Maoist, Destined To Live In No Man's Land

The miserably poor adivasis of Bastar are caught between two armies, that of the State and the Maoists. The latest Maoist ambush has only made lives worse for villagers.

- Ushinor Majumdar

The government’s current arterial push through the heart of the Maoist insurgency is a road being built diagonally across Sukma district in south Chhattisgarh. It is only when blood was spilled during the road’s construction—26 paramilitary personnel were killed on April 24 in a Maoist ambush on a CRPF detachment providing protection—that national attention shifted once again, albeit for a short while, to counter-insurgency and development in the forests of Bastar. To Maoists—going by interviews of top leaders and their statements quoted in media reports over the past few years—the region is a battleground where two ‘systems’ are locked in a life-and death conflict. Much of local adivasi life has come to revolve around the consequent violence as the government tries to regain administrative control of tracts where the Maoists are dominant, besides aiming to put down the insurgency for good.

In fact, the conflict has divided the mostly Gondi-speaking adivasis into two camps pitted against each other: those who are part of village-level committees and militias, which the Maoist party has been organising in their areas of influence since the mid-1980s; and those working for the District Reserve Guard (DRG), which recruits locals, mostly former Maoists and SPOs (“special police officers”, formerly members of Salwa Judum, an anti-Maoist militia allegedly armed by the police and later outlawed by the Supreme Court), and forms the local component of the counter-insurgency spearheaded by central paramilitary forces. To the Maoists, adivasis are forever suspect as potential police informers, while to the security forces, any local without a uniform could be a Maoist courier or sympathiser.