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Bastar’s choice: Take up gun for govt or Maoists by Jaideep Hardikar

Nandkumar Naitam is relieved after a month of “torturous” anxiety.

“I thought it over again and again,” the 20-year-old tribal youth says. “I thought that if I couldn’t get a rifle, I’d pick up my traditional weapon, the bow-and-arrow.”

It was a desperation that Nandu, as he is fondly called, shared with his 5,000-odd fellow special police officers (SPOs), who till a month ago formed the Chhattisgarh government’s frontline against the Maoists in the blood-soaked Bastar region.

The SPOs are temporary police employees who are paid Rs 3,000 a month — one-third of a constable’s salary. They are mostly tribal youths, whose knowledge of the local dialect and terrain the government looked to exploit in the battle against the Maoists.

But on July 5, the Supreme Court slammed the government for using the “unskilled and illiterate” tribals as “cannon fodder” before the better-armed rebels, and asked it to “immediately disband and disarm” the force.

The SPOs, Nandu says, had their firearms taken away and were confined to their heavily fortified camps. There they stayed huddled, fearing for their lives and worried about their future, as news came in that the Maoists had been quick to take revenge, killing an unarmed SPO in Dantewada and another in Bijapur.

But now Nandu and his comrades are sighing in relief because they will get back their firearms, as well as six months’ training and increased pay. The state’s BJP government has decided to get around the court order by absorbing these young men as police regulars.

A new auxiliary force will be raised with these SPOs, and recruitment will begin anytime now. The state government has relaxed the educational norms for police recruitment (Class VIII) since most of the SPOs are illiterate.

“We are happy, but the past month of uncertainty has been a torture,” an SPO said at a camp, one of 23 scattered across Bastar.

No choices

Nandu too may be happy but the rifle he craves, and which he will now get back, will not make him all that safe.

It’s six years since he has last been home, to the village in Bijapur district where his parents and brother live. He rarely gets to meet his parents.

“It’s only when they come to the market here that I can meet them — but not openly,” Nandu says. He has tried to persuade them to come and live with him at the camp but “they always refuse, because we have our land there”.

The SPO’s is a life few would choose if they had an option. But options are at a premium in Bastar’s killing fields where the local tribals are hostage to the state-Maoist conflict.

Intelligence reports say that while the state drafts in more local youths to battle the Maoists, the rebels too have stepped up recruitment. There is no room for fence-sitting or neutrality in this zone of fratricidal conflict.

Ultimately, as Dantewada police chief Ankit Garg puts it, whoever has the support of the local population will win this protracted war.

For the tribal, there is no third choice. Few of the SPOs has ever been to school; hardly any has travelled beyond Bastar. Nandu himself is an ex-Maoist: he was once a dalam (squad) member. He says he had never wanted to go with the rebels when he was a child. Now, he has no option but to join the police.

“It’s difficult to say what I would have been if I could choose my profession,” Nandu said. “But it’s difficult for peace to return to my home. So I must fight.”

The government too wants him to go on fighting. It knows that if Nandu doesn’t fight for the state, he may have no choice but to fight for the enemy. One reason the administration has been so quick to decide to raise the new force is that immediately after the court order, the Maoists had appealed to the SPOs to return to their villages.

If the government did not act fast, the chances of some of them joining the Maoists could not be ruled out, said an officer who monitors Nandu and his group of SPOs. The police brass decided the state must not let go of this “highly motivated force”.

Tainted past

The SPOs, also called the Koya Commandos, were recruited from among the ranks of the Salwa Judum, a controversial anti-Maoist vigilante group that was formed in 2005 in Bijapur and later co-opted by the government.

However, this tribal militia, later joined by non-tribals too, was accused of widespread rights violations against their own brethren in the region. As criticism of its actions grew, the state absorbed some of its younger fighters as SPOs, who are an officially sanctioned force.

This process of legitimisation is now to be repeated again when the SPOs are recruited as regular policemen.

Notwithstanding the national and international criticism of the Salwa Judum and the SPOs, the state police have always strongly backed them.

“We are up against a faceless enemy. The local youths (SPOs) are good in intelligence networking and play a crucial role in counter-insurgency operations,” Garg said.

Besides, the Goendi language in Bastar has several variants, the dialect in Kanker (north Bastar) being different from the one spoken in Dantewada or Bijapur. For most of the central forces and non-tribal police, it’s next to impossible to communicate with the Adivasis of the region.

“The local youths act as translators and interpreters,” Garg said. Also, they know the terrain better and, as police officers are ready to vouch, are fierce fighters. That some of them are former rebels means “they know the Maoists and their tactics”, Garg said.

This is why the Maoists don’t miss a single opportunity to kill an SPO, says Nandu, squatting with his friends on a road cutting through two lines of their hutments at their camp.

A police officer who handles SPOs said that when the court verdict came, “It was difficult to inform them that they could no longer go on operations or keep arms. They were obviously shocked and worried.”

BJP gains

In Raipur, the court verdict dominated two cabinet meetings, which relaxed the police recruitment norms for Bastar for three years. Next, the government has ratified an ordinance to raise the state auxiliary police force. It will be enacted into law during the Assembly’s monsoon session.

The new force, government sources said, will cost the exchequer Rs 40-50 crore a year. A bureaucrat claimed the recruits would be sensitised to the law and human rights.

Politically, the BJP will benefit, observers say. The move to bail out the SPOs will go down well with the followers of the erstwhile Salwa Judum movement. Bastar is crucial to the BJP, which holds 11 of the region’s 12 Assembly seats compared with the Congress’s one.

In the 90-member Assembly, the BJP has 49 seats and the Congress 39 and the Bahujan Samaj Party, two. Leave Bastar aside, and the Congress levels with the BJP, both having 38 seats from the plains.