Freny Manecksha - Flaming Forest, Wounded Valley: Stories from Bastar and Kashmir

FLAMING FOREST, WOUNDED VALLEY

For those who dare to tell their stories and for those brave truth tellersjournalists and human rights activistswho recount them and even go to jail for doing so.

Contents

Preface

I n 2010, I began a series of journeys to various parts of India to try and understand peoples uprisings and movements. I had moved out of mainstream media and, as an independent journalist, was keen to visit the hinterlands where crucial struggles for survival were taking place. My visits to Bastar in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Kashmir brought about a tectonic shift in my ways of seeing. They set me on a learning course, and over the years, as I continued my journeys, I saw the horrific consequences of State repression in the name of national interest: death, dispossession and routine violation of human rights. I saw the numbing tragedies that result from the vicious cycle of militarism and militancy and are dismissed as collateral damage.

From the Adivasis of Bastar, who were squatting in the forests of adjoining Telangana, I heard accounts of killings, beatings and razing of homes because they were reluctant to relocate to the camps the government had set up for them. There was no one whom they could turn to for redressal. This violence was emanating from the police and largely from the Salwa Judum, a militia, initiated by the state and corporate interests who wanted to clear forest lands for mining. Adivasis who resisted could also be hauled away to jail and labelled Naxali. In Odisha, which I visited two months later, the betel leaf growers of Dhinkia who had protested against the acquisition of their lands by the Odisha government and a South Korean steel company had been jailed in similar fashion. One thousand villagers had false cases foisted on them. The Korean company gave up its bid years later but the struggle is not yet over. There are new moves to acquire lands, this time by an Indian company.

I arrived in Kashmir in October at the tail-end of the summer uprising of 2010, following encounter killings of three Kashmiri civilians by the Army in Kupwara. There had been massive protest marches, and people had been killed in firing by the police and security forces. The armed struggle of the 1990s had waned, militancy was down. It had been replaced by an unarmed mass civil disobedience movement. But the number of troops on the ground had not been reduced and the Valley remained one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world. Some 110 people, including an eleven-year-old boy, were killed in the face-off that took place on the streets that summer of 2010. Visual images captured the contrast between boys with stones in hand protesting against heavily armed troops. Pellet guns were being deployed, a weapon seldom used elsewhere. Militarization, I learnt, has an added dimension in Kashmir. Not only is it a deterrence against Pakistan in the territorial wars but it is also a weapon to quell Kashmiri dissidence and exercise control over the political aspirations of its people. These aspirations existed even before Partition. Dissent against the Hindu Dogra rulers had been openly manifested in an uprising in 1931. Military strength is bolstered by extraordinary security legislation like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). It provides blanket immunity to the security forces against crimes like unlawful detentions, torture and custodial killings. My travels to all these regions were a revelatory exercise on the ways in which the state uses nomenclatures like development, or concerns of national security or securing the sovereignty of the nation to wage war on citizens and hold in contempt their basic rights.

I returned again and again to Kashmir and then Chhattisgarh and saw how the conflict and the imposition of authoritarian rule permeate every aspect of life. Militarism spreads and enters every nook and crevice of everyday living. No space is left untouched.

I learned how merely failing to stop at a check-post barrier can get you shot in Kashmir. Or then, as a lawyer in Mumbai explained, how even routine activities become dangerous for Adivasis living deep in the forests of Bastar. He spoke about an incident in which seventeen Adivasis were shot one night as they sat in their fields discussing the impending celebrations for Beej Pandum (a festival before the sowing of seeds). They were labelled as dreaded Maoists by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) who came upon them during a night march. I remember him saying that as middle-class urban Indians we were insulated from this violence and have very little inkling of how life can be in other places.This gave me the seedling for the book: how places and spaces are impacted by the politics of a nation and how people fight to reclaim them.

For Adivasis, the forest has shaped their entire culture and ecosystem and produced what a researcher in development, Arunopol Seal, calls an ethics of reciprocity. This deals with how indigenous peoples live in harmony with the trees, waterbodies and earth. What happens to this construct when Adivasis are ordered to leave the forests they have lived in all their lives and are settled in makeshift camps by the side of busy roads? How did that impact their right to life? The government ordered the move on the pretext that it was for the peoples safety against attacks by the Naxalites but intimidatory tactics made it clear it was the concerns of corporate firms, with whom it had drawn up memorandums of understanding, that was paramount. It was not as if the Adivasis had other choices: anyone who chose to ignore the Chhattisgarh governments diktat was outlawed.

In Kashmir, Bakarwals and other pastoral communities have traditionally used the meadows as grazing grounds for their animals in the summer months. Increasing militarization and the armys takeover of lands put their livelihood and their own lives at risk. One example was when the Jammu & Kashmir government in 1964 leased out the vast meadow, known as Tosamaidan, to the army for use as an artillery field. Firing exercises began in the morning and coincided with school hours: children cowered in fright as guns boomed and sometimes the school building shook. The army continued to use the beautiful meadow as a firing range until 2014. Unexploded shells lying around in the area have killed at least 65 people, including children, and injured and disabled almost 300. In June 2009, two people who were collecting iron scrap in the meadow were killed when an old shell exploded. In 2020, three people were grievously injured, including fifteen-year-old Muhammad Asif Wani, who was playing in the meadow.

In Chhattisgarh, schools were taken over by security forces and were often blown up by the Maoists. Sometimes school buildings became informal interrogation and torture centres with the police holding Adivasis there in unlawful custody. One of the cases I heard about from lawyers was the story of Arjun (told later in the book). It was Arjuns desire to get an education that became the very reason for him to be cruelly targeted and killed. The security forces were irked because he was padha, likha aur sawal karta tha. He could read, write and questioned them when they made unlawful arrests of people in the village.

The concept of home as a safe inviolate space does not exist in Kashmir where AFSPA empowers security troops to enter at any hour and where night raids have staged a big comeback. Troops can force their way into homes at any hour, deploy a male member as a human shield or decoy and search the rooms. Even the aged are not spared. In one case, security forces did not hesitate to drag an elderly woman in poor mental health out of her room, with scant regard to the fact that she did not have her salwar on. Nor was she given time to cover her head.