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.”

Laxmi Yarragantla, a 20-year-old mother of three, lives in the Warangal district, where over 50 percent of girls are married before they reach 18 years. Credit: Stella Paul

By Stella Paul
HALDIYAGANJ, India, May 28 2013 (IPS)

In the small village of Haldiyaganj in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, 17-year old Injuara Begum is nursing her son who was born right here on the floor of her home three years ago.

She has never heard of Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), a government health scheme that provides free medicine, midwife assistance and 30 dollars in cash to all pregnant women who deliver at a government hospital.

“In marginalised communities, early marriage is the only way to…ensure a girl’s physical safety.” -- Mamatha Raghuveer
Nor is she aware that marriage before 18 years of age is illegal and punishable by law. “My parents arranged my marriage when I was fourteen,” she tells IPS in a whisper – a result of shyness coupled with intense fatigue that has plagued her ever since giving birth.

Injuara comes from a poor Muslim family that migrated to India from Bangladesh in 1980. Her father, a brick kiln worker, says the early marriage was intended to “protect his daughter’s future” in this volatile border village where there are few opportunities for women beyond motherhood.

Injuara’s story is indicative of a worrying trend in India, where, according to a 2012 study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 22 percent of women become mothers before the age of eighteen.

Research indicates that over 70 percent of these child mothers are from marginalised groups like the Scheduled Caste (Dalits) and other tribal communities, who comprise 24 percent of the country’s total population of 1.24 billion people, or refugees who have few economic opportunities.

Experts say lack of access to, and awareness of, health services compounds the problem.

Severe health repercussions

The exclusion of marginalised women from health services is holding India back from achieving the Millennium Development Goals, which set the target of reducing maternal mortality and achieving universal access to reproductive healthcare by 2015.

According to the UNFPA, 25 percent of the 56,000 maternal deaths in India in 2010 occurred within marginalised communities.

D C Sarkar, head of the Haldiyaganj Public Health Centre, tells IPS that most first-time mothers here are below 18 years. “Almost 70 percent of them suffer from low haemoglobin levels and weakness,” he said, which results in premature deliveries and miscarriages.

Since his own centre is ill equipped to deal with pregnancy-related complications, he often refers his patients to the district hospital. But it is an exercise in futility, since none of the village’s residents can afford to pay hospital fees.

Sunil Dhar, one of the leading gynaecologists in the northeastern region, says over 70 percent of his patients are from minority communities, while most are below the age of 20.

Drawing on his 50 years of medical experience in the border state of Tripura, Dhar told IPS, “Over 50 percent of my patients are as young as 14 and 15. Elderly female relatives, who want to know the health of the foetus, usually accompany the young girls who come here – but one look at the expecting mother tells me she is the one in need of treatment,” for conditions like jaundice, or swollen ankles.

He links poor health and early marriages to the socio-economic status of refugee communities in these northern border regions, where over two million people fleeing the bloody Liberation War in Bangladesh arrived in 1970.

The 1990s also saw an influx of refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma) and the Chittagong Hill districts of Bangladesh. Still living in abject poverty in informal camp settlements, these communities “can’t be expected to go to the hospitals – the hospitals must come to them,” according to Dhar.

Further south, in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh, a Gond tribal woman named Khemwanti Pradhan tells IPS she was married at 15, and became pregnant shortly after.

A resident of the Sindurimeta village in the conflict-ridden Bastar region, she was forced to delivered both her sons at home because the closest health centres were shut when she went into labour late at night. “My mother-in-law helped me cut the umbilical cord,” she said.

An ongoing Maoist insurgency against the government keeps most people indoors for fear of being caught in the crossfire.

Though Pradhan was aware of the JSY government health scheme, violence prevented her from accessing the services. “Doctors and nurses will not work after dark because they are scared of the Maoists. No transport is available after four in the evening. If our men go out to fetch a car or a doctor, army personnel suspect them of being terrorists and arrest them for interrogation,” she lamented.

Integrated Solutions

According to UNICEF, over 52 percent of girls in the Warangal district of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are married in their teens. Experts say the region is in dire need of targeted interventions that can slow this trend.

Here, an NGO called ‘Thaurni’ trains adolescent girls from vulnerable communities, such as children of migrant labourers, landless farmers and nomadic tribes, to become anti-child marriage campaigners. In the past five years, the organisation has stopped 56 child marriages in the district.

Still, hundreds of girls continue to get married every year because existing laws do not cater to their specific problems, Mamatha Raghuveer, head of Thaurni, told IPS.

“According to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, anyone found guilty of planning or conducting a child marriage can be fined up to 2,000 dollars and also be jailed for a maximum of two years.”

But while this law has relevance for mainstream society, where families have other options, it does not address the specific problems in marginalised communities.

For people in dire economic and political straits, living in regions where rape and sexual abuse is rampant, “early marriage is the only way to…ensure a girl’s physical safety.” Unmarried teenagers face untold risks, including being kidnapped and sold to brothels. “We need a policy that focuses on reaching out to these people,” Raghuveer stressed.

According to Swapan Debnath, a local homeopathy practitioner and school teacher in Tripura, the prevailing “anti-immigrant” climate in India also forces many families to turn to early child marriages as insurance against deportation.

Therefore, policies to improve maternal mortality must necessarily tackle issues of violence and immigration, incorporating, wherever possible, cross-border solutions to prevent child marriage and early motherhood.

Debnath hopes that the Women Deliver global health summit, scheduled to run from May 28 to 30 in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, will provide the perfect opportunity to discuss such integrated strategies.

While activists and experts from around the world debate on what action can be taken, women in vulnerable situations have no choice but to rely on the support of their families.

At the moment, Injuara is happy that her husband Zakir Mohammed is not asking for another child just yet.  Since contraceptives and abortions are considered a sin, family planning means abstaining from sex – something that her husband has agreed to do until she regains her strength. “I am happy,” she says, “that he understands.”