Since June-July 2014, reports have been filtering in regarding the intensification of Operation Green Hunt in the forest villages of Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh. Civil rights organizations have been receiving requests to send teams in order to investigate what was happening on the ground. To this end, PUDR conducted a fact-finding in the villages of Sarkeguda, Rajpeta, Kottaguda, Pusbaka, Basaguda, Lingagiri, Korsaguda, Kottagudem and Timmapur villages in Usur Tehsil of Bijapur District from 26th to 31st December 2014. The attempt was to document the principal concerns of the Adivasis and the reasons underlying these, by staying for a few days in the villages.
This report adds to the existing documentation on state repression that PUDR has been carrying out along with other civil rights organizations for over a decade in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. However, unlike previous fact-finding reports which were incident-specific, such as the Sarkeguda killings of June 2012 by the CRPF, the scope of the present report allows for a larger understanding of how repression has percolated and utterly changed the lives of Adivasis. The information provided by the residents of the nine villages, the facts gathered and the observations made in the course of the fact-finding confirm the insecurities and hardships of daily life in the war zone—the low key, but ever-present forms of repression routinized by the state through its forces and security camps. The urgency of this report lies in the fact that there is a very real need to intervene and prevent the security camps from assuming a permanent character in the villages of Bijapur.
To download the report, click below:
War and the Lightness of Being Adivasi: Security Camps and Villages in Bijapur, Chhattisgarh
For the Hindi version of the report, click below:
युद्ध-क्षेत्र में आदिवासी जिंदगियाँ: बीजापुर के गावों में सुरक्षा कैंप के बीच असुक्षित जीवन
