How is the Tarmetlar forest now? How is Abughamad? And what of the young man from Dantewada who once told me, standing amid the whispering trees, “Close your eyes and stand still for a while you will still smell the burnt flesh in the air.”
That sentence was not a metaphor. It was memory and a warning.
In April 2010, Dantewada’s Chintalnad became the graveyard of 76 CRPF personnel, a massacre that remains etched in the nation’s conscience. I had gone there as a journalist. The scene I witnessed was a warzone carved into a forest; torn camouflage, scorched boots, a crater twelve feet deep, and the acrid smell of explosives clinging to the humid air. The charred fragments of life lay scattered across a landscape that was once serenely beautiful.
Standing there, I wondered: Is this the thunderclap of spring, or the requiem of humanity?
Everywhere I looked, grief and futility intertwined. For the security forces, every tribal was a potential Maoist. For the Maoists, every uniform was an enemy of the people. And for the tribals, the true sons of the soil, there was no space left to stand that wasn’t soaked in suspicion or blood.
Slaughterhouse called Chhattisgarh
A year later, when I returned to Bastar, the forests were still green, but the silence had deepened. Chhattisgarh felt like one vast slaughterhouse — and today, that slaughterhouse has expanded. From Bastar to Gadchiroli, from Malkangiri to Sukma, “encounters” have become the grammar of governance.
Home Minister Amit Shah promises a “Maoist-free India” by March 31, 2026. The route chosen to achieve it, however, is drenched in gunpowder. The state encircles the forests, reduces the Maoist radius, and leaves behind heaps of bodies, each tagged as a victory.
Security forces dance around corpses; cameras flash; reports celebrate coordination and bravery. But amid all that triumphalism, no one speaks of the families whose only wealth was a son, now wrapped in plastic and never returned.
There is jubilation because the command from the top is clear, shoot to eliminate. Legal evidence takes time; judicial processes demand patience. In a political landscape obsessed with results and deadlines, bullets are faster.
The Maoist leadership, Basavaraju, Sudhakar, and countless others, has been wiped out. But who measures how many ordinary tribals, lured or coerced into the Maoist gatherings, perished with them? Who will ask if they were combatants or bystanders?
The state celebrates their deaths as proof of progress. But is a forest littered with blood and silence truly a measure of peace?
Mirror of history
India’s “encounter raj” did not begin yesterday. It was born in the 1970s under Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s Bengal. It matured under Congress’s Operation Green Hunt and thrives today under the BJP’s muscular nationalism. Regimes changed, but the method remained: annihilate the insurgent, neglect the grievance.
After the 2010 Dantewada tragedy, the E. N. Rammohan Committee, led by a former BSF chief, warned that the state’s military approach was fundamentally flawed. Rammohan’s words still sting with relevance: “Can you think that military operations against the people of your own country are right?”
He said what few in power dare to acknowledge , that the roots of rebellion lie not in ideology, but in dispossession. The forest dwellers, uprooted by mining contracts and corporate greed, were forced to trade their ploughs for guns. Their protest, once about survival, became a war.
Development for whom?
Rammohan asked the most uncomfortable question of all: Who needs this development? If the tribal people are denied their basic rights to land and livelihood, what purpose does a new highway or mining project serve?
He argued that true development lies not in displacing the Adivasis for mineral wealth but in giving them ownership of it — not as peons and drivers, but as partners. Yet, every government, red or saffron, has chosen the opposite path.
The forests burn so that the mines can shine.
The Maoists, too, bear blood on their hands. Their dream of armed revolution has turned the tribals’ home into a battlefield. Every child carrying a rifle in the red corridor is another life stolen by ideology.
They claim to fight for the poor, yet they drag the poor into a war they never chose. How long can one fight in the name of liberation when the liberated keep dying?
There is no popular outrage at Maoist deaths anymore. The revolution, once romantic, has lost its resonance. It has become an echo in a forest too tired to listen.
The future, and the fear
The state now marches through Bastar’s impenetrable jungles, cutting off supplies, destroying camps and claiming progress. The boots of security forces echo across the Indravati basin, the sound of control replacing the sound of birds.
But the question remains, will the conflict end when the last Maoist falls, or when the last tribal family loses its land? Many fear the war will continue until every inch of Bastar’s mineral-rich soil is cleared for corporate extraction.
Dialogue, reconciliation, and justice have all been dismissed as weakness. The government has no appetite for ceasefire, only conquest.
(By Pranab Mondal)
Follow us
