Your book paints a grim picture. But the national media hasn’t done a lot to bring up the issue.
There is little interest in covering poverty and compounding that, is lack of interest in adivasis. For instance, when Dana Majhi carried his wife’s corpse, there was a little bit of outrage and it all died down.
As in the case of Bastar, there is a three quarter struggle in Kashmir as well. And in both cases, the people are suffering.
There are similarities across conflict situations. In terms of the way in which the government carries out its counterinsurgencies, you have special forces in all conflict zones. In Kashmir, there is curfew, in Bastar as well there is unofficial curfew. The difference is Kashmir is an older and international issue. But even in that case, the media is not concerned about the people of Kashmir as such.
Wherever there is militarisation, the worst affected section is mostly the women. How has the women suffered in Bastar?
A lot of sexual violence in Bastar is unreported. We hear horrible stuff like security forces squeezing women’s breasts to see if they are lactating because that would mean that they are not Maoist cadres. And this is apart from the rapes and beating up of women.
If Salwa Judum was so devastating then why did it spread?
It was spread by the Chhattisgarh government in Bijapur and Kunta. The fact that it didn’t spread anywhere else, showed that the people didn’t want it.
What has the government done to better the situation?
The government has done everything to make the situation worse—by sending in so many CRPF forces, by starting Salwa Judum, by not giving any compensation for the human rights violations.