A Bengali shopkeeper, Shekhar, was shot dead at point-blank range at Dornapal yesterday by ‘unidentified assailants’. This is what really happened: a jawan (policeman) of the Naga battalion entered the shop with the purpose of buying an undergarment; the shopkeeper asked him Rs. 30 for it; the jawan insisted that he wouldn’t pay more than Rs. 15; a quarrel broke out between the two; the jawan took out his weapon, and fired. The abovementioned sequence of events has been confirmed by reliable sources, including eyewitnesses, who wish to remain unnamed.
As of today, the entire district administration, along with a certain Mr. Kushwaha, a Salwa Judum leader and Mr. Mahendra Karma’s Number Two, has been camping at Dornapal, trying to ‘persuade’ members of Shankar’s family to lodge an FIR (First Information Report) against ‘unidentified person(s)’.
This is the first specific case of human rights violation, involving directly a member of the armed forces, to have come to light, if only because the victim is a non-tribal. The shocking aspect is that this killing did not happen in a remote village but in the largest SJ ‘base-camp’, where more than 7000 uprooted tribals are being kept.
AJ
as part of the women fact finding team we went to dornapal camp in
ReplyDeletethe beginning of this month where we were told that the people in
the camp were 16,000, displaced from 50 to 60 villages. we have seen
salwa judum leaders mostly sapnaches of panchayats building big
houses with cement slabs. some surpanches on record said that they
were informed in a block meeting by the administration that they
need to do judum in thier villages. judum wallas also went on record
that it is the force (police and CRPF) which plans the judum and
they do not even know which village they were going to till they go
to particulat village. it was all recorded on video. the dornapal
camp which is just 6 months old is already developing in to a big
slum on the road side. we also heard the cases of prostitution.
government gives each person two plastic mugs of rice and some dal
and do not give them any cash to take care of other needs like
clothing. there is no enough work for the entire displaced
community. what we found was the entire life in the camp itself is a
violation of human rights. the camp has taken the life out of the
inmates. we spoke to scores of people in the camp. everybody wants
to go home and return to their normal life of cultivating and
colleting the forest produce. none of them are happy in the camp.
even the slawa judum activists except those who are making most out
of the situaiton are not willing to stay back. they do not have a
clue about what happenes to their lands left back in the villages.
nobody is sure if they would ever be compensated for their lands.
and finally given the vulnarability of the situation shooting,
raping and other forms of violations are going to happen more
frequently. in andhra pradesh we have seen these kind of shootings
and rapes wherever CRPF camps were set upin late 80s and early 90s.
we all heard the same incidents from north east, from kashmir and
from wherever the camps were set up.
best
vanaja