She was accused of acting as courier between Maoists and Essar group Soni Sori, an Adivasi woman accused of acting as a courier between the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Essar group, was remanded in judicial custody by the first class judicial magistrate, Yogita Vinay Wasnik, here on Monday. Ms. Sori was arrested in New Delhi on suspicions that she served as a conduit for transferring funds between Essar...

Soni Sori, a 36 year old adivasi school teacher arrested in New Delhi on charges of being a Maoist, and sent to Dantewada for police interrogation, was admitted to the district hospital on Monday morning with head and back injuries. "She was unconscious when she was brought here around 9.30 am," said Dr SPS Shandilya, chief medical officer. An X- ray confirmed the injuries. "She has contusions on the right side of...

I got a call around midnight in the Delhi summer. It was Lingaram, the young Muria adivasi from Sameli village in Dantewada, then studying in Noida’s International Media Institute of India. Linga’s misfortunes never seem to end: first he was accused of helping the Maoists, then tortured in the police station toilet, forced to be a special police officer, then released thanks to a habeas corpus petition. In a few months,...

At the Independent People's Tribunal in Delhi last year, a young tribal man, Lingaram Kodopi, had a question: "My family is well off, but they [security forces] accuse me of being a Naxalite. Why can't we adivasis wear a good watch or drive a car without being picked up by the police?" In September 2009, 10 men with AK-47s entered Kodopi's home in Sameli, Dantewada, Chhattisgarh. They wanted to know...

A mysterious death in Raipur hospital reveals routine cross-border raids in A.P. by Chhattisgarh police They lock the door when a post-mortem is under way, but the smell of death seeps through the exhaust vents of the mortuary at the Medical College Hospital in Raipur. Outside the morgue, a pack of dogs sniffed the air experimentally; inside, the corpse of Gangraj, a middle-aged Adivasi man lay in body bag in a...