USHINOR MAJUMDAR - Extortion In The Name Of Maoism
Extortion is their business and business is good. So much so that it has become the very raison d’être for around eight left-wing extremist (LWE) outfits in Jharkhand. In the past two years, these groups were reportedly responsible for nearly 60 percent of the killings related to left-wing extremism and collected more levy than the Maoists. The People’s Liberation Front of India (PLFI) alone was responsible for 80 percent of these killings. No wonder, the state police considers the PLFI to be the most dreaded of the LWE outfits outside the Maoist fold.
The total levy extorted by the group in 2012 in Jharkhand is pegged at around Rs 170 crore. This amount is extorted out of funds for development projects, including roads, bridges and highways, building construction and irrigation. A recent police raid on a PLFI hideout revealed that the group also gets people to file RTIs on upcoming projects and uses the information to decide how much is to be extorted and from whom. The fear of extortion by LWE outfits is making more and more contractors unwilling to take up infrastructure projects in the region.
But ask the PLFI’s supremo Dinesh Gope, 43, and he will tell you a different story. “I’m fighting to bring in a janata sarkar (people’s government) for the oppressed people, who are forced to live in penury in the jungles,” he says.
Gope boasts of running 12 schools in Khunti, Simdega and Ranchi districts. Last week, he was busy distributing malaria prevention kits and medicines to villagers, while the police were hot on his trail. He is a fugitive on the run but manages to find time to talk to people because he is planning to contest elections soon.
Gope has amassed substantial wealth and has invested in properties in Ranchi, Chhattisgarh and Rourkela in Odisha. “He has a lot of property in Assam as well,” says SN Pradhan, additional director general (ADG) of the Jharkhand Police.
The PLFI’s origin can be traced to another group, the Jharkhand Liberation Tigers (JLT), which Gope had helped organise in 2002-03. The JLT’s cadres were Adivasis who had returned after working in the tea gardens of Assam. At that time, Gope was engaged in struggles for land rights and was battling it out with the Jainath Sahu gang, a militia armed by the local landlords. The gang allegedly raped and pillaged freely while often fighting the Maoists on behalf of the police.
Once the Sahu gang tried to push a woman from Gope’s village into prostitution. Gope says he was then on leave from a posting in Ladakh as a soldier of the Indian Army’s Bihar Regiment and protested against the gang. The Sahu gang got an FIR lodged against Gope and his brother Suresh, accusing them of dacoity. During an encounter with the police, Suresh committed suicide by shooting himself. Gope remained underground and went on to form the PLFI.
After the CPI (Maoist) was formed in 2004 following the merger of CPI-ML ( People’s War) with the Yadav-dominated Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), Maoist leader Masi Charan Purty rebelled against the new entity and joined the PLFI the next year. Purty was arrested a year later. “Purty was convinced that Gope had betrayed him and wanted to help us round up the PLFI cadres. But, he is now blind and of little use to us,” says ADG Pradhan.
Among all the LWE outfits in the state, the PLFI’s cadre strength is next only to the Maoists. The police recently put the number of Maoists in the state at 16,000. This includes armed cadres of its People’s Liberation Guerilla Army, unarmed local cadres, cultural activists, sympathisers and activists of its frontal organisations... read more:
Last March (2011) when MGNREGA activist Niyamat Ansari was brutally beaten to death by Maoists in Latehar, shockwaves spread among social activists. “Though our methods are different, our goal is the same. We work for the welfare of the people. I don’t know why they want to target us,” remarked activist Bhukan Singh, who was attacked by the rebels along with Ansari. Initially he was under police custody but later preferred to ‘apologise’ to the Maoists and return to his village. Ansari and Singh had exposed the nexus between the Maoists and local contractors, to avenge which Ansari was killed. When activists Jean Dreze and Aruna Roy protested against the killing of Ansari, they too were threatened. They were asked to appear before a Jan Adalat. The bonhomie between the Maoists and activists had snapped. But why did the Maoists take such a deadly step? The answer lies somewhere else. “Under attack from the splinter groups, there is growing insecurity within the Maoist party in Jharkhand,” says a senior activist considered close to the state Maoist leadership. He explains why such an act of indiscipline by local commander Sudarshan was tolerated and later endorsed by the party. “The party had no choice. It is already facing attacks in Latehar from security forces and renegade groups. If they had not endorsed Ansari’s killings, Sudarshan would have simply left the party like many others and floated another group,” he says...
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