50 dead in 25 days: A bloody May in Chattisgarh Red zone

RAIPUR: A burst of light machine gun fire rips apart the bodies of nine policemen; a vehicle carrying CRPF jawans is lifted in the air by a powerful explosion, seven jawans die; another landmine blast waylays a wedding baraat, killing six of the groom's family, including a four year old child.

May has been a bloody month in terms of Maoist violence
. Within 25 days, 50 lives have been lost in or around Chhattisgarh. Thirty-three of those killed were security personnel, with the rest being primarily civilians. If you account for casualties among Maoists, that cannot be confirmed in the absence of bodies, the toll crosses the 50 mark.

Barring one episode, none of the deaths made it to the front pages of national newspapers. Scattered across disparate districts, and tucked away from the national limelight, the deaths are symptomatic of the insistent insurgency engulfing Chhattisgarh from, literally, all four sides.

"If 20 people die in one incident, everyone takes notice, not when they die in one's and two's over 20 days," says Ajai Sahni, director, Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi based think tank, who decries the way the national response lurches from one watershed event to another, ignoring persistent routinized violence.

For Purnima Sarkar, May 4 was no routine day; it was the day of her son's much anticipated wedding. Early morning, her son Manoram woke up and dressed up in a sherwani. Accompanied by his doting 70 year old grandmother Tarulata, and other relatives, he left their home in Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh, and headed for Chandrapur in Maharashtra, where his fiance waited, dressed up in bridal finery.

The wedding party, a convoy of two Sumo vehicles, had crossed the border into Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, when a landmine explosion hit the second car. The vehicle lurched in the air and landed with a thud, amidst a volley of gunfire. Moments later, Manoram walked out, with blood splattered on his sherwani. His grandmother and five others were dead, including a four year old child. The wedding was called off. The Maoists are yet to issue a statement, accepting responsibility, or offering regret. "It appears to be a case of mistaken identity," said R K Vij, IG, Durg. The driver of the vehicle had earlier driven police cars and Sumos are often used by the police.

Ten days later, on May 14, another wedding was interrupted, in Gumla district of Jharkhand, bordering Chhattisgarh's Jashpur district in the north. Gunmen broke into the small mandap and shot dead the groom and four others. "My son had returned home for the marriage around a fortnight ago from Punjab where he had gone for a job," the groom's mother Chumdru Oraon told TOI. Next day, four people were killed in same district. Both instances involved uniformed gunmen, suspected to be cadres of rival Maoist groups, and there were reports of rivalry and land disputes underlying the killings. Earlier in the month, 11 security personnel had been killed in an encounter with Maoists in neighbouring Lohardaga district.

From the north, the trail of violence travelled south to Dantewada, Chhattisgarh's most intense battleground. Arvind Rai, commandant of CRPF's 2nd battalion, left his station at Sukma, on May 17, with a group of jawans. He travelled a short distance to Kerlapal, on the badly broken national highway 211, to inspect new barracks built to accomodate jawans who had to vacate a school building on the Supreme Court's orders.