Human rights group faults India's support of anti-insurgent militia
The Indian government, locked in a deadly struggle with Maoist rebels, should stop supporting an anti-insurgency militia whose members have intimidated, beaten, raped and killed civilians while authorities looked the other way, Human Rights Watch said today.
The group accused the Salwa Judum militia of routinely abusing poor villagers in Chattisgarh state, thousands of whom have fled or been uprooted from their homes and ancestral lands because of the armed conflict pitting government forces and the militia against the Maoists, known as Naxalites. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the Naxalites, whose insurgency covers a large swath of eastern India, the No. 1 internal security threat facing the country.
Members of the Salwa Judum, sometimes in collusion with the police, have burned down hamlets to force residents to leave, extorted money to fund their activities, stolen food, sexually assaulted women, carried out summary executions and recruited children into their ranks, according to a Human Rights Watch report released today.
The organization said the Naxalites had committed similar abuses in their 41-year uprising against the state. The two sides have fostered an us-or-them atmosphere that has escalated the bloodletting, putting residents under threat from all directions, the report says.
"People were forced to take sides. Neutrality was not even an option," said Meenakshi Ganguly, one of the researchers of the 182-page report, which is based on dozens of witness accounts collected late last year and early this year in Chattisgarh.
The violence has triggered a massive wave of internal refugees. As many as 100,000 people have been displaced, ending up in squalid roadside Salwa Judum camps or seeking refuge in neighboring states, bereft of land and jobs.
Most are poor rural folk who belong to historically marginalized communities such as tribal groups and those previously known as "untouchables" under the ancient Hindu caste system.
The Naxalites claim to be fighting on behalf of the downtrodden, and are strong in the dirt-poor but mineral-rich states in the east, whose natural resources officials and multinational corporations are eager to exploit to keep India's economy booming.
Plenty of critics, not just the Naxalites, contend that the area's residents have received few of the benefits of such ventures and that the environment has been despoiled by large-scale mining.
