was hit by a bullet in his buttock, Lakke said.

The injured child stayed in the forest that night, returning next morning to his mother, who was bereft with sorrow at her husband’s death.

Like the other injured children from Kummam, he was taken to the nearest hospital, in Bhairamgarh, by Adivasi leader Soni Sori.

The hospital register notes that a child named Chaitram was admitted on December 14 with “some unknown foreign particle” in his “buttock and thigh”.

Among the other injured children was Sonu Oyam, the eight-year-old from Kummam. The Bhairamgarh hospital record states “he was hit by a foreign particle on head”. The third minor was Raju Bandam, a 17-year-old boy from Diwalur, who had come to his sister’s house in Kummam to help her with her penda kheti. He had been admitted to the hospital with a fractured ankle and injuries on the fingers of his right hand – a bullet had whizzed past him while he was collecting millets in the field.

The fourth minor, Ramli Oyam, the 17-year-old girl from Kummam, was first admitted to the Bhairamgarh hospital for treatment. A discharge document noted the presence of an “unknown particle” which had hit her in “the back of her neck”. At the Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital in Raipur, where she underwent a surgery on December 20, the hospital records state a “bullet was identified and retrieved”. Its size was noted as 2.5 mm x 5 mm.

A large area

Until the children had been admitted to the Bhairamgarh hospital, the press statements by the police had offered a very sanitised account of events.

According to the first press statement released on the evening of December 12, an encounter had taken place between the security forces and the Maoists at 3 am in south Abujhmaad – no specific location was mentioned.

The second statement on December 14 said that a joint team of Chhattisgarh police and the Central Reserve Police Force was dispatched for the security operation on December 10, and that an exchange of fire with the Maoists began at 3 am in the Kalhaja-Donderbeda forests and continued till late.

By December 18, the third statement claimed the encounter had started at 8 am and continued till 3 pm, and the location was the Lekawada-Kalhaja-Kondakoti forests.

On the ground, however, I found Kummam was about three hours by foot from Lekawada. While the forests between Kalhaja and Donderbeda, where the encounter is said to have taken place, is about four hours by foot from their village Kummam, said the villagers.

The accounts of the villagers of Kummam and Lekawada suggest what had unfolded was not a single encounter but several rounds of firing at multiple locations over two days. While eight-year-old Sonu of Kummam got hurt on December 11, the others were killed and injured in firing on December 12.

I asked the villagers whether armed Maoists were present in the area, and whether there had been an exchange of fire between them and the police. Everywhere, the response was the same: they had not seen anything.

On December 10, they heard distant explosions, said Aytu Oyam in Kummam. When I asked him if they saw any armed insurgents in the area, he waved his hand and said “Naxal illa” – no Naxals.

In Lekawada village, Lakke had pointed to a courtyard about 500 metres away from the ghotul or community centre where we had sat down to talk, to indicate how far the security forces were when they fired at her brother-in-law. When I asked her if Maoists were present in the area, she shook her head.

Apart from the eight dead and the four injured children, three men had been missing from their villages since December 12 – Ramal Oyam from Kummam village, Mangudu Oyam from Edwa village, and Hidma Parsa from Rengawaya village. Mangudu’s wife, Ayti Oyam, trekked to Bhairamgarh to look for him in both the morgue and the police station. She could not find him. Officials redirected her to the Narayanpur district headquarters, but the young woman told me that it was too far for her to travel with her baby.

Questions for the police

The villagers’ account raises several questions about the police’s conduct.

If the villagers of Kummam are to be believed, a drone helped the security forces detect their presence in the bushes. Wouldn’t the drone images have shown that the people hiding there were unarmed villagers? Assuming senior officials were monitoring these images in real time, why did they not instruct the ground personnel to spare them?

The villagers also claimed to have overheard a conversation between the security personnel about whether they should be caught or killed. Was the decision to shoot at them influenced by the police’s practice of giving hefty monetary rewards to its troopers?

Officially, the personnel are entitled to Rs 40 lakh in rewards for the December 12 operation – Rs 25 lakh for Karthik, Rs 5 lakh for Ramli Madkam, and Rs 2 lakh each for the remaining five who the villagers say are innocent, unarmed civilians.

If Nevru Oyam’s body had been found by the security forces, perhaps he too would have declared to be one more bounty-carrying Maoist?

Inspector General of police, Bastar, Sundarraj Pattilingam, strongly denied these allegations. “It is in our interest that we arrest Maoists rather than recover dead bodies as we would get better information from the arrested Maoists,” he said. “No operation is launched with an objective to kill or harm anyone. Maoist cadres are killed only in a retaliation action, when they fire upon the jawans, who also have their right for self-defence.”

Sundarraj said the injured children were given “the best of treatment”, and reiterated that according to the preliminary investigation, senior Maoist cadres may have used them as a human shield. “Further inquiry is underway to get a clearer picture,” he said.

He declined to comment on the divergence between the location identified by the villagers and the site of the encounter mentioned in the police statement. “The matter is under investigation and I cannot divulge any specific information, which could hamper the legal procedure,” he said.

All photographs by Malini Subramaniam