The story of an ‘Urban Naxal’

The following is an edited excerpt from the recently released book ‘The Incarcerations – Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India’ by Alpa Shah. It is the story of Sudha Bharadwaj, who was one of the ‘BK-16’ – lawyers, professors, journalists, artists, and activists – who were arrested and held in jail for years without trial under the UAPA law in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon case. The courts have since released them – except the octogenarian Stan Swamy, who died in jail – on bail.

Of the BK-16, until Stan Swamy died, the story of Sudha Bharadwaj, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday in jail, was perhaps the best covered by the Indian and international media. Born in one city of Cambridge, in the US, to well-known economists undertaking a two-year postdoctoral stint at Harvard University and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), raised in another Cambridge, in the UK until she was eleven years old, and then on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University where her mother founded the Centre for Economics Studies and Planning as Professor, Sudha herself was an alumna of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, one of India’s most prestigious higher education institutes…

…After more than three years in jail, the Bombay High Court granted ‘default bail’ to Sudha. 

…I had wanted to meet Sudha since at least three years before she was incarcerated, when I led a European Union and UK government Economic and Social Science Research Council funded project that exposed the underside of economic growth in India. Our team had shown how the rich business elites of India were able to buy manor houses in the English countryside because of the huge profits they made employing armies of cheap, vulnerable and undocumented workers who were given no contracts, let alone medical insurance or pensions. They were paid less than the minimum wage, worked overtime in a hazardous environment, and could be fired on the spot. More than 90 per cent of India’s workforce was employed under such treacherous conditions. One of the only ways to make positive change for these precarious workers was by uniting and mobilising them to demand better pay, terms and conditions of work. But the majority of trade unions in India – or for that matter the world – only catered for a small minority of permanent, privileged workers with formal contracts. There was almost nobody fighting on behalf of the mass of India’s precariously employed contract workers. Almost nobody, with the exception of Sudha Bharadwaj.

We invited Sudha to London to give a leading lecture at the final conference for the project, but she wrote, ‘I am afraid I have to turn down your kind invitation, and very reluctantly. Getting my papers for foreign travel will have to begin with getting my passport, which itself has some hurdles at this point.’

It is almost unheard of for an Indian to give away American citizenship. But it turned out that Sudha didn’t have a passport to come to London because she hadn’t bothered to get another one after she relinquished her American one at the age of twenty-three.

When I finally met Sudha for the first time, in April 2022, five months after she was let out of jail on bail, she told me with some amusement the story of her visit to the intricately sun-screened white building of the American Embassy in the heart of the treelined diplomatic enclave at Chanakyapuri in Delhi.

…‘The consul was flabbergasted when I told him I wanted to surrender my American citizenship. I had to repeat my request and explain that my parents were both Indian and I wished to be Indian too,’ Sudha said.

…Sudha’s decision to give up her US citizenship was noteworthy in a context where almost everyone she had studied with dreamt of emigrating to the US and securing a Green Card. Sudha was clearly different. By then she had decided she wanted to devote her life to the struggles of the poor in her own country.

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‘A rich land of poor people,’ is how Sudha Bharadwaj eventually came to understand the mineral-rich central and eastern Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha. Lands under which lie India’s largest reserves of iron ore, coal, bauxite, limestone, tin, dolomite, quartzite and uranium, but on top of which live some of the poorest people in the country, and indeed the world.

These are places where the mineral wealth has become a curse for the locals, as corporate elites who live in faraway cities and abroad in the UK and the US set out to extract the wealth and, with the help of the Indian state, forcibly displace local communities, sending them into extreme poverty. But back then, as Sudha travelled to Chhattisgarh for the first time in her early twenties, she had little idea of this wider political economy of the region, and that twenty years later she would be part of leading a dangerous fight against the displacement of locals.

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The Sarkeguda ‘fake encounter’

…In July 2012, a seven-minute bone-chilling video appeared on Sudha’s WhatsApp. It was shot on a mobile phone in the remote forested village of Sarkeguda in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region. 

Five hundred kilometres south of Bhilai, Bastar was almost another country, part of an undulating forested region that stretched right across central and eastern India, across the states of north-east Maharashtra, southern Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, northern Andhra Pradesh, and northern Telangana. It was where the electricity lines and tarmac roads stopped and the thickets of bamboo, sal, saqua and other trees took over. Villages consisted of scattered mud huts, some had only a few dozen. Hindi was rarely heard in the region. Gondi, Halbi, Koya and other tribal languages took over. Literacy rates diminished, but other kinds of knowledge flourished – how to hunt and gather a wealth of forest produce, how to make houses from the surrounding mud and timber, how to dam a river in the rains and find water in the dry riverbeds in the summer. These were the lands of India’s indigenous people, popularly called Adivasis, but for centuries considered so
low as to be outside of India’s hierarchical caste system, stigmatised as ‘jungli’ – wild, savage and barbaric – and treated as such by most outsiders.

The Sarkeguda video that went viral around the Chhattisgarh activists’ social media groups drew Sudha, now fifty years old, into uncovering one of the greatest tragedies of contemporary India.

The camera focused on a young Adivasi woman, barely twenty-six years old, screaming at a government officer
who had come with a truck load of grain to give to the villagers. She was surrounded by men and children under a grove of trees, but she stood out from the crowd… The young woman shouted at the officer that they would not accept their grain and water until they brought back the seventeen people they had taken.

‘What did you think you were going to do by coming here?’ she taunted the officer. ‘You wanted to feed Naxalites? All those seventeen people you have just shot dead, they were all real Naxalites, weren’t they? In these villages there’s nobody but Naxalites. That little girl who was barely twelve years old, she was a Naxalite, wasn’t she? That’s why you killed her, is it not?

‘Does anyone give food and water to Naxalites?’ she continued. ‘Everyone standing in front of you here right now is a Naxalite. Kill them. They’re all Naxalites. Burn them all.’

…That woman was Kamla Kaka, and Sudha was impressed by her courage. A young tribal woman in a highly militarised zone, amidst what was in effect a civil war, turning away state officers through just the power of words was admirable. But the events that drove her to do so were also intensely disturbing…

The Indian security forces said that they had gunned down seventeen hardened guerrillas of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)…It was only when the villagers followed the security forces back to the local police station to demand the bodies of their kin that they found out who exactly had been killed. Kamla Kaka discovered the bodies of her seventeen-year-old nephew, Kaka Nagesh, and her twelve- year-old cousin, Saraswati Kaka. Among the dead were seven children…

It was not the first time that the people of Sarkeguda and its neighbouring hamlets had suffered such counter-insurgency operations. In 2008, the villagers were forced to flee as a state-sponsored vigilante group, ironically named Salwa Judum or ‘peace offensive’, initiated three years before, burnt down houses, raped women, and took away three people…

About three months after the 2012 encounter, Sudha got a notification that a Judicial Commission inquiry into the killings had commenced. ‘Out of curiosity, I decided to go to its proceedings. But no one had come there from Sarkeguda. The commissioners were all sitting “twiddling their thumbs”. Something was very wrong,’ Sudha said…

‘I got the news that we won the case only when I was in jail,’ Sudha said. It took another nine years for the report of the Judicial Commission to come out. When it did, in September 2019, it revealed what the villagers had been saying all along. None of the seventeen killed were Maoists. The security forces had unilaterally conducted the firing. At least six of the dead had been shot through the head, and ten through the back as they ran for their lives. One villager was killed in cold blood the morning after the encounter. Just as damningly, the report concluded that the police investigation into the incident had been manipulated and dishonest.

By the time the report came out though, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officer who had planned and led the operation had been valorised as the ‘Iron Man of the CRPF’, and Sudha had been jailed as an ‘Urban Naxal’.