Not just incidental news

There has been another incident. A tribal person set out from home to encash a cheque, after working hard to collect tendu leaves. He was ‘picked up’ allegedly by the Chhattisgarh police.

While he was in lock-up, the police said, he used a bedsheet (or perhaps a shawl, or blanket) to hang himself. Then the police were saying that he was caught by the CRPF and tortured nearly to death. The post mortem report has mentioned injury to the genitals. Some constables have been suspended.

Funny, isn’t it, the way these incidents play out? The police explanations… if they must make fictions, can they not come up with something more creative than ‘Hung himself’? Although it is sort of amazing — the speed at which some people grow weary of life whilst in custody. It makes the imagination boggle to think of the kind of misery a man must feel in order to injure his own genitals before hanging himself. And what sane woman would put foreign objects into her genitals before contriving to slip in the bathroom and hurting her head and spine?

On a serious note, what are these cops (or those armed forces guys) thinking when they put out such blatant lies? They must know that forensic and medical science will give them away. They must know that questions will be asked if someone dies whilst in custody. Or, do they not know any such thing?

Perhaps they take it for granted that investigations into murder or torture or sexual assault will be forestalled if the perpetrators are policemen or CRPF men. Perhaps they are genuinely surprised to discover that citizens — well, some of them anyway — might be bothered by custodial killings.

And perhaps they are thinking: this wasn’t part of the deal. The deal was to arrest, torture, burn entire villages, and draft official versions of incidents as accidents in the bathroom. The state government was expected to deal with the fallout.

Actually, the state government is dealing with the fallout. For instance, even after public revelations about the ‘accidents’ that left Soni Sori seriously injured and allegations of torture and sexual assault, the schoolteacher remains in Raipur jail. Groups of women activists are not being allowed to meet her.

The press could ask some questions, yes. But the state government seems to think it can make the press shut up too. It has reportedly filed as many as 40 cases against Patrika, a newspaper in Chhattisgarh. The paper has complained to the Press Council of India that its journalists are being harassed. 

As for meddlesome citizens, an important tool they use is the Right to Information. The state cannot reject it outright. But they can make it damnably hard for citizens to exercise this right. The Chhattisgarh legislative assembly has decided to do just that by increasing the cost of an RTI application fee to Rs 500. This is fifty times the fee charged in other parts of the country.

There can only be one explanation, and only one expected result from such a move — filing RTIs will become harder for the common man. It becomes nearly impossible for the poor. Who benefits from such a move?

Well, that is something the democratically elected Chhattisgarh government should be asking itself. Failing which, the citizens who elected that government should be asking. Ask why the state sends in policemen to deal with people who oppose the expansion plans of a power plant. Ask why it can afford to up its advertising expenditure to change its ‘naxal-infested’ image but cannot find the 1,846 doctors needed for existing government hospitals.

Annie Zaidi writes poetry,
stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she
never actually tried)