Going by the recent arrest of a young Adivasi, Lingaram Kodopi, charged with pro-Naxal sympathies, in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district, and a police raid in Jaipur on the house of Kavita Srivastava, the national general secretary of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), that would indeed seem to be the case.

The raid was carried out by as many as 40 policemen, who forced their way into the house, ransacked it and took away various objects, without listing them or showing them to the residents, and without producing a search warrant or identity proof in advance. The police behaved like thugs in trying to intimidate Ms Srivastava.

Such harassment of a well-known human rights defender is a grave offence by the Chhattisgarh police who want to extend their lawless activities to other states too. The police said they had firm information that a key Naxal sympathiser from Dantewada, Soni Sori, a schoolteacher, was hiding in Ms Srivastava’s house. They were evidently wrong. They arrested Ms Sori the next day in Delhi.

Now, Ms Sori happens to be the aunt of Mr Kodopi who, the police claim, was arrested last month in the Palnar village market in Dantewada, along with Mr BK Lala, a contractor working for Essar industries. The police claim that Mr Kodopi was caught red-handed collecting Rs 15 lakhs from Mr Lala on behalf of the Communist Party-Maoist, of which he is a member.

Ms Sori was also arrested, say the police, but managed to escape. But according to eyewitnesses, Mr Kodopi was picked up not from the market, but from his grandfather’s house in another village by plainclothesmen travelling in a white station wagon. By the police’s own account, the hardcore Maoists were allowed to escape. This altogether defies credulity, as in the Binayak Sen case.

In fact, the whole thing sounds like a cock-and-bull story. Ms Sori’s family is a victim, not a sympathiser, of the Maoists. This past June, Maoists mounted an armed attack on their house, shot her father Madru Ram Sori in the right leg, looted valuables, grain and cows, and trussed up the entire family and abducted it into the forest, leaving Mr Sori behind, hoping he would die. (He is still in hospital.)

The family is also a victim of police excesses. In 2009, Mr Kodopi was arrested, locked up in a toilet for 40 days, and forced to join Salwa Judum. He was eventually released when a habeas corpus petition was filed by his family. He escaped from the village. But the police in July last year issued a press release claiming he was a senior Maoist commander who had received weapons training in Delhi and Gujarat. They alleged that he had replaced Maoist leader Comrade Azad, executed by the Andhra Pradesh police.

The claim appeared so laughable to all who knew Mr Kodopi as a simple, politically untutored youth that the police retracted it. In reality, Mr Kodopi worked with Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar, who ran an ashram in Dantewada for 10 years. The ashram was burnt down by the police and Mr Kumar has lived in exile ever since. According to Mr Kumar, Mr Kodopi was sharply critical of the Naxals, and was threatened by them. Mr Kodopi’s seems like a classic case of an innocent caught between the Naxals and the police.

Mr Kodopi soon left Dantewada for Delhi and enrolled himself as a student of journalism in Noida. Earlier this year, after the police set three villages in Dantewada on fire, he returned there and recorded testimonies of the victims on a video camera. He also appeared as a witness before the Indian People’s Tribunal last year.

There is every reason to believe that Mr Kodopi is being targeted by the police for intense harassment and repeated arrest on trumped-up charges because he is an upright and honest citizen who knows Gondi, the local language, and the village and forest terrain, and because he has exposed police atrocities against innocent villagers. This makes him “dangerous” in the same way as Dr Binayak Sen, an outstanding public-spirited health activist and PUCL office-bearer, who too had documented the anti-tribal excesses of Chhattisgarh’s officialdom, including the police.

As for Ms Sori, she was arrested, according to The Times of India, when she visited a local police station on September 9 with a petition seeking compensation for the attack on her family home in June. The police claimed, without citing evidence, that she was part of the Rs 15 lakh bribery operation involving the Maoists. She went into hiding and eventually reached Delhi.

The purpose of recounting these incidents at length is to show how lawless the Chhattisgarh administration has become, and how insecure ordinary citizens feel in the face of its predatory police. The state government has no intention of abiding by the Supreme Court verdict declaring Salwa Judum unconstitutional and illegal. It has passed a law creating an “auxiliary armed force” which is “to assist security forces in dealing with the Maoist/Naxalite violence”. This will legalise Salwa Judum’s existing Special Police Officers by inducting them as members.

The Act says that notwithstanding “any judgment, order or decree of any court, each person working as an SPO” shall have “the right to remain at the post”. In fact, their salaries will be upgraded and they will be given six months’ training in using firearms and gathering intelligence.

Nothing could constitute a greater violation of the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court’s considered judgment, discussed in this Column in mid-July. The SPOs can now return to their Chengiz Khan-style violence in order to “teach the Naxalites a lesson” by demonstrating that the state can be more violent than them and strike fear in the hearts of innocent civilians.

In this, the state government must have felt greatly encouraged by the Centre’s decision to file a review petition against the original judgment and question its wise counsel, namely that “the fight against Maoist/Naxalite violence cannot be conducted purely as a mere law and order problem to be confronted by whatever means the state can muster.”

The judgment added: “The primordial problem lies deep within the socio-economic policies pursued by the state on a society that was already endemically, and horrifically, suffering from gross inequalities. Consequently, the fight against Maoists/Naxalites is no less a fight for moral, constitutional and legal authority over the minds and hearts of our people.”

Instead of acting within the “gridlines” laid down by the Constitution, the state will brutalise the people of Chhattisgarh even further by visiting terrible violence upon them in the name of fighting Naxalism. This is a recipe for the state’s total loss of legal and moral authority, and for the degeneration of all governance into some form of martial law, like in parts of India’s Northeast.

Already, 15 helicopter gunships and large numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been inducted into the Dandakaranya region comprising the central-eastern Adivasi belt. Roughly 91,000 paramilitary personnel have been deployed, of whom 65,000 have already been trained by the Indian Army in counter-insurgency.

The Army is itself monitoring the Maoist “threat”, according to a recently released WikiLeaks cable which quotes an “unusually candid” conversation between the US Consul General in Kolkata and the present Army chief VK Singh from February 2010, when he headed the Eastern Command.

None of this bodes well for India’s democracy. It is nobody’s case that the Naxalites or Maoists are a democratic and wholesome political current—despite their articulation of popular grievances and aspirations in India’s increasingly unjust society, with its multiple deprivations, lack of opportunity and growing inequalities. Added to this are the problems specific to the Adivasi belt related to the plunder of its rich mineral and forest wealth, and unremitting displacement of tribals.

The Maoists’ strategy of overthrowing the Indian state through an armed peasant revolution is antiquated and utopian, and fails to recognise both the strength and value of democracy, and the armed might of the state.

Their methods, which include senseless violence, sometimes against their own cadres and followers (to enforce loyalty), as well as innocent civilians, are unworthy of those who want a genuine social transformation. They also selectively collude with their declared “class enemies” like mining and industrial corporations and traders, and resort to extortion to raise resources for buying arms and maintaining themselves.

However, the Naxalite problem cannot be resolved by the use of military/paramilitary force, but only by a combination of normal police methods and redressal of the genuine grievances which create cesspools of popular discontent, which the Maoists exploit. By stooping to the same level of lawlessness as the Maoists, the state risks losing its authority and legitimacy, thus degrading India’s democracy. (IPA Service)