The Ghosts of Dantewada

On March 12, Rahul Sharma, superintendent of police, Bilaspur, shot himself in the head with his service revolver. Some cite personal problems, others feel he was under severe pressure from his superiors.

I first met him on April 3, 2009, when motorcycle-borne Maoists had gunned down Channu Karma, a relative of Mahendra Karma, in broad daylight, just a few kilometres away from the police station at Dantewada. I had taken the above photograph of the witness of the crime, who sat distraught, holding his head, unable to talk. Rahul Sharma (framed by the window) then the Superintendent of Police of Dantewada, had entered the scene of the crime, and instantly called someone in Raipur, and in a calm demeanour, described the situation and everything that was being done by his department to handle yet another political assassination in Dantewada. He would later ask me where I had come from, and I replied I came from Mumbai. I would live in Dantewada for months under his office.

A few days later, on April 11, an alleged encounter had taken me to the village of Goomiyapal, then to Hiroli, then Samalwar, where the police had claimed to have killed three Maoists in the forest, yet the dirt roads leading away from the village of Samalwar were filled with pools of blood. The villagers too claimed that three people were taken away by the police from Samalwar and that there was no encounter in the forest.

That day I had interviewed Rajesh Pawar, the assistant superintendent of police in the mining town of Kirandul. He had the strange habit of leaving his service revolver on his desk. I would meet him a few more times, once to find access to some prisoners who I knew were being beaten in the other room following an IED blast on a road near Kuakonda that had injured three CRPF personnel. And each time I met him behind a desk, he would leave his 9mm on the desk. When another reporter challenged him about the killings of Hiroli, he responded quickly, ‘Itna easy nahi hai, aadmi ko marna.’ And he handed his service pistol to the reporter, ‘mujhe maro.’

A few months later, he was gunned down by Maoists May 23, 2011, at Gariaband. The Maoists had filled him up with 20 bullets in an ambush that also took nine other lives. The village of Goomiyapal, where a mother and her son were beaten up during the April 12 encounter in the ‘forest’, would see another encounter in December 2009 that claimed six lives, and another in May 2010, that claimed two lives, and again on February 12, 2012, where a young boy was shot dead.

But Rahul Sharma’s stint as SP, Dantewada, was even more controversial with the killing of 19 adivasis in Singaram village who the police referred to as hardcore Maoist cadres but human rights groups and the media had cited as ordinary villagers.

Witnesses claimed that people were lined up and shot. The Singaram matter was taken to the courts by human rights activist Himanshu Kumar, and a few months later, one of the adivasi petitioners who was challenging the version of events of the police, would be killed by the Maoists.

Death, in Dantewada, moves in circles, and only the ghosts know the end of the war. There was once a casual story about SP Rahul Sharma, who met Arundhati Roy and filmmaker Sanjay Kak when they were in Dantewada. He would tell Roy that he was an avid reader of her work when he was in JNU, and would say, like a market economist would concur, ‘Peace would come to Dantewada if the adivasis would be taught greed.’

I wish I knew Rahul Sharma a lot better now, and I wish I could’ve asked him what he learnt from the adivasis.

Javed Iqbal is a journalist based in Mumbai