National Highway 221, which connects southern Chhattisgarh with Andhra Pradesh, is perhaps the most broken highway anywhere in India. Pockmarked in most patches, it skirts and sometimes intersects the expanse of hills and forests where Maoist guerillas are engaged in a protracted low-intensity war with Indian security forces. And yet, with no railway network in this part of the country, the highway sees a steady stream of vehicular traffic. Everyday, scores of people travelling between the region's towns and villages brave a bumpy ride in rusty and overflowing jeeps, buses and motorcycles.
On Tuesday morning, the northward bound traffic on NH 221 came to a standstill about 50 kilometres short of Jagdalpur, the region's largest town. Word went around that a few vehicles had been flagged down and asked to turn back. No one asked who was giving the instructions and why. Everyone stopped. They understood there was trouble ahead.
But Vikram Nishad, an auto-parts trader who lived in Sukma and who travelled every week to Jagdalpur to pick up supplies, did not hear the warning. He had plugged in earphones while driving, according to reports in the local newspapers. Nishad rode ahead and got caught and killed in the crossfire between Maoist guerillas and security personnel. Fifteen men of the central paramilitary and state police also lost their lives.
Dainik Bhaskar reported that Nishad is survived by his wife and two sons, one aged five, the other not yet one. The night before he died, the family had celebrated the older son's birthday.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, in the decade between 2003 and 2012, 2,838 people have been killed in Chhattisgarh's Maoist conflict. Of these, 1,393 were civilians – that's nearly half of all casualties.
What explains such a large number of civilian casualties? Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde might like to call them terrorists, but unlike terror groups that kill people indiscriminately, the Maoists stick to targeted attacks. As a rebel force that claims to be fighting the Indian state on behalf of the poor and dispossessed, their main targets are government troops deployed against them. But they also hold kangaroo courts and kill poor and unarmed civilians whom they suspect of being police informers. On rare occasions, they deviate from the norm of keeping their attacks limited to security men, and target civilians, as they did in May last year, when they opened fire on a convoy of Congress leaders and workers. They apologised later for the heavy civilian casualties, as they might in the future for the death of Vikram Nishad. But life once lost cannot be restored.
While the Maoists are to be rightly condemned for their acts of violence, particularly those that leave non-combatants dead, the Chhattisgarh government too cannot escape blame. Its policemen are known to kill ordinary people and pass them off as Maoists. Such instances often go unreported, unless a large number of people have been killed, as happened when paramilitary forces opened fire on villagers gathered to celebrate a festival in Edesmeta village last year.
More significantly, as this table shows, the greatest number of civilian casualties took place in 2006. For those not familiar with Chhattisgarh’s recent history, that was the year when the government encouraged the spread of an anti-Maoist civil militia called the Salwa Judum, which had taken shape the previous year. The government supplied arms to the Judum recruits,pitting adivasi against adivasi, and unleashing civil war in southern Chhattisgarh. Eight years later, even though the levels of violence have come down, the region remains fractured as ever, and the blood of both soldier and citizen continues to be spilled.
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On Tuesday morning, the northward bound traffic on NH 221 came to a standstill about 50 kilometres short of Jagdalpur, the region's largest town. Word went around that a few vehicles had been flagged down and asked to turn back. No one asked who was giving the instructions and why. Everyone stopped. They understood there was trouble ahead.
But Vikram Nishad, an auto-parts trader who lived in Sukma and who travelled every week to Jagdalpur to pick up supplies, did not hear the warning. He had plugged in earphones while driving, according to reports in the local newspapers. Nishad rode ahead and got caught and killed in the crossfire between Maoist guerillas and security personnel. Fifteen men of the central paramilitary and state police also lost their lives.
Dainik Bhaskar reported that Nishad is survived by his wife and two sons, one aged five, the other not yet one. The night before he died, the family had celebrated the older son's birthday.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, in the decade between 2003 and 2012, 2,838 people have been killed in Chhattisgarh's Maoist conflict. Of these, 1,393 were civilians – that's nearly half of all casualties.
What explains such a large number of civilian casualties? Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde might like to call them terrorists, but unlike terror groups that kill people indiscriminately, the Maoists stick to targeted attacks. As a rebel force that claims to be fighting the Indian state on behalf of the poor and dispossessed, their main targets are government troops deployed against them. But they also hold kangaroo courts and kill poor and unarmed civilians whom they suspect of being police informers. On rare occasions, they deviate from the norm of keeping their attacks limited to security men, and target civilians, as they did in May last year, when they opened fire on a convoy of Congress leaders and workers. They apologised later for the heavy civilian casualties, as they might in the future for the death of Vikram Nishad. But life once lost cannot be restored.
While the Maoists are to be rightly condemned for their acts of violence, particularly those that leave non-combatants dead, the Chhattisgarh government too cannot escape blame. Its policemen are known to kill ordinary people and pass them off as Maoists. Such instances often go unreported, unless a large number of people have been killed, as happened when paramilitary forces opened fire on villagers gathered to celebrate a festival in Edesmeta village last year.
More significantly, as this table shows, the greatest number of civilian casualties took place in 2006. For those not familiar with Chhattisgarh’s recent history, that was the year when the government encouraged the spread of an anti-Maoist civil militia called the Salwa Judum, which had taken shape the previous year. The government supplied arms to the Judum recruits,pitting adivasi against adivasi, and unleashing civil war in southern Chhattisgarh. Eight years later, even though the levels of violence have come down, the region remains fractured as ever, and the blood of both soldier and citizen continues to be spilled.
