Police Sponsored Fascist Organizations Start to Disintegrate in Bastar, After Exit of Kalluri

-Rajesh Tyagi/ 11.2.2017

Two rightwing fascist formations, Action Group for National Integrity (AGNI) and the Bastar Sangharsh Samiti (BSS), that had spearheaded the violent campaign against tribal resistance in Bastar after official disbanding of Salwa Judum, have dissolved themselves, finally.

This dissolution has come on the heels of exit of Shiv Ram Prasad Kalluri, Bastar Range Inspector General of Police, who has been instrumental in unleashing a reign of brutal repression upon tribals in Bastar. Coordinating police savagery with misadventures of fascist bands, that included mass rapes, loot, arson, beating and outright killings of tribals whom they termed as naxalites, Kalluri had become another name for terror in the region.

Kalluri was sent back recently to Police Headquarters in Raipur by the right-wing Chhattisgarh government after he has presided over for fairly long period upon most brutal wave of crackdowns upon tribals, journalists, lawyers and human rights activists in Bastar.

Kalluri and his subordinate officer, R.N.Dash had been openly and frequently sharing dais in public rallies and meetings organized by the fascist bands that were only new banners for the old Salwa Judum. AGNI, that stands disbanded after a broad daylight attack on the house of the rights activist Bela Bhatia had invited huge public outcry, was formed from the cadres of Samajik Ekta Manch, a proxy for Salwa Judum. Many of the group members retained government accommodation and accompanied police officials in choppers.

Proclaiming dissolution of AGNI, its convenor Anand Mohan Mishra, said on February 9, “The AGNI has been dissolved with consensus. We were representing the people of Bastar in their fight against the Maoists. Since its formation, the AGNI was working peacefully and in a democratic way along with the government and the police. In the current situation, we are announcing an immediate dissolution.” Immediately after it, P.Vijay Naidu of the Bastar Sangharsh Samiti announced the ‘dissolution’ of the group.

Both of these police backed armed gangs were notorious in carrying out unspeakable atrocities upon poor tribals and their sympathisers, branding them as ‘anti-national’ and ‘naxalites’.  

Recent row, that culminated in the exit of Kalluri, had started with hullabaloo carried out by AGNI goons outside the house of Bela Bhatia, a rights activist in Bastar. The action was abetted by police as she was part of a probe team of MHRC to record the statements of 14 victims of rapes by policemen in 2015. The incident caught public attention, after National Human Rights Commission has intervened to order protection to the rights activist.

Bela Bhatia, presently a Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, had been on several central government panels, formed to suggest 'ways of governance' in the disturbed areas like Bastar, to the government, that wants to avert an upsurge like Naxalbari, beforehand. These panels had included reactionaries like Ajit Doval alongside Bela. Her husband Jean Dreze, became an Indian citizen in 2002 during NDA rule, and is an Honorary Chair of the "Planning and Development Unit" created by the Planning Commission, Government of India. He had been member of National Advisory Council (NAC) during both terms of UPA, 2004-09 and 2009-14, under Chairmanship of Sonia Gandhi.

The exit of Kalluri has given an opportunity to the rightwing governments in Chhatisgarh and at the centre to save their faces and wash their hands off the torrent of mischiefs committed under Kalluri regime in Bastar. Well aware and informed of the situation in Bastar, neither the government nor the NHRC ever questioned the acts of Police repression so widely and frequently reported in the press until there was an uproar this time.

Before his departure, Kalluri, has accomplished the task for which he was deployed in Bastar. Aided by fascist bands, he performed large number of fake encounters and forced surrenders by those who dared to resist against atrocities, alongside a whole spree of predatory repression that includes mass rapes, arson, loot, custodial torture etc.

After a while, as Bastar would fade away from public view, Kalluri would be replaced by other bully!

Unrest in Bastar is the direct offshoot of intrusion of capitalism in this one of the most backward regions of the country. Huge corporate ventures in the form of extensive mining and big industry are threatening to erode the tribal life completely. In defence of their life and livelihood, the native tribals are resisting what they deem as infringement of their natural rights and abode. Maoists, who claim to provide leadership to tribal resistance, have no viable program to dislodge capitalism in its core centres, the cities, except reactionary exhortations to the tribals to violently ward off all development in the region. This bankruptcy of political perspective has prevented Maoists to present any viable alternative to the capitalist regime, leaving the poor tribals in the wobble of an endless bloody struggle where they are always on the receiving end.

Neither bourgeois liberals like Bela or Dreze nor petit-bourgeois radicals like Maoists have any plan or program to transcend capitalism.

As always, the bourgeois establishment remains divided in a range of opinions on the question of  ‘path’ of capitalist development and the methods to deal with resistance against it, in the backward regions like Bastar. While the rightwing sections of the establishment, favour a more radical policy of massive intrusion assisted by bayonets, its conservative, gandhian, leftwing sections recommend a more subtle and humane policy, which they term as ‘alternative development agenda’.

While the likes of Kalluri are backed by the rightwing sections, the leftwing sections of the establishment find their echo in likes of Bela Bhatia. To be sure, none of them is opposed to capitalism or capitalist development, but they have their own ways of its execution.

The reactionary appeals to thwart and oppose the capitalist development in Bastar or any other backward rural or tribal region in the country, are the height of idiocy. Capitalism is already disintegrating the peasant and tribal life while organizing the proletariat, the class that would dig its grave. Program of Maxism is not aimed at thwarting capitalism, rather its forcible overthrow. The struggle for liberation of the tribal would find it’s most coherent, viable and finished expression not in the struggle of the jungle against the city but in the revolutionary struggle of the worker against the bourgeoisie in the city.