It is women in Jharkhand who have been facing the brunt of Operation Jharkhand. There have been several reports and allegations of police and other security forces inflicting brutal violence on villagers during their anti-Maoist operations in areas under Operation Greenhunt, including rape and sexual violence against women, which rarely, if at all, get reported.
This investigation by Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS), a non-funded group, were told of news reports of rape by security forces in Jharkhand in some areas where there was large deployment of security forces, which had not been sufficiently investigated. The team visited Jharkhand in November 2010, and recently published its findings ‘In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Jharkhand Facing Operation Greenhunt’.
Among the cases that the factfinding team investigated, was the October 30, 2010 arrest of three adolescent school-going girls following an alleged encounter with a Maoist squad in the forest near Eeti village, Khunti. They were presented before the media as ‘hardcore Naxal women’. The three girls were later presented in court as adults and remanded to judicial custody.
The team found that the arrests and their subsequent treatment raised several serious issues.
Even though the girls were released after two months without any charges against them, the serious issue of arbitrary arrests and detention remained. “The questions that come up are – if the police did not have any reliable evidence against these girls then why were they arrested in the first place, why where they charged with such grave crimes, and why were they paraded in the media as ‘hard core Naxalites’? What effect will all this have on their education and future? Will the state take responsibility for injuries that could possibly have been caused to young girls during their severe beating with batons? Will state bear responsibility for these gross violations by police personnel, and if yes, how will it compensate for what the girls have gone through?”
The girls were clearly below 18 years of age and rather than abiding by the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act, their age had been falsified and they were kept in jail for nearly two months. The Superintendent of Police (SP) was hostile to the team when the issue was pointed out to him. He wanted to contest the claims and even go for bone tests to verify their ages.
The team found gross violation of all the rules laid down regarding arrests, such as informing family members. Even two weeks after their arrest, the SP said that it was not their duty to inform them, and that he was waiting for the parents to come and file an application.
The DK Basu Guidelines clearly state that at the time of arrest someone other than the police has to be a witness to the arrest as well as seizures. In this case, the arresting officer wrote in his report that since the accused were arrested from the forest, there were no independent witnesses, hence two policemen signed as witness. But the police did come to the village and also picked up men from there. The bag was also seized from the house in the village. They could have asked a villager to be a witness. But that was not done.
The interaction with teachers indicated that the girls were attending school regularly, and therefore could not possibly have been moving with the Maoists squads, and could not have been present at the encounter site with guns and explosives.
Worse, at a press conference the SP produced the arrested four persons in front of audience, referring to them as belonging to a certain ‘Kundan Pahan’ faction of Maoists. “Although their faces were covered, yet, is such a treatment necessary? Why should the young girls be publicly maligned?” The WSS team found that no mediaperson had actually gone to Eeti village to verify the police version nor was there any report of the people who were beaten up by the police. The people in the village were saying that they had drawn up a list refuting the ‘zapti chalan’ of the police (seizure list). But even that was not reported. The journalists also admitted that most of the news that they got was from the SP’s press conferences, and that much of the news and facts about these encounters were coming from the police.
Molestation cases are rampant. Several people the team spoke to in Ranchi said that “the security forces misbehave with women once they enter houses at will and with arms in order to search and in such a situation molestation and sexual violence may be taking place.” Both men and women said there were incidents of rape and molestation in many villages during combing operations in 2009, but no woman was willing to identify herself as the victim; in fact there appeared to be a collective decision to maintain silence on such matters.
The report remarked, “As women, we respect such decisions. However, we feel that such silence would be detrimental in the long run as it would lead to security forces indulging in such crimes regularly and getting away with their lawlessness in these remote areas.
The WSS team highlighted the use of stories of sexual exploitation as a propaganda tool by the state. These stories are not only often false or highly dubious but are also a form of sexual exploitation since they involve a vulgar and manipulative sensationalisation of the sexuality of these vulnerable women. “One instance of this is the salacious and titillating reporting by Dainik Jagaran (October 28, 2010) following the arrest in October 2010 in Khunti of one Monica Dang, reported to be the ‘girlfriend’ of a Maoist leader Kundan Pahan, in order to portray him as a man of ‘loose’ sexual morals. This amounts to a cynical exploitation of the arrested young woman. Such attempts further discredit the anti-Maoist campaign of the state, which is under question for several cases of false arrests and encounters, violence against innocent villagers, and for functioning as a tool of corporate interests.”
Women are having to pay for Operation Greenhunt in other ways too. Jharkhand trails in all human development indicators like literacy and health, the most startling being that anemia amongst rural women is as high as 73.8 per cent as compared to the national figure of 58.2 per cent. Almost half of the women in rural areas have a below normal body mass index (BMI) that is below normal (18.5) pointing to high levels of under-nutrition. And it is this population that is now, in addition to the struggles of life and livelihood, pitted against rapid corporatisation and state interventions like the Operation Greenhunt.
Operation Greenhunt was launched in Jharkhand in March 2010, and in August that year about 12,000 CRPF personnel were deployed for anti-Naxal operations. This came in the backdrop of the state government’s ‘Jharkhand Vision 2010’ and ‘Jharkhand Industrial Policy’. Since then the tribal people’s lands and forests have been under attack from companies and their agents, for land, forests and the great mineral wealth lying under these. Between 2006 and 2008 the state government signed 66 memorandums of understanding (MoUs) under which from the many companies vying for land and mines, Jindal Steel earned 3000 acres and Tata Steel 25,500 acres. According to Human Rights Law Network, as of 2011, Jharkhand Government has pledged away 84,340 acres for mining and industrial units in 14 of its 24 districts.
An Action Aid India study of the land acquisition drive in five sample districts of Jharkhand had found that this had left more than 8.2 lakh persons displaced, 85 per cent of them being tribals. Of 1035 land acquisition notifications, people under 81 projects got one eviction notification while people under 840 projects got two notifications, meaning that these people were evicted twice. Of the total 549776.15 acres acquired, private land acquisition was highest (415983.2 acres), followed by forest land (63818.77 acres)
It doesn’t have to try hard to figure out whose interests the Jharkhand government is protecting, and who is paying the price for the rampant land-grab.
[Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) is a non-funded grassroots effort initiated in November 2009, to challenge and put an end to the violence being perpetrated upon women’s bodies and societies. It is a nationwide network of women from diverse political and social movements comprising women’s organisations, mass organisations, civil liberties, student and youth organisations, mass movements and individuals.
The members of the team that visited Jharkhand were Sharanya, HumAnE, Koraput; Rajni, Advocate, HRLN, Ranchi; Rinchin, Madhya Pradesh Mahila Manch, Bhopal; Pyoli Swatija, Advocate, Delhi; Madhuri, Jagrut Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, Badwani; Indira Chakravarthi, Public Health Researcher, Delhi; Bela, Paschim Bengal Khet Majdoor Samiti; Anuradha Talwar, Paschim Bengal Khet Majdoor Samiti.]
