Chitrangada Choudhury - Terror at night in Odisha: 'How could the force shoot at us defenceless villagers?'
On the overcast
morning of July 26, Rahula Nayak, a subsistence farmer in his 20s, joined a few
hundred villagers, mostly Kond Adivasis, making their way to Gumudumaha, a
village in mourning, nestled in the Eastern Ghats in south-central Odisha’s
Kandhamal district. The crowds, most on foot, a few on bicycles and motorbikes
or a rare tractor, were heading to a memorial meeting for five Gumudumaha
residents who had been shot days ago on the outskirts of the village.
“We have come to cry
for the dead,” said Keshamati Pradhan, a Kond woman leader from Raikia, over 40
kms away, who was among the crowds. "When one suffers, we all do." On the night of
Friday, July 8, returning to Gumudumaha in an autorickshaw after collecting
NREGA wages at the block town of Baliguda nearly 45 kms away, the five – three
women and a baby boy, among them – were killed when a 15-member team of the
state’s anti-Maoist paramilitary force, the Special Operations Group, allegedly
fired at the vehicle. Several other passengers were injured – for example, the
bullet that killed the baby boy Jehad Gehej, also grazed the side of his mother
Sangita. Another bullet hit his father Lota in the upper back, injuring him
seriously.
The young couple and
others who survived the shower of bullets have since narrated the terror of
being fired upon, out of the blue, on a dark, rainy night. Gumudumaha is 12
kilometres away from the nearest black-top road, National Highway 59. It is
particularly hard to access in the monsoon due to the absence of a serviceable
road – despite multiple public works signs announcing road construction under
various government programmes along the stretch, and listing the lakhs of
rupees spent on them.
We walked past
villages, farms, a church and patches of forest, jumping over mud and slush on
undulating tracks, crossing the site of the firing to arrive at Gumudumaha. “I
felt I had to come today for the meeting," Rahula said. "How can we
protect ourselves against these cold-blooded killings?
The same thing happened
that night [in Gumudumaha] that had happened with my parents.”
July 26, the day of
the memorial in Gumudumaha, marked a year since Rahula’s parents Dhobeshwar and
Bubudi Nayak had been shot dead in the nearby village of Madaguda. As they did
on most Sunday evenings, the Nayaks set out on the evening of July 26, 2015, to
seek a “network area”, a forested elevation in the village to speak on the
mobile phone to Rahula, then away in Thrissur, Kerala, to work on a
stone-breaking site. On the call, Rahula heard his father making a choking-like
sound, and his mother scream before the line went dead. A villager called him
later that night to say his parents had still not returned home.
Two days later, after
protests and a road block by villagers, the police returned the couple’s
bodies, saying an SOG team had recovered them after crossfire with
"Left-wing extremists" or LWEs, as they sometimes refer to Maoists.
Villagers alleged that a contingent of security forces who had crossed Madaguda
on the evening of July 26 had killed the couple.
Faced with criticism
over the deaths, the government conceded that Dhobeshwar and Bubudi were
“innocent people”, not Maoists. But it never took the villagers’ or Rahula’s
accounts seriously, nor did it conduct an independent investigation into how
the deaths occurred. This February, an inquiry by the Odisha Police’s Human
Rights Protection Cell reproduced the exact account put out by the SOG team,
and exonerated them. It ended by saying “... it is possible that the deceased
may have died due to bullet fired by LWE Activists”.
With the help of lawyers
and activists, Rahula is challenging this conclusion at the Odisha State Human
Rights Commission… read more:
Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system
