In Serfanguri relief camp in Kokrajhar, several tents were erected, but they were inadequate to properly house the roughly 2,000 people who had arrived there on Dec. 23, 2014. This single tent houses 25 women and children. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Priyanka Borpujari
KOKRAJHAR, India, Jan 29 2015 (IPS)

The tarpaulin sheet, when stretched and tied to bamboo poles, is about the length and breadth of a large SUV. Yet, about 25 women and children have been sleeping beneath these makeshift shelters at several relief camps across Kokrajhar, a district in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam.

The inhabitants of these camps – about 240,000 of them across three other districts of Assam – fled from their homes after 81 people were killed in what now seems like a well-planned attack.

The Asian Centre for Human Rights says the situation is reaching a full-blown humanitarian crisis, representing one of the largest conflict-related waves of displacement in India.

It has turned a mirror on India’s inability to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and suggests that continued violence across the country will pose a major challenge to meeting the basic development needs of a massive population.

Hunger is constant in the refugee camps, with meagre rations of rice, lentils, cooking oil and salt falling short of most families’ basic needs. Women are forced to walk long distances to fetch firewood for woodstoves. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Appalling conditions

On the evening of Dec. 23, several villages inhabited by the Adivasi community were allegedly attacked by the armed Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), which has been seeking an independent state for the Bodo people in Assam.

The attacks took place in areas already marked out as Bodoland Territorial Authority Districts (BTAD), governed by the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC).

But the Adivasi community that resides here comprises several indigenous groups who came to Assam from central India, back in 150 AD, while hundreds were also forcibly brought to the state by the British to work in tea gardens.

Clashes between the Adivasi and Bodo communities in 1996 and 1998 – during which an estimated 100 to 200 people were killed – still bring up nightmares for those who survived.

This child, a resident of the Serfanguri camp, is suffering from a skin infection. His mother says they are yet to receive medicines from the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

It explains why the majority of those displaced and taking shelter in some 118 camps are unwilling to return to their homes.

But while the tent cities might seem like a safer option in the short term, conditions here are deplorable, and the government is keen to relocate the temporary refugees to a more permanent location soon.

The relief camp set up at Serfanguri village in Kokrajhar lacks all basic water and sanitation facilities deemed necessary for survival. A single tent in such a camp houses 25 women and children.

“The men sleep in another tent, or stay awake at night in turns, to guard us. It is only because of the cold that we somehow manage to pull through the night in such a crowded space,” explains Maino Soren from Ulghutu village, where four houses were burned to the ground, forcing residents to run for their lives carrying whatever they could on their backs.

Now, she tells IPS, there is a serious lack of basic necessities like blankets to help them weather the winter.

Missing MDG targets

In a country that is home to 1.2 billion people, accounting for 17 percent of the world’s population, recurring violence and subsequent displacement put a huge strain on limited state resources.

Time after time both the local and the central government find themselves confronted with refugee populations that point to gaping holes in the country’s development track record.

With food in limited supply and fish being a staple part of the Assamese diet, it is common to see women and even children fishing in the marshy swamps that line the edge of the refugee camps, no matter how muddy or dirty the water might be. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Outside their hastily erected tents in Kokrajhar, underweight and visibly undernourished children trade biscuits for balls of ‘jaggery’ (palm sugar) and rice.

Girls as young as seven years old carry pots of water on their heads from tube wells to their camps, staggering under the weight of the containers. Others lend a hand to their mothers washing pots and pans.

The scenes testify to India’s stunted progress towards meeting the MDGs, a set of poverty eradication targets set by the United Nations, whose timeframe expires this year.

One of the goals – that India would reduce its portion of underweight children to 26 percent by 2015 – is unlikely to be reached. The most recent available data, gathered in 2005-2006, found the number of underweight children to be 40 percent of the child population.

Similarly, while the District Information System on Education (DISE) data shows that the country has achieved nearly 100 percent primary education for children aged six to ten years, events like the ones in Assam prevent children from continuing education, even if they might be enrolled in schools.

According to Anjuman Ara Begum, a social activist who has studied conditions in relief camps all across the country and contributed to reports by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), “Children from relief camps are allowed to take new admission into nearby public schools, but there is no provision to feed the extra mouths during the mid-day meals. So children drop out from schools altogether and their education is impacted.”

Furthermore, in the Balagaon and Jolaisuri villages, where camps have been set up to provide relief to Adivasi and Bodo people respectively, there were reports of the deaths of a few infants upon arrival.

Most people attributed their deaths to the cold, but it was clear upon visiting the camps that no special nutritional care for lactating mothers and pregnant women was available.

This little boy is one of hundreds whose schooling has been interrupted due to violence. The local administration is attempting to evict refugees from the camps, most of which are housed in school compounds, but little is being done to ensure the educational rights of displaced children. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

Bleak forecast for maternal and child health

Such a scenario is not specific to Assam. All over India, violence and conflict seriously compromise maternal and child health, issues that are high on the agenda of the MDGs.

In central and eastern India alone, some 22 million women reside in conflict-prone areas, where access to health facilities is compounded by the presence of armed groups and security personnel.

This is turn complicates India’s efforts to reduce the maternal mortality ratio from 230 deaths per 100,000 live births to its target of 100 deaths per 100,000 births.

It also means that India is likely to miss the target of lowering the infant mortality rate (IMR) by 13 points, and the under-five mortality rate by five points by 2015.

Scenes like this are not uncommon at relief camps inhabited by the Bodo community. Many families have accepted that they will have a long wait before returning to their homes, or before their children resume schooling. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

According to a recent report by Save the Children, ‘State of the World’s Mothers 2014’, India is one of the worst performers in South Asia, reporting the world’s highest number of under-five deaths in 2012, and counting some 1.4 million deaths of under-five children.

Nutrition plays a major role in the mortality rate, a fact that gets thrown into high relief at times of violence and displacement.

IDPs from the latest wave of conflict in Assam are struggling to make do with the minimal provisions offered to them by the state.

“While only rice, lentils, cooking oil and salt are provided, there is no provision for firewood or utensils, and hence the burden of keeping the family alive falls on the woman,” says Begum, adding that women often face multiple hurdles in situations of displacement.

With an average of just four small structures with black tarpaulin sheets erected as toilets in the periphery of relief camps that house hundreds of people, the basic act of relieving oneself becomes a matter of great concern for the women.

“Men can go anywhere, any time, with just a mug of water. But for us women, it means that we have to plan ahead when we have to relieve ourselves,” said one woman at a camp in Lalachor village.

It is a microcosmic reflection of the troubles faced by 636 million people across India who lack access to toilets, despite numerous commitments on paper to improve the sanitation situation in the country.

As the international community moves towards an era of sustainable development, India will need to lay plans for tackling ethnic violence that threatens to destabilize its hard-won development gains.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Women in the north Indian village of Katra Shadatganj in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where two young girls were recently raped and hanged. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
CHIRANG, India, Sep 30 2014 (IPS)

On a bright March morning, a 17-year old tribal girl woke as usual, and went to catch fish in the village river in the Chirang district of India’s northeastern Assam state.

Later that evening, villagers found her lifeless body on the riverbank. According to Taburam Pegu, the police officer investigating the case, her assailants had raped her before slitting her throat.

The girl was a member of the Bodo tribe, which has been at loggerheads with Muslims and Santhals – another indigenous group in the region. The tragic story reveals a terrible reality across India, where thousands of girls and women are sexually abused, tortured and murdered in a tide of gender-based violence (GBV) that shows no sign of slowing.

“We have a culture of impunity. Our legal system itself negates the possibility [...] of punishment in cases of violence against women.” -- Anjuman Ara Begum, former programme officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission
Conflict and a lack of accountability, particularly across India’s northern, eastern and central states where armed insurgencies and tribal clashes are a part of daily life for over 40 million women, fuel the fire of sexual violence.

According to a report released earlier this year by the United Nations Secretary-General assessing progress on the programme of action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, violence against women is universal, with one in every three women (35 percent) experiencing physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime.

Of all the issues related to the ICPD action plan, ending gender-based violence was addressed as a key concern by 88 percent of all governments surveyed. In total, 97 percent of countries worldwide have programmes, policies or strategies to address gender equality, human rights, and the empowerment of women.

Still, multiple forms of violence against women continue to be an hourly occurrence all around the world.

A recent multi-country study on men and violence in the Asia-Pacific region, conducted by the United Nations, reported that nearly 50 percent of 10,000 men surveyed admitted to sexually or physically abusing a female partner.

In India, a country that has established a legal framework to address and end sexual violence, 92 women are raped every day, according to the latest records published by the government’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

This is higher than the average daily number of rapes reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which currently stands at 36.

Sexual violence is particularly on the rise in conflict areas, experts say, largely due to a lack of accountability – the very thing the United Nations describes as “key to preventing and responding to gender-based violence.”

According to Suhas Chakma, director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights in New Delhi, “There are human rights abuses committed by security forces and human rights violations by the militants. And then there is also violence against women committed by civilians. No matter who is committing the crime […] there has to be accountability – a component completely missing” from the current legal framework.

An example of this is Perry*, a 35-year-old woman from the South Garo Hills district of India’s northeastern Meghalaya state – home to 14 million women and three armed groups – who was killed by militants in June this year.

Members of the Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA), an insurgent group, allegedly tried to rape Perry and, when she resisted, they shot her in the head, blowing it open. The GNLA refused to be held accountable, claiming that the woman was an informant and so “deserved to die”.

Another reason for the high levels of GBV in India is the dismal conviction rate – a mere 26 percent – in cases involving sexual assault and violence.

In 3,860 of the 5,337 rape cases reported in the past 10 years, the culprits were either acquitted or discharged by the courts for lack of ‘proper’ evidence, according to the NCRB.

“We have a culture of impunity,” Anjuman Ara Begum, a Guwahati-based lawyer and former programme officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding, “Our legal system itself negates the possibility or certainty of punishment in cases of violence against women.”

With a declining conviction rate, armed groups have been playing the role of the judiciary to deliver instant justice. In October 2011, a kangaroo court of the armed Maoists in the Palamu district of India’s eastern Jharkhand state cut off the hands of a man accused of rape.

In August 2013, the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP) – an insurgent group operating in the northeastern state of Manipur – launched an “anti-rape task force”.

Sanakhomba Meitei, the secretary of KCP, told IPS over the phone that his group would deliver fast-track justice for rape victims. “Our intervention [will] instill fear in the [minds of the] rapists,” said Meitei, adding, “We will deliver stringent punishment.”

This is a worrying trend, but inevitable, given the failure of the legal system to deliver justice in these troubled areas, according to A L Sharada, director of Population First – a partner of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in India.

“What we need is a robust legal system, and mob justice hurts that possibility. In fact, such non-judicial justice systems are also very patriarchal in nature and ultimately against women. What we really need are quick convictions [in] every case of gender violence that has been filed,” Sharada stated.

According to the NCRB over 50,000 women were abducted across the country in 2013 alone, while over 8,000 were killed in dowry-related crimes. More than 100,000 women faced cruelty at the hands of their husbands or other male relatives, but only 16 percent of those accused were convicted.

*Not her real name

This story originally appeared in a special edition TerraViva, ‘ICPD@20: Tracking Progress, Exploring Potential for Post-2015’, published with the support of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. The contents are the independent work of reporters and authors.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An Adivasi tribesperson walks down a forest path in India’s Chhattisgarh state. Credit: Virppi Venell/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, May 31 2013 (IPS)

They chopped down trees and used them to barricade the road, then retreated into the dense forests of the remote Sukma district, located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, to await their quarry.

When the convoy bearing leaders of India’s ruling Congress Party finally came chugging along the road, the rebels activated a landmine that sent cars and people flying in all directions.

Not content to trust the force of the explosion, male and female cadres reportedly belonging to Maoist guerilla groups emerged from the trees and used AK-47s to gun down 24 people who comprise the “top brass” of the Party’s Chhattisgarh leadership.

In doing so the rebels sent a clear message to this country of 1.2 billion people on May 26: the Maoists rebels, thought to number some 22,000, are far from being a spent force.

A decline in attacks in resource-rich eastern and central states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh – where armed groups now under the umbrella of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) have been operating since the early 1990s – as well as reports of “successful” military operations against the rebels, had, in the last two years, turned the spotlight away from what mainstream media refers to as “India’s Maoist menace.”

But this latest ambush in the southern Bastar region of Chhattisgarh – the rebels’ most politically significant attack in over twenty years – has once more drawn attention to what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has labelled the “greatest threat to India’s national security”, and raised questions about the government’s plans to end a conflict that has resulted in 8,000 deaths in the last decade.

Saturday’s attack is thought to have been carried out by some 500 guerillas who fired bullets and lobbed handmade explosives at the armoured vehicles, killing Congress Party State Chief Nand Kumar Patel, his son Dinesh Patel and Mahendra Karma, mastermind of the anti-Maoist civilian militia movement known as the “Salwa Judum” (Purification Hunt).

When Karma’s lifeless, bullet-ridden body slumped to the ground, eyewitnesses say women cadres danced in celebration, while one rebel stabbed him with a bayonet.

Experts on the conflict have somberly observed that this brutal attack was a tragic reflection of Karma’s Judum, through which thousands of local vigilantes were unleashed into a 40,000-square-kilometre area of tribal forested lands with guns and the license to kill.

What government policy?

Security experts say that unless the government firms up its “Maoist policy”, unresolved issues will continue to fester and erupt in bloodbaths similar to this one.

As Ajai Sahni, counter-terrorism expert at the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, told IPS: “There are no flaws in the government’s policy, because there is no policy to deal with Maoists in the first place.”

One day the government talks of “developing” tribal areas where the Maoists gained ground as a result of grinding poverty – in fact, 90 percent of some 1.4 million people in the Bastar region live below the poverty line – and on the second day they talk of “operations” against the rebels, he said.

“Where is the policy? All this talk of ‘holistic’ and ‘multi-pronged’ approaches is just garbage.”

He believes the answer lies in gathering intelligence and using it to target the Maoist leadership, “instead of continually massacring ordinary Maoist cadre.”

According to the expert, human rights violations by policemen in Maoist areas are a result of poor training, and a flawed policy of wantonly attacking foot soldiers.

Enough is known about the rebels’ command structure – including its politburo and current general secretary, Muppala Lakshmana Rao, who is known as Ganapathy – to attack the highest decision-making body, he said.

He also stressed that the government must never underestimate the Maoists’ capabilities.

“Even while the Indian home secretary announces to a parliamentary committee that security forces are charging Maoists, the home minister is warning the public that Maoists are arming themselves with sophisticated weaponry,” he said.

These mixed messages have allowed rebels to seize upon unsuspecting victims, like the convoy of Congress Party members on May 26.

“This incident was served to them on a platter. They have been after this man (Karma) for years, yet the high-profile ‘yatra’ (political procession) had minimal security.”

His is not an opinion that many in the sphere of national security share.

P V Ramana, an expert on the Maoist insurgency at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi, told IPS that the government’s policy is sound, and requires only “better implementation and monitoring.”

Rooting out an armed force is not like using a vending machine to get an instant cup of coffee, he said. It requires patience, and an understanding that incidents similar to the May 26 attack are to be expected and must not cause “panic” and chaos.

Since 2009, the government has dispatched about 100,000 paramilitary troopers and policemen to fight the rebels.

The root of the problem

Other observers say the “disastrous” results of state-sanctioned policies have given the Maoists more legitimacy.

Blood spilled in the Purification Hunt has created fertile ground for Maoists to recruit angry and impoverished villagers into their ranks.

According to filmmaker Soumitra Dastidar, creator of the documentary ‘Journey Through Camera: My Days with Maoist Guerrillas’, “Between 2004 and 2008, at least 600 villages were torched, tribal people were killed and women were tortured.

“Many were whisked away into camps” in the name of stamping out the Maoist threat, Dastidar tells IPS.

During one such operation, writes Sudeep Chakrawarti in the ‘Hindustan Times’, over 50,000 tribal folk were “herded into little more than concentration camps in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada (South Bastar) district.”

Despite efforts by the Indian Supreme Court to disband the operation in 2008 due to its “illegal” practice of arming civilians to kill at random, various branches of the Judum continue to operate throughout the Bastar region.

Flawed government policies on forests and tribal rights have also fuelled support for Maoists.

Subhash Chakma, director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), pointed out that when the Maoists fled into the forests – after their “caste wars” in lower caste states like Bihar were crushed – they walked straight into long-standing disputes between forest-dwellers and forest officials.

With the former dependent on forest produce to sustain a modest way of life and the latter, along with middlemen, anxious to secure profits in an informal timber trade, the forests were already the site of a major crackdown on tribal peoples, with officials “empowered to make indiscriminate arrests,” Chakma told IPS.

Since fear of the rebels now keeps many officials and middlemen at bay, the Maoists have won the sympathies of many tribal villagers here, he said, hastening to add that tribal people often end up as pawns in the war between Maoists and government forces.

Others say the conflict will not end until the government reconciles the enourmous mineral wealth buried in these forests with the poverty of forest dwellers.

According to Sudha Bharadwaj, a human rights lawyer and general secretary of the Chhattisgarh-based People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), “If you overlay maps of forests, of adivasi villages, of minerals – you’ll find almost perfect overlap.

“This state (Chhattisgarh)…holds 19 percent of India’s iron ore and 11 percent of the coal, bauxite (and) limestone,” she said.

In the last decade 26,000 acres of agricultural land have been swallowed up by mining projects and industrial plants.

“Where are the people to go?” she asked, indicating that if the government does not attend to these outstanding issues, the Maoist threat will continue to hover like a dark shadow over the world’s “largest democracy.”

Little girls play outside in India's West Bengal state. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, May 21 2013 (IPS)

When a five-year-old was rescued from the basement of a building in the eastern part of India’s capital, New Delhi, the doctors treating her were horrified to find the little girl had not only been raped by two men several times, but the perpetrators had also inflicted severe perineal injuries by inserting foreign objects into her body.

Tied to a bed for nearly two days, the girl was raped and brutalised by a young neighbour and his friend, even while the police ignored her parents’ repeated requests to trace their missing child.

“Violence against a child, even if it occurs inside (his or her) own home, must not be seen as a private issue. It is violence and it is a public issue." -- Shantha Sinha
“We pleaded with the police. We called the (hotlines). But they did not act instantly and when she was rescued in such a horrible state, cops offered me some money to keep quiet and said I am fortunate that she is still alive,” the girl’s father told IPS.

Coming after a season of anti-rape protests in New Delhi over last December’s fatal gang-rape of a young medical student inside a bus, this latest incident, coupled with police inaction, triggered fresh agitation in the national capital.

In the same month, another five-year-old girl in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh succumbed to her injuries after enduring similarly unspeakable horrors.

Stories of rape and abuse, often involving fatalities, are pouring in every day now, with the latest figures showing that child rapes in India have risen 336 percent between 2001 and 2011.

Human rights activists lament that these figures represent only reported cases, while the actual number may be much higher.

Many of these rapes occur in the confines of the victim’s own household, sometimes by family members or other known assailants, other times by unknown attackers.

According to a recent report by the New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), sexual offences against children in India have reached an “epidemic proportion”.

The 56-page report, citing National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) statistics, stated that rape cases increased from 2,113 cases in 2001 to 7,112 cases in 2011, with a total of 48,338 cases in that period.

ACHR Director Suhas Chakma told IPS these numbers represent “only the tip of the iceberg, as the large majority of child rape cases are not reported to the police”, while other forms of sexual assault against children pass largely under the radar of the authorities.

Chakma attributes the increase partly to the “tremendous rural-urban migration” of the last 15 years that has resulted in a clash of cultures, as migrant workers from India’s remote agricultural belts come face to face with an urban lifestyle.

“Pornography is now at everyone’s fingertips,” he noted, adding that India’s socio-economic upheaval of the last decade and a half have “impacted behaviours”.

The state of Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of child rapes, with 9,465 cases from 2001 to 2011; the western state Maharashtra came a close second, with 6,868 cases; while Uttar Pradesh, located on the northern border, reported 5,949 cases.

The report found that every single Indian state reported high numbers and experienced an increase in cases.

Not a private matter

When it comes to child abuse, said Shantha Sinha, chairperson of India’s National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), there cannot be any distinction between private and public space.

“Violence against a child, even if it occurs inside (his or her) own home, must not be seen as a private issue. It is violence and it is a public issue,” Sinha told IPS.

She stressed the need for citizens to report as many details as possible about such cases to the proper authorities – maintaining anonymity if necessary – such as the countrywide Child Welfare Committee (CWC).

Homes of horror

According to the ACHR, rape is especially rampant in juvenile homes established under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2000.

The government of India supports at least 733 juvenile homes under the Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) of the ministry of women and child development; but government oversight has been unable to stem abuse.

“All juvenile homes are centres of sexual abuse,” said Chakma. “There is no supervision whatsoever and the offenders are mostly staff members.”

He alleged that the government has failed to establish proper “inspection committees”, charging that the issue is not even on the agenda for minister-level discussions. Chakam also blasted the NCPCR for being “useless.”

According to a report by NCPCR member Vinod Kumar Tikoo, who visited three such homes in the Ambala district of India’s northern Haryana state after reports of physical and sexual abuse, the conditions of the facilities are “shocking.”

In one of the homes, Tikoo found girls and boys living together but could see “no evidence” of a professional staff, trained caretakers or security measures. The operation seemed to be an “entirely family affair.”

“The husband–wife duo managing one of the other homes seemed unaware of the roles, responsibilities and…the jurisprudence governing child protection in an official child care institution,” he said.

Conditions are particularly threatening to girl children. In one of the homes, the only toilet facility available for girls was located on the terrace, surrounded by water.

According to the report, many of the managers of these homes simply bring in abandoned or runaway children from hospitals, railway stations and bus-stands, without presenting them to the concerned Child Welfare Committee, which exist in every state.

According to Sinha, security in juvenile homes is a complex issue and calls for rigorous government monitoring and intervention. She recommended that the state “redefine” the meaning of these homes, and run them instead as training and resource centres, thereby offering these kids the chance for a more independent future.

Poor legal infrastructure

Other experts believe the answer lies in amending the Juvenile Justice Act, which does not currently provide an adequate support system for families too poor to embark on lengthy legal battles.

Chakma said it is “essential” that the government create a victim assistance fund, which aggrieved parties can utilise to seek justice and punitive measures through the courts.

“India enacts laws without any judicial impact assessments. So the judicial infrastructure has to be upgraded too,” he said.