Javed Iqbal: Does Chhattisgarh government respect the law?

The Supreme Court’s judgment regarding the Salwa Judum has put the state at serious risk of contempt of court. Despite evidence stating what the Salwa Judum had been doing for years, the state is still in complete denial of the role played by the Salwa Judum and the Special Police Officers to accentuate a brutal fratricidal civil war.

An affidavit submitted in the Supreme Court by the State of Chhattisgarh noted that there are 6,500 SPOs in Chhattisgarh, who’re paid Rs3,000 (of which 80% comes from the Centre), and they will get Rs5lakh if killed in action.

They need to have passed their fifth standard and are provided two months training in which they are expected to learn how to deal with weapons, yoga, the history and culture of Bastar, forensic science, the Indian Penal Code, CrPC, the Evidence Act and human rights, among other things.

During the proceedings, the lawyer for the petitioners remarked that whoever had framed the training module must have had a sense of humour to expect the SPOs to learn the law within two months. The judges responded by saying, ‘I don’t know about you learned gentlemen, but speaking for ourselves, we would have certainly failed if we had only two months training.’

Yoga too is something that has been imparted to the SPOs, some of whom have been indicted for smashing stones into the eye-sockets of villagers. One wonders how much yoga would have been useful there.

Justice Reddy: ‘So the gun and yoga go together?’

Counsel for the State of Chhattisgarh: Yoga is needed to control the mind and prevent indiscriminate use of guns. Yoga is a Sanskrit word. The whole world has adopted our heritage. It is a part of soldiers training, also in martial arts.

One really wonders if the State of Chhattisgarh was ever taking the Supreme Court proceedings seriously. They jailed petitioners, held witnesses of the killings as virtual prisoners and treated the petitioners as Maoists.

Adding to that now, some commentators on the judgment have gone on to talk about the ideology of the judges impugning over the constitution. Apparently the constitution of the democratic, socialist, republic of India has no ideology. And these commentators don’t seem to have read the Directive Principles of State Policy, which the Supreme Court mentions.

“The Directive Principles, though not justiciable, nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country, direct the State to utilise the material resources of the community for the common good of all, and not just of the rich and the powerful without any consideration of the human suffering that extraction of such resources impose on those who are sought to be dispossessed and disempowered.”

In context to the jungles of Central India, the Directive Principles state that the State shall maintain its policy to secure (a) every citizen, men, women and children the right to equal opportunity for an adequate means of livelihood. Or, the ‘state shall ensure to protect and improvement of the environment and safeguards of the forests and wild life of the country.’

Neither is given any respect — or even thought — and the violation of the rights of people continues to this day.

Article 21 declares that no citizen can be denied his life and liberty except by law. Which means the government can’t shoot people ‘except by law’. The State of Chhattisgarh in its affidavit to the Supreme Court mentioned that it is providing employment to SPOs in the spirit of Article 21, which is quite an innovative way of describing cannon fodder. So the question is this, does the State of Chhattisgarh have any respect to the law?

An eye opener would be their treatment of, and complete subversion of the Panchayat Extension To Scheduled Areas Act, that give the people, the farmers, the indigenous, the right to exercise control over their own farms, forests and forest produce.

It is one of the most progressive laws in the country: a law that hoped to undo an historical injustice done to the adivasis and the vanvasis by the British, who treated the original inhabitants in the jungle as encroachers. The law gave the people the right to reject any company or plan for land acquisition. Yet the government is using another colonial era law, the Land Acquisition Act 1894 to subvert Gram Sabha resolutions.

Gram sabhas in Lohandiguda, Chhattisgarh rejected Tata’s steel plant, gram sabhas in Dhinkia, Orissa, rejected Posco Steel Company, gram sabhas in Raigarh rejected the Birlas, yet the state always finds a way to subvert the process and throw cases onto the people who attended or practiced their rights as per the PESA. 

There are hundreds of Memorandums of Understandings with companies, and thousands of adivasis who have false cases thrown onto them if they don’t want to give away their land.
The fact is, colonial era laws are very convenient to the state apparatus. The 1862 Police Act, which was used to hire SPOs was a law brought in by the British after the 1857 rebellion and its carbon copy, the Chhattisgarh Police Act of 2007, gives the

Superintendent of Police the power to appoint anyone as an SPO.
These are the excessively wide-ranging, un-democratic powers given to the executive, and the judiciary has every right to put a stop to it.