Kafka in Chhattisgarh: The bureaucratization of violence in India

BASTAR, India — When the List caught up with Kartam Joga in October last year, he couldn’t quite believe it. He reached into his breast pocket for a talisman to wave away this ill omen: a notarized photocopy of his acquittal papers, shrunken down to the size of a playing card and laminated in clear plastic. 

“What List?” he asked the soldiers who apprehended him at a bus stop along a broken highway in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

“The List of suspected Maoists.”

“But I can’t be on the List. I’ve been freed by the courts.”

Kartam Joga is a widely respected figure in these parts. Amid an insurgency that pits nearly 30,000 Indian troops against the guerrilla army of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), Joga stands out as a politician known for speaking for civilians caught in this vortex of violence. His activism has enraged Chhattisgarh’s security apparatus, which imprisoned him for nearly three years, prompting Amnesty International to declare him a prisoner of conscience. He was eventually acquitted of all charges by the courts.

This time too, the soldiers handcuffed him and whisked him away to one of the many fortified military encampments that dot the hardwood forests, rolling hills and patchwork rice fields of southern Chhattisgarh, in a region known as Bastar. 

At the camp, Joga told me, an officer of the Central Reserve Police Force, or CRPF, a paramilitary force, offered him two ways to get off the List: “Go back into jail for a few years, or you could just surrender as a Maoist.”

“I said, ‘Why surrender when I’m not a Maoist?’” Joga continued. “But the officer said, ‘According to the List, you are a Maoist. Once you surrender, your name will be struck off, and you definitely won’t be a Maoist. If you can bring along a gun when you surrender, you can get some money as well.’”

In 1967 in Naxalbari village in the state of West Bengal, an extrajudicial killing by police — referred to euphemistically in India as an “encounter” — of villagers wielding bows and arrows sparked the dream of a countrywide, peasant-led Maoist revolution that has persisted to this day. In the half century since the uprising, India’s Maoist movement, also known as the Naxalite movement, has transformed into a militarized insurgency spread across what is known as the red corridor: an area the size of Maine spanning nine states from West Bengal and Odisha in the east, down to Maharashtra in the west. 

Unlike India’s other insurgencies, the Maoists’ goal is not to establish a separate nation, but to capture state power and install their own national government. 

In Bastar, believed to be the center of the insurgency, the Maoists focus on exacerbating what they perceive to be the fundamental contradiction in the relationship between the Indian state and the adivasis, India’s indigenous peoples, who primarily live in forested hamlets settled atop the country’s richest deposits of coal, iron ore and bauxite. The state claims to care for the development of Bastar, where most villages have no schools, hospitals, electricity or clean water. Yet successive governments have sought to acquire adivasi lands by force and allocate them to mining companies even as development projects worth millions of rupees have languished. 

In the past decade, the Maoist conflict has claimed the lives of nearly 7,000 civilians, suspected Maoists and security forces across the country, with Chhattisgarh accounting for a third of all fatalities, according to government data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management, ICM. 

The killings are part of a broader war in which both sides purport to enjoy the support of the adivasis, on whose behalf this battle is ostensibly fought. While the Maoists claim the state has failed to safeguard the interests of the adivasis, successive governments have pointed to the staging of regular elections and the participation of adivasis in state-run development programs as evidence of adivasi support for the state. The Chhattisgarh government and police have seized the “surrender” of large numbers of Maoist cadres as evidence that adivasi support for the guerrillas has waned, and adivasis have decisively chosen to support the state in this conflict. The Indian press has reproduced this narrative: Phrases such as “shun the path of violence” and “join the mainstream” appear repeatedly in stories about surrenders, and media observers suggest that reporters are doing little more than regurgitating police press releases.

The “List,” wielded by the soldiers who confronted Joga last October, appears to be part of this state objective and has produced a more bureaucratic form of violence: arrests, surrenders, paperwork and the weaponization of India’s painfully slow judicial process.

How did the List come to be?

The Communist Party of India is the country’s oldest communist party. It participates in parliamentary elections and is a distinct political entity from the Communist Party of India (Maoist), to which the guerillas belong. Kartam Joga is a member of the CPI, and in 2007 he and fellow member Manish Kunjam filed a petition called a Public Interest Litigation in the Indian Supreme Court. 

Data collated by the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, or JagLAG, a Bastar-based collective of women lawyers, reveals that Joga’s experience is typical of how the system works. From 2005 to 2013, the aid group found, an astonishing 96 percent of cases in Chhattisgarh’s Maoist-affected districts ended in acquittal of the accused, compared with a national average of 61.5 percent. Yet, in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, almost 70 percent of prisoners awaiting trial in these districts spent more than one year in prison before they were either acquitted or granted bail, compared with a statewide average of 30 percent. JagLAG’s analysis also revealed instances in which the police fabricated evidence or were overzealous in charging suspects. In one case, for instance, an adivasi was booked under the Arms Act, intended to regulate the use of firearms, for possessing kitchen knives and a large kitchen utensil. 

According to JagLAG’s Shalini Gera, “Our analysis suggests that Chhattisgarh is using the criminal justice system as a weapon of war.” 

“Putting people on this List puts pressure on people that they can be arrested at any time,” Joga says. “This fear of arrest can be used to force people to work as police informers.”

So most people accused of being Maoists prefer to surrender rather than spend years in jail trying to clear their name. Thus the due process of criminal investigation, arrest of suspects, charging suspects and judicial remedy has been compressed into detaining suspects, forcing them to “surrender” and denounce their supposedly violent past before a phalanx of journalists and allowing the police to claim a propaganda victory over the Maoists.

Lawyers, like those in JagLAG who question this policy, are targeted as well. On Oct. 3 this year, the Bastar District Bar Association passed a resolution, at odds with Indian law, banning JagLAG from practicing in Bastar courts on the grounds that Gera and her colleagues were “outsiders.” The bar association has refused to share a copy of the resolution with JagLAG or the press, but its members have taken to appearing in court and interrupting JagLAG lawyers as they argue cases. The presiding judges have refused to curb this practice, creating a strange situation in which the only lawyers willing to represent financially impoverished adivasis have been barred from court by a completely illegal social boycott.

In September 2014, a man called KT stood before a constellation of popping camera flashes, a scarf wrapped around his face, a homemade muzzle-loaded shotgun placed on a table before him. He was, he realized with a start, in a press conference. 

“A policeman told a group of reporters that dreaded Maoists had surrendered and were ready to join the mainstream,” he recalled.

A common concern for those considering surrender is that the police may kill them en route to the police station and win acclaim from their superiors for eliminating an allegedly dangerous terrorist. 

“We could kill most of the people on this list and defend ourselves in court,” admitted a senior police official, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

So most villagers take along a well-connected intermediary to ensure that the surrender goes smoothly. Of late, these middlemen have caught the attention of the Maoists.

“Don’t call me an intermediary,” said Uncle K with a worried look, one of those middlemen. “The Maoists will get very angry.”

Uncle K is a village elder whose nephew, a peon in a government office, was put on the List. “He works for the government; how can he be a Maoist?”

When Uncle K went to the local police station to plead his nephew’s case he was given two options: jail or surrender. “My nephew chose to surrender and in a few hours his name was struck off the list,” K said.

When five other villagers who were also on the list learned how Uncle K had helped his nephew surrender, they asked him to accompany them to the police station when they surrendered.

Then one evening in October 2014, the five men who had surrendered disappeared. A day later, Uncle K and his nephew vanished as well. 

“When three days passed without any news, the villagers got worried,” the village headman said, who requested anonymity for fear of Maoist reprisal. So a large group of villagers gathered in the forests and set out in search of the men. They walked for three days before they were intercepted by a group of Maoists, who assured them the men were safe. 

“It was during the hurricane Hudhud,” the headman recalled. “We sat in the pouring rain as the Maoists brought the men forward and asked each one to explain why he went to the police.”

“Everyone was scared, so we said Uncle K told us,” said the headman, who was among the men who surrendered. Uncle K was called forward and he explained his case.

“The Maoists accused me of making money from each surrender,” he said. “That is not true. I was only trying to save people from imprisonment.”

Eventually everyone was given a stern lecture except Uncle K. “To set an example they confiscated part of my field,” he said. “It is crazy. First you surrender before the police, then you surrender before the Maoists.

“The police ask you why you went to a Maoist meeting; the Maoists ask you why you went to the police station.”

At the end of the summer, I called a senior police official for an honest, off-the-record assessment of the surrender policy. A number of supposed Maoists had surrendered in his district, and I asked if he felt this made a difference to his job of policing.

“It has shown adivasis that they can surrender before the police and they will not be penalized,” he said, but admitted, “There are all kinds of people on the List of suspects.”

Like whom? I asked. 

There was a brief pause at the other end of the line. “Well, a few police informers have surrendered as Maoists as well,” he said, explaining that many informers were interested in low-level government jobs offered to surrendered Maoists. 

It was a kind of reward by the police for the people they had relied on to compile the List and make arrests, the officer continued. “They’ve been working with us for years, providing information at great personal risk. So we felt we had to do something for them as well.”