Hope and fury in Malkangiri: A mother finds her son's body but yearns for her husband's return

On Wednesday morning, a clutch of sari-clad women and a few men ran behind a rust-red truck as it pulled into the district police office in the Odisha town of Malkangiri. The doors of the vehicle were thrown open to reveal 24 wooden boxes stacked inside. These rudimentary coffins, the police said, contained the bodies of Maoists killed in a battle on the Odisha-Andhra border on Monday.

After hearing news about the encounter on television or reading about it in the newspapers, many people whose relatives had been reported to be among the dead had begun the arduous journey by bus and private vehicles to Malkangiri, where the battle had taken place. Many were hoping against hope that the information they had received was wrong and that their relatives had not actually been involved in the violence.

Soon after the boxes had been unloaded by a team of policemen, some with surgical masks around their faces to help stifle the sickly smell of the bodies, officers urged the crowd of relatives who had gathered in the complex to look at the sheets of paper they were carrying. Each sheet bore a photograph of the person inside the box. But many families were unwilling to identify their relatives by merely looking at the pictures: they insisted on actually seeing the bodies. They feared that the photographs were not really of the dead people in the coffins and that the authorities would later use their assent to claim that senior Maoist leaders had been killed.

Among those who was sceptical of the exercise was Shirsha, whose son was reported to have been killed during Monday’s operation. “The last time I saw Munna, he was 20,” said Shirsha. “How can I identify him from a picture?”

Shirsha who lives in town of Ongole in Andhra Pradesh learnt about the encounter while watching television. “I didn’t know what to make of it,” she said. “Then I saw the ticker saying Munna had been killed.”

Munna had left their home in Ongole in 2009 to join his father, Ramakrishna or RK, a central committee member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). “RK went to the forest in the 1990s and my son followed his footsteps,” Shirsha said. Some reports stated that RK was also killed in the encounter.

After much persuasion, the police eventually allowed the families to inspect the bodies. Shirsha burst into tears as she peered into the boxes. It was clear that Munna was dead, but RK’s body was not to be seen. “I hope he is alive,” said Shirsha.

A proud father

Shirsha wasn’t the only one who was uncertain about whether the boxes actually contained the body of a relative. Laxman Rao from Maripakala in East Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh, was scanning the photographs to see if his daughter was among them. “Some television channels were saying that Aruna had died,” he said. Rao said that he was proud of his daughter and the work she does for the welfare of Adivasis.

For Rao, the identification process is not new. His son, Azad alias Gopal Rao was allegedly killed in an encounter in May by the Greyhounds – the special anti-Maoist force raised by the Andhra Pradesh government. Azad carried a bounty of Rs 6 lakhs on his head. “He had married an Advasi girl and was mobilising the Advasis to demand what is theirs,” said Rao.

Rao alleges that his family had faced repeated harassment from the police. “They keep on telling us to get our children to surrender,” he said. But he supports his daughter’s decision to continue her battle. “If Aruna comes back it will be injustice to my son’s death,” said Rao.

Devendra had come to Malkangiri to lend emotional support to her friend Shirsha. But when the photographs were circulated, she discovered that her husband Prabhakar – also known as Gangadhar – was among the dead. She reached into her purse to pull out a snapshot of her and her husband sitting outside the Taj Mahal in Agra. “He was an artist,” she said.

Weapons recovered

The Malkangiri district police said that 11 of the 24 bodies brought to the town from the dense forest patch where the battle occurred are yet to be identified. “From what we know, everyone killed is a Maoist,” Malkangiri SP Mitrabhanu Mahapatra told Scroll.in. “We suspect that some deceased Maoists are from Chhattisgarh and we have sent the photographs to our colleagues there for identification.”

Mahapatra said that 22 sophisticated weapons had been seized, indicating that all those killed in the encounter were armed and hence were Maoists.

But some activists at the police office dismissed his claims: only 14 of the dead were Maoists, they claimed. The others were probably innocent villagers or Maoist sympathisers who were at the site, they alleged. Said activist Varavara Rao, who had come to Malkangiri from Hyderabad to help with the identification process: “I think some of those killed were mithishya” – villagers who the Maoists supply with arms so they can protect themselves from attacks by the landlords or the police.

“They are not Maoist as such – they are just villagers,” said Rao who was an emissary for the Maoists during negotiations with the Andhra Pradesh government in 2004.

For others in the complex on Wednesday, however, there was little doubt about the identities of some of the bodies in the boxes. Komal amma sobbed uncontrollably when it became clear that her sister Mamta, one of the senior cadres of the party, had been killed. Mamta had joined the Maoists as a teenager. "She had married her comrade, Suresh,” said Komal amma.

She was especially distressed at the marks on her sister’s chest. Komal amma claimed that the police had tortured her sister but since an autopsy was conducted on all the bodies, it was unclear if the marks were a result of the postmortem procedure.

Even as the identification exercise was underway at the district police office in Malkangiri, the news emerged of another battle on Tuesday. Malkangiri superintendant Mahapatra said that there was another exchange of fire with Maoists after the Greyhounds were returning after Monday’s battle. “During that operation, four were killed,” he said. “We are yet to identify them.”

As the day wore on, the police began to put ice in the boxes to preserve the bodies. Some Border Security Force personnel marched into the compound. This angered some in the crowd. The police "have called them to control us”, said Devendra, whose husband was among the dead. “Or maybe they fear that the dead might wake up from the boxes again. We want these attackers to be punished.”