Deep inside the forests of Bastar in southern Chhattisgarh, Maoist insurgents drawn from local Adivasi communities have been locked in a low-intensity war with the Indian state for nearly four decades. This year, Chhattisgarh police claim to have made a major breakthrough in the conflict, killing 153 Maoists in nearly 40 encounters, higher than any annual tally seen in the past, barring 2009.
This series brings you the stories behind those numbers by travelling to the sites where the encounters took place and speaking to the families of 37 of those killed.
After a gruelling two-hour-long bike ride through the forests, crossing two hills and wading through three rivulets, we finally caught a glimpse of our destination: the village of Battekal, a collection of mud houses with thatched roofs scattered across a valley.
We had travelled to the village in Narayanpur district’s Orchha tehsil, to meet the family of 16-year-old Baijnath Padda. He was one of the 29 Maoists killed on April 16 in what Chhattisgarh police had described as “the biggest strike” against the insurgents.
His house appeared dilapidated and unkempt – a rare sight for Adivasi homes. An old woman sat in a corner staring blankly, while a young woman flitted in and out, with two children trailing her. She put a bowl of rice and tamarind juice in the hands of the younger one, who looked not more than two years old. A third woman who sat silently rose to sweep the floor. No one uttered a word, other than to say that the men folk were out in the forests to collect tendu leaves.
Half an hour later, a man in his early twenties appeared. He introduced himself as Baisuram Padda. Baijnath Padda was his younger brother, he said.
Born in 2008, Baijnath was the third in a family of seven siblings. He joined the village primary school in 2014, at the age of six, and passed out of Class 5 with a score of 56%, according to a school marksheet issued in 2019. The document stated Baijnath’s date of birth as January 4, 2008.
Since the village lacked a middle school, to access one, Baijnath would have had to walk three to four kilometres through the forest. He decided to drop out and stay at home to help his family with farmwork, his brother recalled.
Last year, in September, Padda went away from home for a few weeks. His family did not know where he was until they heard from others that he had joined the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The banned outfit has been engaged in a low-intensity war with the Indian state in the forests of Bastar, the region in southern Chhattisgarh of which Narayanpur is a part, for nearly four decades.
Baijnath was 15 when he joined the Maoist army. When he died of police bullets near the forests of Chhote Bethiya in Kanker in April, he was 16 years and four months old.
The police statement about the security operation, however, recorded him to be “lagbhag 18 saal” – nearly 18 years old. The CPI (Maoist) statement was silent on his age – or, for matter, the ages of all 29 killed, who the insurgent group acknowledged were its cadres.
There is a possible reason why neither side accurately reported Baijnath Padda’s age: the use of child soldiers in armed conflicts is proscribed by an optional protocol to the United Nations’ Convention for the Rights of the Child. Since India is a signatory to the convention and its corresponding protocols, it needs to adhere to the provisions.
Article 4 of the optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict states: “Armed groups that are distinct from the armed forces of a State should not, under any circumstances, recruit or use in hostilities persons under the age of 18 years.” It adds: “State parties shall take all feasible measures to prevent such recruitment and use.”
Baijnath, however, was not the only child soldier killed in the Kanker encounter. Of the 29 Maoists killed, Scroll found four were less than 18 years old, according to their families and the age recorded in their Aadhaar cards and school documents. Three others were just about 18 – their families said they had joined the Maoist army when they were minors.
Even in other encounters that have taken place this year, Scroll came across at least three instances where the families of those killed identified them to be below the age of 18.
The presence of child soldiers in the Maoist army is not an accident – the Maoist recruitment policy allows those above the age of 16 to join their military wing. However, as the deaths in the Chhote Bethiya encounter revealed, the Maoists have failed to meet the standards of their own questionable policy. Baijnath was just 15 when he joined the guerilla army. Killed in the same encounter, Jenny Nuruti was 15 when she died.
Soldier at 14
Jenny Nuruti lived in Kalpar village, with her mother and seven siblings. The fifth child in the family, she was born on March 20, 2009, according to her Aadhaar card, which records her name as Janila.
The police statement on the Chhote Bethiya encounter had identified her as a member of the local organising squad of the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army in Mendki area, carrying a reward of Rs 8 lakh on her head.
But her older brother Mithun said Jenny had joined the “party” – as the CPI (Maoist) is called in Bastar – as recently as January this year, when she was 14. She had spent just four months with the guerilla army, hardly any time to become worthy of a reward.
What had prompted Jenny to join the party at such a young age, I asked – had there been a fight at home? Mithun shook his head to say no.
Was she drawn to the party because her friends had joined it? Again, Mithun nodded to say no.
Was there pressure from the party to join? No, the brother nodded again. But this time, he also spoke up: “Apni marzi se gai,” he said. She went on her own volition.
Mithun said Jenny did not inform the family about her decision, and left home quietly. When she did not return for a month, they gathered she had joined the Maoists.
Although she came home in the middle, and her family asked her to stay back, she declined their request and left, he said, with a shrug.
‘Why not take parental consent?’
Unlike Jenny Nuruti’s family which betrayed no emotion, Sonu Madvi’s parents were visibly grief-stricken when I met them at their home in Marriwada village in Bijapur district in early May.
Budru Madvi and his wife, Ayti, were busy bundling tendu leaves they had gathered from the forests, when I showed up at their door.
Sonu was their youngest child, said Budru, bursting into sobs. He had left home about three years ago, after a bitter fight at home. It was the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the father recalled. Sonu had cleared Class 8 with B grade from a government residential school in Bijapur, but was now stranded at home, since schools had closed down during the pandemic. Instead of helping out at home, he would keep wandering off, without disclosing his whereabouts, Budru said.
This led to constant fights between the father and the son. One day after Budru yelled at him, Sonu, in a fit of anger, hit him. Stunned at his own actions, he left home. The father did not stop him.
Sonu never came back. “Had he come back, I would have asked for his forgiveness,” the father said, in between sobs.
A few months later, in June 2021, the family discovered that Sonu had joined the Maoists. Like Baijnath and Jenny, he was just 15 at that time.
The family sent a letter to the Maoist leaders, seeking Sonu’s return, said Budru’s older son, Sodi. But they were not sure whether the handwritten note had been delivered to them.
When news of Sonu’s death in the April encounter travelled to the village, grief washed over them – but so did anger. They pointed out that no weapon had been recovered on Sonu’s body, as per the statement issued by the police after the encounter. If he was unarmed, why had the police not arrested him, they asked.
“They could have arrested him and put him in jail for as long as they wanted, at least we could have met him,” Budru said, swallowing his tears.
Although the father blamed himself for his son’s death, he was also angry with the Maoists – why not seek the consent of parents before recruiting a minor into their army, he asked.
“Ek baar poochh hi lete,” they could have asked once, said Sonu’s older brother.
‘Clear policy of recruitment’
To seek answers to this question, I walked two days in July to reach an undisclosed location deep inside the forests of Bastar.
As I waited near a small clearing, a lean man in his early fifties emerged out of the thick woods with an AK-47 slung across his shoulders. Resting his rifle across a tree trunk, he spread a plastic sheet on the ground and asked me to sit down for a conversation, indicating he was in no hurry.
In the course of the conversation, I discovered he was fairly high up the hierarchy of the CPI (Maoist), responsible for one of the three sub-zones of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee which extends across Bastar and Gadchiroli in neighbouring Maharashtra.
The Maoist leader was defensive when I asked him about the party’s policy on child soldiers, specifically bringing up the case of the minors killed in the Chhote Bethiya encounter.
“Jenny Nuruti was definitely underage,” he admitted. He claimed she had been sent back home when she had come to join the party last year in July or August. “Although we sent her back home due to her age, she returned, insisting on staying with the party,” he added.
It wasn’t just Jenny, he said. Last year, a large number of underage girls and boys had shown up at the Maoist recruitment camps, forcing the party to do a review in January this year. About 30 underage girls and boys were sent back, he claimed.
A rebuke was issued to the area committee members who were responsible for the recruitment, he said. They were asked to exercise caution and avoid enrolling underage children into the party.
Asked whether the party sought parental consent before it recruited minors, the senior Maoist spelt out the recruitment process. During recruitment campaigns, villagers are informed about the political situation and encouraged to join the party. Once individuals come forward, a selection is made by the area committee members based on defined criteria, including age. After the selection is made, through local village members, the family is informed about an individual’s decision to join the party.
“Our party has clear policies against engaging children under 16 years,” the senior Maoist leader said.
He claimed that this was not just for “reasons of principles”. “Enrolling and managing underage children in the party is not easy,” he said. Given that many of them had not attended school or been exposed to the external world, “developing appropriate syllabus” to educate them and orient them to the party’s ideology was a challenge, he said.
Many human rights activists find these explanations inadequate.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child categorically establishes that “a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years”, said Suhas Chakma, Director of the Rights and Risks Analysis Group, a Delhi based independent think-tank that keeps a watch on violations of human rights with specific focus on threats to the rule of law and democracy.
Chakma was one of the authors of a report released by the Asian Centre for Human Rights in 2013, in which it documented instances where children as young as 12 and 13 had been recruited and put through military training by the CPI (Maoist) party in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Bihar.
“Any organisation that recruits children, that is, those below 18 years, including the CPI (Maoist), remains in breach of international law,” he said.
‘Exceptional cases’
It was not just the Maoists, however, who downplayed the extent of the problem.
The police, too, seemed to have turned a blind eye to the high number of underage children killed in recent encounters – many of whom have been shown to be reward-carrying Maoists. As previously reported, the police have earned more than Rs 5 crore in rewards for the encounter killings this year.
When asked about the deaths of child soldiers, Bastar Inspector General of Police, P Sundarraj, said: “We did notice that a lot of young boys and girls have been killed. Perhaps in exceptional cases, one or two were underage children, but it is not a strikingly noticeable feature.”
On the ground, though, while handing over bodies of those killed in the encounters to their families, police personnel did reportedly notice their age. Munna Kunjam, the brother of Asmati Kunjam, who was about 17 years old when she was killed in the Rekawaya encounter on May 23, recalled a policeman asking him at the morgue: “Itni chhoti umar mein kyun bhejte ho?” Why do you send them at such a young age?
State authorities could have taken note of the underage deaths at the time of conducting their post mortems. According to guidelines laid down by the National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court, doctors handling autopsies must ascertain the approximate age of the person killed.
In Kanker, the chief medical and health officer, Dr Avinash Khare, said: “We thoroughly follow the NHRC and the Supreme Court guidelines while conducting postmortems.” He directed me to the forensics department at the medical college where I met two doctors who had conducted the autopsies of 11 of the 29 people killed in the Chhote Bethiya encounter.
Both doctors were reticent about their findings. “It is difficult to ascertain the exact age, which is why for two bodies, we mentioned the age as almost 18,” said one of them, on the condition of anonymity. “We have taken bone X-rays – a key determinant of age – and video recorded the autopsy process as required by the NHRC guidelines,” he added.
The 2013 report of the Asian Centre for Human Rights had outlined reasons why the Indian government would not be keen to dwell on the problem of child soldiers. In its 2011 report to the UN on its adherence to the optional protocol to the Convention for the Rights of the Child, the government had defended its own policy of recruiting children into the armed forces at the age of 16.5 years by claiming that they are “sent to operational areas only after attaining 18 years of age”.
In the same 2011 report, which was the last one the government filed to the UN, it absolved insurgent groups like the Maoists from using children in their military wings by stating that “India does not face either international or non-international armed conflict situations”.
What families feel
Formally, India may want to avoid acknowledging the involvement of children in the Maoist conflict, but in Chhattisgarh, the police tend to bring it up strategically. Inspector General Sundarraj, while avoiding specific comment on the underage casualties in the Chhote Bethiya encounter, did make it a point to say: “It is a known fact that Maoists pressurise families into sending their young children to the party.”
Contrary to the police claim, however, most families of the young cadres who had died in encounters this year said they had little say in their decision to join the Maoists.
Pardeep Parsa was killed in the Kodtamarka encounter in Abujhmarh on June 15. According to the police statement, he was 30 years old. But his mother Lakki Parsa told me he was not more than 20-21 years old at the time of his death.
A tall and intense looking woman, Lakki could not recall the exact year when Pardeep had joined the Maoists, but she said it was surely after the Tadballa encounter, which had taken place in February 2019.
By that yardstick, Pardeep must have been about 15-16 years old at the time he joined the Maoists.
Lakki said both he and the Maoists informed her about his decision to become an insurgent.
For a while, the mother would send him messages asking him to return. She would remind him that his parents needed him to help them with farm work since his younger brother lived with his uncle and his sister was still a toddler.
One day, Pardeep showed up at home, but Lakki was away. By the time she came back, he was gone. “He did promise to return during the rainy season to do farm work,” she said. That never happened.
The conversation with Lakki was taking place on the sidelines of a protest in Tadopot village, against another police encounter in which villagers claimed several civilians had been killed. “It is important to struggle and save our village,” she said, pointing out that the state was building roads in the area in order to facilitate mining.
Holding her nine-year-old daughter close to her, Lakki said she would be happy if her children participated in these protests, but she would not allow them to join the party, even if they showed an inclination.
Kamla Kartam, another grieving mother, was silent when I asked her, during a conversation at her home in Bijapur’s Durdha village, if she had a message for the police and the Maoists. Her son, Guddu Kartam, was among those killed in the Chhote Bethiya encounter. He had joined the party in June 2021. He was 17 years old then, according to his Aadhaar card.
After a really long silence, all that Kamla said, in a choking voice, in Gondi: “Nana peena aalsi taan – nan baata ketta parvon.” I am very tired – I am not able to say anything.
All photos by Malini Subramaniam.
