Word: chhattisgarh
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...Ripe for Revolution A recent - and extremely rare - trip into a Naxalite zone in the state of Chhattisgarh shows just how much control the Maoists have in India's neglected heartland. After weeks of negotiating, I received word from a senior commander there that cadres from the area would escort a photographer and me into the field to meet a rebel unit. After an early morning, two-hour motorbike ride along dirt roads south of the town of Dantewada, across rivers where women beat their clothes against rocks and through villages full of thatched and terracotta-roofed huts, scrawny chickens...
...very same villagers they claim to be liberating. To protest state "exploitation," the Maoists regularly order farmers in their regions to stop growing food or to raise the sale prices for certain items. Farmers who defy such bans have been summarily executed, say human-rights groups such as the Chhattisgarh-based Forum for Fact-Finding Documentation and Advocacy...
...with the Maoist presence or not. But a few days earlier, in a camp for people displaced by the conflict about 20 miles away, Miriyam Joga, 41, could barely contain his rage. A relatively successful farmer, Joga had owned a few dozen goats and 27 oxen in the southern Chhattisgarh village of Punpalli until a Naxalite raid three years ago. "They said if I leave my village then they will cut me like this," he said, tilting his head back and drawing his finger across his throat. "But I was feeling that they might murder me anyway so I left...
...central government has begun training state police in jungle warfare at a new college in Chhattisgarh. More than 6,500 police officers have learned better shooting skills, how to move in thick forest, how to survive on bush food and how to take on enemy fighters in hand-to-hand combat. But the flamboyant head of the college, Brigadier B.K. Ponwar says that no matter how much police officers improve their skills, the key remains winning the support of the masses. "Look at Iraq," he says. "I tell my students that their most important objective is to win people...
...That would be easier if not for the emergence in Chhattisgarh three years ago of a civil militia known as Salwa Judum, which means either "peace mission" or "collective hunt" depending on who's doing the translating. The movement's backers say it developed spontaneously when local villagers grew tired of the Naxalites' brutal mafia-like tactics. Chhattisgarh police then appointed thousands of young men, some of them still teenagers, as "special police officers," supplied them with weapons and pushed them to fight the Maoists. Human-rights groups say the special police officers use many of the same tactics...