The Frontline of Democracy

FAR FROM POLARISING and enervating debates about India’s ‘democratic decline’, residents in a remote and security-challenged area of Chhattisgarh are giving voice to a vi­brant democratic process. Chances are it will be hard to find Puvarti, Silger and Bhima­puram on a map. But these villages of Konta Assembly block of the Bastar Lok Sabha constituency are the frontlines of democracy. It is here that the true measure of India’s democracy can be seen and assessed as fresh shoots rise in an area that has been a Maoist stronghold.

Much of this has to do with the effective and increased security at the tri-junction of Sukma, Bijapur and Dantewada districts, once seen as no-go zones. On February 16 this year, the Central Re­serve Police Force (CRPF) established a new camp in Puvarti that is the home of top Maoist commander Hidma, who is on the run. The force has constructed an anganwadi and a Public Distribution System (PDS) centre. These are likely to become operational soon. There is no substitute to feet on the ground and it is security forces like CRPF and its specialised CoBRA battalions that are ensuring public participation by the people of the area.

These are not easy places to re-plant and nurture participatory politics. The Konta Assembly block is among the most sensitive parts of India. Here, Maoists have had a free run for more than four decades and until recently, the situation looked hopeless. The people of the area seemed ‘resigned’ to Maoist hegemony. The north-western edge of the constituency, which includes the Puvarti, Silger and Bhimapuram (also known as Meshiguda) poll­ing stations, present unprecedented hurdles for election officials and security forces personnel. Yet, bit by bit, Maoist terror has retreated and the voting pattern in this area since the 2018 As­sembly elections, as gleaned from the Form 20—that details votes cast at each polling station in the Assembly block—tells the story.

In the 2018 Assembly elections, a mere five votes were cast at Silger and just two at Puvarti. This figure dipped further in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. But by 2023, a sea change was notice­able in the area. The CRPF camp at Silger was established on May 12, 2021. Two years later, when elections were conducted for the Chhattisgarh Assembly, the number of votes cast at Silger went up to 54 and even in remote Puvarti, the figure went up to 10. For those accustomed to witnessing brisk voting in urban areas of India, these figures may appear uninspiring. But it is important to understand the background in which people come out to vote in these areas in the face of boycott calls and threat of violence.

The improvement in security did not end the woes of the people. As a last-ditch measure, the Maoists decided to open an overground front in Silger. When the CRPF camp was established, there were protests and it was claimed the presence of paramili­tary forces would lead to harassment of Adivasis living in the area. A permanent protest site came up at Silger in 2021. (This site shifted over time in an area of one-odd kilometre: from Tar­rem in Bijapur district to its final site near the Silger CRPF camp.) The protest has been lifted now. Unwilling to accept that the pro­test ran out of steam, commentators sympathetic to the Maoist cause continued to hail it as a “democratic protest.” ‘Intellectuals’ claimed the lifting of the protest was because of ‘coercive’ pressure from the security forces. A simpler explanation for the protest withering away can be found in the fact that residents of Silger and adjoining villages sought the benefits of democracy and wanted their representatives to carry their voice in the state Assembly and Parliament. And pressure of the security forces, if any, ensured Maoists could not intimidate locals.

All this has, however, come at a cost. In discussing the security situation with Open at Silger, an officer highlighted the challenges that accompany any political activity. “After the polling for Assembly elections last year, there were at least 15 cases where fingers of voters with the mark of the indelible ink were chopped off by the Maoists,” the officer, who did not wish to be named, said. These villagers belong to Silger and its adjoining areas. There are other challenges as well. Silger lies on the road from Awapalli, some 33km away, in Bijapur district. Jagargonda, a key administrative centre in Sukma district, is another 15km away. Around 400 metres ahead of the camp lies a tree line. The area beyond has been laid with spikes hidden by leaves and foliage in the ground that can maim and kill anyone who accidentally falls on them. If this were not enough, the entire belt, which merges into Dantewada district, has been rigged with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

The same officer tells Open, “This is not aimed at us [CRPF] only. The Maoists don’t want people from these villages to vote in the Lok Sabha elections or even approach us at the camp for any kind of aid.” The Silger camp has a makeshift hospital and is manned by a doctor who not only cares for troopers and officers, but also for people of villages around the camp. By all accounts, this has gone down well with the people of Silger. “It is a cat-and-mouse game. We try to secure the area; they [Maoists] keep on watching us and change their tactics. We respond and they counter-respond,” says the officer. For all the challenges, the area under Silger Forward Operating Base (FOB) is now under control.

CRPF is now trying to replicate, lock stock and barrel, the Silger experience in Puvarti, an experiment that is far more de­manding, in a security environment that is doubly challenging. Puvarti is around 11km from Silger in the south-west direction. There is a single track, a dirt strip that leads from Silger to Puvarti. It is on this ‘road’ that a daily traffic of earth-moving equipment, tractors with trolley loads of construction material and trucks with supplies plies. Almost at their mid-point lies the Tekulagudem camp, infa­mous for the April 3, 2021 ambush in which 22 CRPF troopers lost their lives. This year, on January 30, the very day when an FOB was es­tablished at Tekulagudem, Maoists attacked the camp. Three CRPF men were killed and 14 were injured. Puvarti lies another five kilometres away from Tekulagudem.

For all practical purposes, Puvarti is the tip of the spear pointed at the Maoists. It is effectively surrounded on all sides by hostile territory. But it is interesting to note that the strategy based on a mix of welfare and security measures being attempted at Puvarti is delivering results.

The first thing to note about Puvarti is that it was purportedly a ‘model village’ being developed by the Maoists. This Marxist-Leninist ‘utopia’ had collectivised agriculture, based on fields parcelled into plots, a check dam of sorts, and more were dis­covered by security forces at a location of around one kilometre from the camp. The village— Hidma’s home—is roughly 750 metres from the camp. Until now, people at Puvarti had no medical help unless they trudged all the way to Silger. This has changed. The camp now has a make­shift hospital and a doctor to boot. In time, a permanent hospital is planned.

“When we began, we had to take our table, medicines and equipment outside the camp under a tree. We then waited for the villagers to approach us,” Dr Jeetu Kurian, the doctor at Puvarti tells Open. Within days, there was a beeline of sorts for medical help. “The cases we see here involve falciparum malaria, dermal infections, dehydration and malnutrition,” says the doctor. This is the mix of maladies that is seen everywhere in Bastar. Most of the fatalities in the area are due to malaria. In the roughly two months since the camp was opened, some 510-odd patients have been treated, on average around 10 patients a day. Not only do Maoists have no care for such concerns, they have regularly blown up schools and hospitals and damaged roads to prevent regular administrative services from reaching areas under their control.

“In one case, a person had a severe infection on his leg. I applied a dressing and told him that you need to come for at least two to three more days for a fresh dressing every day. The man came every day. Some days later, he returned with a handful of edible seeds. I see that as a mark of his affection,” says Kurian.

The importance of medical facilities at Puvarti and people in the village availing them has another dimension: the govern­ment’s outreach in this area is working.

Another officer at the camp, who did not wish to be named, said: “Our strategy is not about hunting Maoists. We are here to impart confidence among the people towards the govern­ment. If the Maoists do come, we will deal with them. But the overall goal is to stabilise the region.”

This is a big change from the Salwa Judum era when the strategy to counter the Maoists was to control people living in Bastar. That strategy did not work and, by some accounts, even backfired spectacularly. Since then, there has been extensive thinking and rethinking on how to counter the Maoists. The an­swer is to adopt an approach based on area domination. But how does one do that and how does one take into confidence people in a region who have known no other ‘government’ except gun-toting Maoists and their own ‘Jantana Sarkar’? A people-centric approach had to be the cornerstone of any such strategy, and it is in camps like Silger and Puvarti with their mix of security and civic action programmes that now seems to be delivering results.

The three camps—Silger, Tekulagudem and Puvarti—lie in a straight line as the crow flies, in a north-south axis. Each camp has an operating radius of five to six kilometres in a concentric circle. While the exact area of operations is not disclosed—for obvious reasons—together, the three camps now effectively control terri­tory with a radius of around 18 km. The Awapalli-Jagargonda road, a distance of 50-odd kilometres, lies in an east-west direction. From Jagargonda to Dornapal (both in Sukma district) is a distance of 70-odd kms in a north-south direction. These two axes—Dornapal- Jagargonda and Jagargonda-Awapalli—are now ringed with mul­tiple CRPF camps that have a significant presence of CoBRA troops.

THE RESULT IS that Maoists are being hemmed in to ever-shrinking areas. If one looks at incidents that have led to the killing of 85 Maoists since January (including 29 killed in a single encounter in Kanker district on April 16), a majority have taken place to the north of the Awapalli-Jagargonda axis. This area falls mostly in Bijapur and Sukma districts. These encounters happened in Gampur, Purangel, Pidiya, Korcholi and other areas that are north of this axis. The strategy is clear: wrest back this area from Maoist control and then focus on Pa­med in the “deep south” of Bijapur and Sukma district — one of the remaining strongholds of the Maoists in Bastar. (The other one being the Abujmarh area that straddles Narayanpur district in Chhattisgarh and Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra.) Even a cursory look at the data on locations of encounters since the start of this year confirms this: few incidents have taken place to the south of this line.

What this does is to exert an immense amount of security pres­sure on the Silger-Puvarti axis. And it shows. The speed at which construction work is being carried out at Puvarti, the extensive area domination exercises and multiple flows of road-opening parties show the seriousness with which security is being manned in this sector. While officers at Puvarti are tight-lipped about the security situation, these measures are not impacting the civilian outreach which is the cornerstone of the strategy to reassert control in the area.

When Open asked if the ‘model farm’ and the check dam made by the Maoists could be visited, officers at Puvarti demurred that the area was too dangerous. Even a visit to the village was con­sidered risky. But in the end, one officer tasked with perimeter defence said he would help. He accompanied Open to the village. The reaction of one villager was interesting. Pointing to the pre­fabricated anganwadi centre, he said while the centre worker visited two of the eight locales—paras in Hindi—of the village, she never came to Puvarti proper. The officer said he would ask the worker to visit there as well. It is evident that villagers here have no nostalgia about the Maoist raj. The government’s out­reach is working, and working well.

It is too early to say when Puvarti will become ‘normal’, be­yond its current status of being an area now under the control of the government. But one thing is certain: the tide is turning against the Maoists in areas that were ‘out of bounds’, even as recently as January. Perhaps it has to do with a growing convic­tion among people that areas such as Jagargonda are now by and large peaceful, along with the vigorous outreach to provide basic services long denied to people for as long as they can remember. Bastar is witnessing democracy in action.

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