Atul Dev - The attack on Soni Sori follows her attempts at holding the police in Bastar accountable
On 20 February, Saturday, Soni Sori, the tribal rights
activist and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Dantewada at south Bastar
in Chhattisgarh, left Jagdalpur at 9 pm and headed home to Geedam. Her friends
Shalini Gera and Isha Khandelwal, who had moved to Jagdalpur in 2013 and founded the Jagdalpur Legal Aid
Group (JagLAG), had been served an eviction notice on Thursday, following the questioning
of their landlord by the local police. On Saturday, they held a press
conference about the police intimidation that had forced them out of Jagdalpur.
Sori had come for the presser, and had stayed back to bid Gera and Khandelwal
goodbye. “She wanted to stay back longer, but it was getting late,” Khandelwal
told me, when I spoke to her on Sunday. Sori sat on the passenger seat of a
motorcycle, behind her long-time friend, Rinki Thakur. It was a 70 kilometre
journey westward on the national highway number 16.
“She was scared,” said Khandelwal. “We had received
information that Soni might be attacked. But around here, we receive these kind
of threats every other day. We were concerned too, but couldn’t possibly think
that it was going to happen that very night.”
On their way home, the women were stopped by three men.
“About 17 kilometres before Geedam, three of them came from behind on a
motorcycle. They stopped us, and then they took Madam [Sori] a little away from
me,” Thakur told me. Sori later told Thakur that one of the men held her hands
behind her back, while the other applied a dark liquid substance on her face.
Sori could not open her eyes, and felt that her face was burning. Fearing that
it could be acid, they rushed to a local hospital in Geedam. It was grease
oil—that may have been laced with corrosive substances. Thakur told me that the
hospital authorities called an ambulance after treating Sori, and sent her to
Maharani hospital back in Jagdalpur.
On Sunday evening, Sori was brought to Delhi, and was
immediately admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at the Indraprastha Apollo
Hospital. On Monday, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal visited the activist
in the hospital. The doctors told The Hindu that her condition is now “stable
and there is no threat to her life.”
What happened on Saturday fits with the grim pattern of
recent events that have unfolded in Chhattisgarh. Last month, on 10 January,
members of the Samajik Ekta Manch, an organisation in Jagdalpur that was
recently set up to counter Naxalism in Bastar and support police work, had gone
to the house of Malini Subramaniam, an independent journalist. The members of
the organisation had
threatened her for writing articles that they felt tarnished the
image of Bastar police. A month later, on 7 February, the Samajik Ekta Manch
staged a protest outside her house, and hurled stones inside.
Last Wednesday, Krishn Kaushik, a staff writer with The
Caravan, highlighted
the various links between the Samajik Ekta Manch and SRP Kalluri,
the chief of police for Bastar range. Kaushik’s story delved into the unsavoury details of Kalluri’s past: allegations
ranging from intimidation to torture and rape. According to a report published on Scroll.in, a news website that
also featured Subramaniam’s writing regularly, the local police showed up at
Subramaniam’s house a few hours after the story was published online. The
policemen took Subramaniam’s domestic help to the station for questioning. On
Thursday—the day on which Gera and Khandelwal were told that they would have to
vacate their home—Subramaniam’s landlord served her an eviction notice too.
In the days preceding the attack, Sori had been raising the
issue of an allegedly fake encounter in Mardum at Bastar district. On 15
February, the local police picked up a villager named Hidma from
his house in the middle of the night and branded him a Naxalite. On learning of
this, Sori had taken Hidma’s family—his wife and daughter who testified that he
was picked from his own house and not captured in a conflict—to Raipur and tried
to lodge a First Information Report (FIR). She was unsuccessful.
Since Kalluri took over as the chief of police in Bastar in
June 2014, there has been a rapid surge in the number of “surrendered Maoists.”
In December 2014, The Indian Express reported that over
seventy percent of those who had surrendered were “ordinary villagers” who
could not be called “surrendered Maoists” according to the eligibility
criteria. Kalluri responded by saying that he was “not concerned about the
eligibility criteria or the surrender policy.”
Since even before the Hidma encounter, Gera said, Sori had
been trying to file an FIR against Kalluri. The 13-point document says that in
public meetings, Kalluri instigated the locals to socially boycott Sori and her
nephew, Lingaram Kodopi; motivating people to sloganeer outsider her house,
terrifying Sori’s children. It also states that on 12 January, in Kunna village
of Dantewada district, which comes under Kalluri’s jurisdiction, security
forces assaulted people, stripped women, and raped them. Twice, Sori was turned
back from police station, her complaint unregistered.
“Sori is the person who has been fighting for the people in
this area,” Khandelwal, who has left the town with Gera, told me. “I can’t help
but think that all the attacks against us—lawyers and journalists active in
Chhattisgarh—are to take her support system away.”
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