On Saturday, over 40 hours after the “biggest encounter” involving security forces and Maoists in Chhattisgarh, bodies of 19 alleged “hardcore Maoists and Jan Militia members” lay outside their huts in the three villages of Sarkeguda, Kottaguda and Rajpenta in Bijapur. Villagers alleged no government official had spoken to them or visited their homes, and no autopsies had been carried out on the bodies. Several bodies appeared to have been brutalised. This...

-The Telegraph Chhattisgarh police today admitted that the 18 victims of yesterday’s anti-Maoist operation included children and women but sparked fresh controversy by claiming they were all rebel cadres. The admission came after the bodies were laid out in front of a police station to facilitate identification — a routine procedure — and journalists took photographs. It was clear that several of the victims were children and at least one seemed a...

Many were civilians caught in the crossfire, says Agnivesh The Chhattisgarh police and the Central Reserve Police Force claim to have killed 20 guerrillas of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in two separate incidents in the State’s Sukma and Bijapur districts in the early hours of Friday. But, sources in the State police and inter-faith activist Swami Agnivesh said many of those killed in Bijapur were civilians caught in the...

Indications are that many civilians were killed in the counterinsurgency operation In the early hours of Friday, about six hundred troopers from the Central Reserve Police Force and the Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) commando unit conducted an operation in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district in which 18 tribal villagers were killed and six CRPF troopers injured. Two suspected Maoists were killed in Sukma in an unrelated incident the same day. As per the...

By stopping social security pensions, the Karnataka government has put the lives of over 10 lakh poor in peril. Naveen Basavaraj Kuntoji is nine years old and suffers from cerebral palsy. His movements are greatly restricted, and it looks like he is in great pain every time he valiantly wills his body to do something. When he is hungry, he slowly lifts his hand and points to his mouth. When this...