The trauma of being

regrouped in

Chhattisgarh

VANI XAXA

THE experience of leaving behind the familial structure of a home situated in a known surrounding, moving into an unknown land amidst unknown people, has always been regarded as a marginal topic. Movement from one place to another is considered in terms of people’s need to migrate into unknown lands. Causes of migration have been discussed at length in India, and it is known that most people who migrate are people from very poor economic and social backgrounds.

In the context of south Chhattisgarh in 2005, the Adivasis who moved to other parts of the country were not migrating voluntarily but were forced to move from their original habitat by an armed conflict of hideous violence and cruelty between Maoists and security forces, who were in effect clearing the land in collusion with mining companies in preparation for large-scale extraction of resources. Also colluding with security forces were other Adivasi villagers in organizations such as the notorious Salwa Judum, trained and armed by police to fight their Maoist brethren and other Adivasis suspected of supporting the Maoists.

In the movement of Adivasis from the violence in Chhattisgarh that started in 2005, we must differentiate between the phenomenon of regrouping, where people are forced to live in small groups, surrounded with perpetual fear, far from their homes; and migration, a more routine movement of villagers to near or distant cities or towns, often just for three to four months, to earn a meagre wage.

The counter-insurgency programme in south Chhattisgarh forced villagers to vacate their homes and move for days together through dense forest to unfamiliar places; staying in the forest without food and shelter; walking half-asleep to save their lives and the lives of their children and family members. Throughout this exodus there was an ever-present fear of being overheard or caught by paramilitaries, notorious for cruel harassment of Adivasis.

Reaching ‘safety’, people had to begin rebuilding their lives again from scratch. Adivasis who had to leave their villages to avoid this conflict, numbering tens of thousands, had to abandon all their assets in the form of land, livestock, houses, and possessions. Their standard of life in the villages they abandoned cannot be categorized as ‘economically poor’, unlike Dalits who must leave homes, urban or rural, because of conditions of deprivation or social alienation.

For Adivasis who reached ‘safety’ away from the violence, the definition of home has changed. ‘Home’ is where the fields lay, the river flows, the cattle graze, the neighbours reside, the community stays, and ancestors rest. The new place cannot be home. There is a deep longing to return. As one villager shared with me: ‘We were so happy before 2005 when Salwa Judum came and devastated our everyday life. Today we can only reminisce as to how we used to live before and how we are living now. We don’t know whether we have a tomorrow or not, but we live each moment, knowing that we may not be alive tomorrow.’1

But the fear of returning is ever-present, ever since the state moved in its paramilitary forces – uniformed, armed men with instructions to kill. For Adivasi villagers these men are strangers, who sometimes kill them, and who curtail their legal rights to live their customary life with dignity.

Attempting to write down the various sociological features of the shock that Adivasis undergo during the process of regrouping demands a sensitive balance between subjectivity and objectivity. This trauma is significantly different from the shock that people undergo during migration or voluntary displacement. ‘Trauma is to do with that which cannot be taken in and assimilated. Since trauma cannot be digested and metabolized, it ruptures the containing skin of the mind, leading to a catastrophic collapse of psychic structure.’2

The language used by those who are regrouped often evokes rage and intense grief. But getting angry can be dangerous, provoking more violence from the state. So, expression often focuses on ‘safe’ areas of nostalgia, pain, and sorrow. ‘When displaced persons are forced out of their homes because of natural disaster or war, we expect their stories to fulfil certain narrative expectations of otherness, victimization, and dependence on the state.’3 The language used by the state, by contrast, is highly abstract and depersonalized – terms such as ‘internally displaced persons’, ‘resettlement and rehabilitation’, ‘relocation’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugees’.

As extraction of resources has escalated in India, as in other ‘developing countries’, the state has begun to create circumstances wherein the people have no option but to leave their homes. This eviction is often extremely violent yet is usually termed as ‘voluntary relocation’. The number of people in India who have been forced to move out of their villages knowing that they cannot return is beyond counting – many millions. These people lose their identity as citizens of the country – ‘they are rarely identified and categorized unless they enter the rolls of bureaucracy’,4 ‘speechless and invisible’.5

Adivasis lose their citizenship rights in situations of civil war, subjected to a state of constant uncertainty – ‘the family may be thrust into temporary shelters that offer no privacy or protection from violence’.6 Villagers who came and settled in the roadside camps where Salwa Judum herded them just got a small hut; those who fled further, south into Telangana for example, got nothing. They dwell in ‘illegal settlements’ now, from where they could be evicted any moment, and are often termed ‘encroachers’.

Salwa Judum and similar militias were recruited from among Adivasi villagers, a cruel yet sophisticated strategy for fighting the Maoists that fomented violence. Young men who had been recruited by police went about killing and robbing their own people – falsely depicted by state propaganda as intertribal conflict or ‘tribalism’. A woman I call K narrated events with a naturalness scarred by pain:

‘I have become an old woman now… Our village was severely affected by Salwa Judum. They burnt down all the houses. R’s father was shot by the Salwa Judum when he was sitting under the mango tree just outside the house… The Judum killed many people ruthlessly. The houses in and around Kothaguda were mostly burnt and destroyed. The men were attacked. The women were not spared. The children and the old faced the same treatment. Nobody was spared. However, none of us went to the camp that was built specially for the villagers. During Salwa Judum, the whole village was ransacked, and burnt… people just moved wherever they could get shelter... Many people seemed to disappear – all killed and hacked by the police. Nobody had any clue where people were disappearing to...

‘The SPOs7 were mostly Sangham members who had joined the police. They were lured into it. Imagine what a 12–14-year-old boy would feel if he is given a gun and an allowance of 500-1500 rupees
and is asked to shoot people down. Most Sangham members were not employed, so the government boasted that they were giving employment to unemployed youth…

‘After the Sarkeiguda incident the whole village became a camp. It was very serious. Anybody entering the village had to make an entry in the register. Before the Sarkeiguda incident, the villagers of Pechepara and Pusbaka were always beaten up… But the condition in remote villages is bad. The patrolling team does what it wishes there – there is no one to monitor.’

The idea of ‘development’ propagated by the state presents a world of idealized projects and promises that bears little relation to real outcomes. Adivasis of Chhattisgarh were displaced without being given any land under any official scheme of ‘Rehabilitation and Resettlement’.

The strategy that the government adopted in Chhattisgarh of pitting Adivasis violently against Adivasis delegitimized any possible protest. Adivasis who had refused to part with their land to make way for a mine or steel factory were evicted within minutes by the state-sponsored Salwa Judum programme, with atrocities and large-scale burning of their homes. What of the irreparable injury caused to the psyche of the individual and the community as a whole?

Villagers who settled in Telangana have developed severe stress disorders. Children who had to flee their village became adults overnight. Women aged, while men lay down with nothing to do. This is not a normal Adivasi existence. In the words of a teenager, who showed me a photo of when he was in Class VIII:

‘Today I look like over 25 when actually I am not even 18. I was there that night when the firing took place in Sarkeiguda in 2012. I still remember that night as the sounds of bullets reverberate in my ears even today. We actually saw the bodies falling down like dead leaves right in front of us. The dark night was lit with bullets being fired into the darkness from all sides. On hearing the firing, all who could lay down flat on the ground. The unlucky few were shot through and through. I lay next to Nagesh, from whose body blood flowed out. And from my eyes tears. My cousin-brother was killed. They chased the villagers and killed them. They guarded the area the whole night. The next day they came back and shot an injured person who lay among the pile of bodies. What was his fault?

‘I had dragged myself to hide in the woodpile nearby. They pulled me out and made me sit among the bodies in a tractor. I sat on the dead body of my brother. They called us Maoists and took us to the police station. I did not speak. I could not speak. I was numb. I was dead.

‘It had taken us so much time to cope with the violence of 2005 – the Salwa Judum. And as if that was not enough, we had to take the 2012 firing. Forgetting 2005, it was so painful. We had to forgo school in the middle of our exams, being flocked to the camps like animals; and then our exodus to interior villages and to the neighbouring states was traumatic. Being packed into those camps with the paramilitaries guarding us was insulting. Why had we to go through this? Can anyone explain this to me? To us?’8

In Sierra Leone, which witnessed years of civil war fought with utmost cruelty, the people affected ‘were not rich people to start with but they had community support and their farms to fall back on; however, after the horrors of war, they ended up as indigents in unfamiliar environments with no skills or access to resources’.9

Though Adivasis settled amidst ‘their own people’ in Telangana (often Gondi-speaking like themselves), the unknown place without the habitual surroundings forced villagers to opt for whatever job came their way – ‘We had little, but we were happy. Now we do not know how to be happy after losing everything’.10

Women in the Telangana settlements of the displaced do not go begging. They remain in their remote huts after a day’s work on the small plots of land that they have cleared from forest areas (here usually demarcated Reserved Forest). Those who survived the trauma of killings and displacement force themselves to live cherishing memories of the past amidst the bitterness of the present. In the words of a woman called Sori I interviewed in Telangana:

‘We came here after the Judum. It was at its peak. When it began, I was in the village. We walked down through the forest and came here. We crossed the river and came to this place in 2008-9. The whole thing began in Bijapur. Then it came to Bheji, to Dornapal to Maraigudem and then Gollapally. We would keep our belongings in small huts in the forest or on treetops. My brother is still there. My mother came very late with the others. The Andhra Pradesh police picked me up, took me to Kothaguda police station…’

In the words of another woman I interviewed called Madkam:

‘I was only 20 when Judum started. We were sandwiched. We had to kill our own animals when we were hiding lest the Judum attack us when the animals made a noise. The whole village was divided. Nobody goes there anymore. People who are still there doubt our intention, ask us to come and see whether their houses are burnt or not. The Judum came and burnt our houses. In fear we fled.’

Gaganpally village was especially badly hit by Salwa Judum. Women were raped there, and I was told that lactating mothers were asked to squeeze out milk from their breast to prove that they were mothers. Feeding mothers were left, the rest were raped. An 18-year-old boy shared with me:

‘During the Judum, three members of our village were picked up, one Dorla – Dula, and two Muria – Kosa and Sana. They were taken to the Konta camp. They were killed there. Kosa was my cousin-brother. The Judum came in a helicopter and burnt most of the houses. Houses in the forest were not burnt as they could not be detected. All of us fled to the forest. We could not differentiate who the SPOs were and who was CRPF.’11

The assault on Adivasis, the burning of their homes and possessions, and their herding into camps without their consent leaves scars that cannot be erased. The disrespect to village headmen by the Salwa Judum militia and state police force, when they would not consent to demands to vacate their village, reveals the undemocratic nature of the Indian state towards its indigenous citizens.

Particularly acute trauma is faced by women and children in conflict situations of war or civil war, where one of the worst forms of violence is often against the female body, which has been violently used in countless conflicts to express domination. ‘Identity, self, and personhood, as well as physical bodies, are strategic targets of war.’12 This violent targeting of an individual’s body forces someone to submit to the state through torture. The unbearable bodily pain tears apart the premises of life, redefining it. Reminiscence of the pain seems enough for an individual or community to succumb to state demands. When I met the brother of a girl who was well known to have been gang raped and killed by paramilitaries and Salwa Judum men who were forcing villagers to move to a ‘relief camp’, he became rude and sarcastic:

‘Why do you people come here? There were many who have come before you and probably many after you. They come and write down points, make stories of it and present their reports. That is all. What happens after that is none of you people’s concern – we are beaten up, we are harassed, we cannot move around, we are arrested, we are confined in a camp. Many people have come and written about me as the brother of the girl who was raped. Can you understand how insulting this is? I could do nothing. I could not save my sister from those forcewalas who dragged her off in front of our eyes. We all begged them to leave her. But they just beat us up. We could not even find her body. Yes, I am the brother of that girl. But life has not stopped there. The incident lives in us, with us and will always be with us.’

This was one of many atrocities that shook his area, forcing people to vacate their villages. He had to leave with the other villagers when his wife was pregnant with their first baby and in that condition she had to walk far to reach safety. The pain his family underwent, including finding no trace of his sister’s body, symbolized total domination and invasion by outsiders. He cannot understand what his people did to deserve such horror. His submission to the authorities, in the form of various tribunals that were set up, involved constant repetition of the same memory. He was unable to get one logical answer to the many submissions he made demanding to know why his sister was raped and where her body has gone. Village after village left the contested areas in south Chhattisgarh, in shame and futile pain, with families torn apart.

A young girl told me about the loss of her mother. She was in the ninth standard when Salwa Judum began in her area. She was in a hostel with other girls when her parents and the rest of her community fled to the interior villages in remote forest. Meanwhile, the hostel was occupied by paramilitaries and police, so the girls were shifted into the school buildings and tents, amidst unprecedented violence. Her father and stepmother moved to Telangana, leaving her mother behind in a village where she fell seriously ill and eventually succumbed to the unbearable pain. The villagers cremated her body as their own family member, since her relatives could not come due to the rigorous patrolling going on the Chhattisgarh-Andhra border. Crying, this girl tells me that ‘Because of this, I have a special relation with that village’.

Structural violence is implicit in use of pain and terror as instruments for controlling Adivasis, whose land and resources the state requires for extractive ‘development’. Right from the onset of India’s independence, Adivasis and the ‘economically poor’ have been badly affected by development projects, including big dams, mines, and factories, involving forced displacement by police, for the ‘public good’. Situations of armed conflict, epitomised in south Chhattisgarh from 2005, take this to an extreme, as ‘war and political conflict are often directed toward a group, and the violence is collectively experienced. Yet also uniquely and individually manifest’ – ‘life becomes broken into a before and after of discontinuities and disruptions’.13

When dams came to be viewed by Nehru and others as ‘the temples of modern India’, Adivasis started to be uprooted on a mass scale. Hirakud dam in northwest Orissa imposed powerlessness on several tens of thousand oustees in the 1950s-60s – several hundred thousand in the case of the Sardar Sarovar dam in the 1990s. After the PESA Act was passed in 1996, gram sabha meetings have been frequently sabotaged and hijacked by goons working for big corporations intent on extracting people from their land.

Countless public hearings and gram sabhas have been staged to force Adivasis off their land to make way for industrial projects. The state administration overseeing the displacement process considers local people’s actual consent unnecessary. ‘When the displaced try to speak, or when their individual discourses come in contact with and resist the dominant discourses (that is, law), then they are immediately considered outside the law. They become outlaws and are often immediately silenced and literally moved out of sight so that the displacement can continue.’14

Among Dorla and Muria Adivasis (two of the most numerous Scheduled Tribes in south Chhattisgarh, who both speak dialects of Gondi), as among other tribal societies, the close kinship ties which bind communities together were severely disturbed by the violence and the forced flight from their land. In the settlements, though people tried to live together, there were visible impacts of this breakdown in community in terms of individualized instead of collective living.

Regrouping starts from people being forced to move out of their village, from fear of attack and bodily harm. The movement out has no surety of return. Those who do return find themselves in shock, for what was once home is left tattered and broken, not by natural forces, but by violence inflicted by the state – the law of the land. People are traumatised by the threat of violence. Those who survive bear the repeated onslaught of the trauma they have experienced and witnessed.

Since 2005, there have been countless military operations carried out in the forest areas of south Chhattisgarh, victimizing Dorla, Muria and other Adivasis. The pain in reliving memories surfaces when boys who have become young men tell me their age when they had to stop their school education – their only memory of being a legitimate citizen of the country. At times, in sharing their stories, the pain of the individual overpowered the collective and at times the opposite, the collective pain came to the fore. The close-knit kinship pattern among the Dorla and Muria community is so strong that it helps the individual to stand together in everyday life. The loss of a family member is not just loss for the family but loss for the community.

The division and breakdown in community was expressed to me by an ‘internally displaced person’ named Madai:

‘There is a rumour that the Judum is going to begin again. Therefore, we are not going back. Most of our agricultural fields are lying unutilized. The animals we left behind have either died or been eaten by the Judum. They would come and take away our pigs, goats, hens. I was in eighth standard when the Judum attacked our village. I was there when the Naga battalion came. The Judum killed my uncle. We buried him there. We left Chhattisgarh after that. My father is living in another settlement. Those who joined the Judum were from Bijapur and Jagdalpur. Nobody from our village joined it. They beat everyone, even small children. Only those who joined the Judum are in the village. They made a camp in our village. Those in the camp are from other villages – not from ours. There were others who came with the Judum. Those others who settled in the village do not want us to come back. We are not going to go back there.’

It is noteworthy that in the whole process of relocation and forced displacement that took place in the Gaza Strip, in Vietnam, in Sierra Leone, in Manipur, in Chhattisgarh, the people were nowhere considered party to the whole process of waging war or subjugating an opponent rival group. However, when it came to moving out, the people were targeted. Just to ensure that the world condemns the violence we must speak the language of victimhood and suffering. Why is there no condemnation of waging war for selfish interest and justice, singling out the perpetrators of violence? Why is there no condemnation of these forced relocations?

The political and extractive intentions are evident in terms such as ‘clearing operations’.15 When government security forces declare a ‘liberated zone’, this is a sure sign of an area’s militarization. But what Adivasis faced in Chhattisgarh in 2005 is much more than clinically defined trauma. It is the price that India’s tribals citizens are paying for ‘development’ in the form of extractive projects whose benefits go entirely to elites. Adivasis are brutally punished for asserting the democratic rights embedded in their society, which guided them long before the state could be called a democracy.

How can the impact of relocation or regrouping people be measured, especially for tribal communities rooted in the land over generations? What would be the benchmark for measuring the social impacts, the economic and cultural impacts?

In effect, villagers are expected to forget their culturally important sites and beliefs. Expressing this disconnect, people say ‘We can move, but how will our gods move?’16

Assertions of a state’s authoritarian rule over unwilling sections of society is not new. State power over Adivasis keeps getting violently reinforced, despite significant legislation passed in their favour, which often functions to mask the brutal realities. Adivasis who have undergone trauma of the kind we have looked at here feel a fundamental injustice – at dispossession by a ‘development’ project or an armed conflict they have not consented to, and at the impunity of the men in uniform who have tortured, raped, and killed their people. South Chhattisgarh was further shocked in 2021 by the arrest of female Adivasi leader Hidme Markam at a gathering commemorating International Women’s Day, on 9 March, where Adivasi villagers were protesting women raped and killed by police.17

When will steps be taken that begin to win the confidence of India’s tribal citizens by giving them justice and allowing them the self-determination that our Constitution and much legislation have promised?

Footnotes:

1. Vani Xaxa, interview with a displaced Adivasi villager, 22 July 2014.

2. Mary Brownescombe Heller, ‘Attachment and Its Relationship To Mind, Brain, Trauma and the Therapeutic Endeavour’, in Ray Woolfe et al. (ed.), Handbook of Counselling Psychology. Sage, London, p 659.

3. Katrina M. Powell, ‘Rhetorics of Displacement: Constructing Identities in Forced Relocations’, College English 74(4), March 2012.

4. Josephine Martin, ‘The Trauma of Homelessness’, International Journal of Mental Health 20(2), 1991.2010

5. Nyers Peter, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. Routledge, New York, 2006.

6. Josephine Martin, op. cit.

7. ‘Special Police Officers’ – Adivasis recruited and armed by police into forces such as Salwa Judum.

8. Vani Xaxa, interview with a young villager.

9. Laura S. Brown, ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1995.

10. Vani Xaxa, interview with an individual settled in Telangana.

11. Central Reserve Police Force – armed policemen.

12. Carolynn Nordstrom, ‘Deadly Myths of Aggression’, Anthropological Perspectives on Aggression 24(2), 1998.

13. Doug Henry, ‘Violence and the Body: Somatic Expressions of Trauma and Vulnerability
During War’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series 20(3), September 2006.

14. Katrina M. Powell, op. cit.

15. Yuvi Thangarajah, ‘Narratives of Victim as Ethnic Identity Among the Veddas of the East Coast’, in Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail (eds.), Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka. Social Scientists Association, Colombo, 1995.

16. Antoine Lasgorceix and Ashish Kothari, ‘Displacement and Relocation of Protected Areas: A Synthesis and Analysis of Case Studies’, Economic and Political Weekly 44(49), 5 December 2009.

17. Sukanya Shantha, ‘When Process is Punishment: Hidme Markam’s Activism and the Sketchy Cases Against Her’, The Wire, 5 April 2021.