The "Salwa Judum" Question
By Campaign for Survival and Dignity
11 July, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Last Tuesday (July 5th) the Supreme Court, in a historic and welcome judgment, disallowed the use of Special Police Officers in the "counterinsurgency" campaign against the CPI(Maoist). Sections of the media have largely focused on the supposed impact this will have on the security forces. The reality is that the Supreme Court has simply upheld the basic norms that a democratic country is supposed to follow - but that our government has never followed.
In the extreme focus on the "security" angle, many seem to have forgotten the horrific atrocities committed by these forces and the "salwa judum" militia to which they belonged. Like private armies and militias in all civil wars, the Chhattisgarh government created salwa judum to do the kind of barbaric crimes that the official forces do not want to be seen doing. This included the burning and emptying of 644 villages, as per official figures; the driving of more than 2 lakh people from their homes in a "scorched earth" policy; and killings and gangrapes on a mass scale.
It is worth remembering that, in international law, such atrocities are classified as crimes against humanity. War crimes indictments have been framed against those responsible for lesser atrocities. Yet in the "world's largest democracy", it took four years for our highest court to halt such horrors, and then we are told that this is "a blow to anti Naxal operations."
Meanwhile, even as the rhetoric of "rule of law" is used by both Central and State governments to justify this kind of inhuman brutality, the very same governments continue to engage in a illegal resource grab with the same rapacity as before. It is not an exaggeration to say that this has become nothing less than a criminal state. And it is hence no surprise that it wants to retain SPOs, the mafia arm of its security forces, to carry on with the atrocities which it sees as necessary for its activities. If indeed the Centre or the Chhattisgarh government approach the Supreme Court for a review of this judgment, it will only expose them as criminals before the nation.
Campaign for Survival and Dignity
www.forestrightsact.com
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