A Raging Fire

A Live, Unsettling Mirror of India’s Failings as a Nation in the Chhattisgarh Conflict

- Sudeep Chakravarti

Read this: “Forty-year-old Madvi Bajare was ill so he and his wife Subbi could not run away when the forces came. Bajare’s two younger daughters, ten-year-old Bheeme and eight-year-old Mutti, were also at home, as was his elder daughter Kattam Kanni; she was visiting with her two year-old son, Suresh.

“Everyone was dragged out of the house. The parents and their youngest daughter Mutti were stabbed and left by a mahua tree. The eldest, Kanni, was stripped, raped and then killed. In the process they also cut off three of her baby’s fingers and put the crying baby on his dead mother’s chest.”

This description is one among several from The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar by the sociologist and human rights activist Nandini Sundar, an acknowledged expert in the state-versus-Maoists-rebels-versus-the-people conflict in Chhattisgarh. Specifically, the deliberately under-developed and mineral-rich region of southern Chhattisgarh— erstwhile Bastar—today split into several districts of which Dantewada, Bastar, Bijapur and Sukma are most frequently in the news. Part of the so-called Dandakaranya region that includes parts of Maharashtra, Odisha and Telangana, it remains the biggest Maoist laboratory of social engineering and the rebels’ largest active war zone and sanctuary. It’s the most security force-saturated part of India besides Jammu & Kashmir and Northeast India.

The incident is from 2009, during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s second term in office running the central government. A second term, too, for Raman Singh of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the chief minister of Chhattisgarh.