Earlier this week, on May 17, the Police shot dead 3 unarmed Adivasi protesters in the Chattisgarh’s Sukma district’s Silger village. 18 other villagers were left injured as a result of the firing.
An independent journalist, Ashutosh Bhardwaj had tweeted twenty-eight-second-long video footage of the incident, which showed the protestors running for their lives as the police fired shots.
“They were protesting against the police camp coming up in the jungle. I was at this spot in January. The jungle was being uprooted, a big road and police camps being constructed.
Adivasis were against it. The protests intensified today — and met with the police’s bullets,” Bhardwaj wrote in one of his tweets regarding the incident.
As per the news reports that have emerged, the villagers were protesting against a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp that was set up on May 12, the first one between Silger and Jagargunda.
The violence is a part of the ongoing struggle of the Adivasis in the area to protect the forests, which continue to deplete as more and more police camps are being set up and more roads are being paved.
The villagers say that the camp has taken up around six to ten acres of their land. One of the villagers, Sunil Korsa said, “We would have willingly given away the land for a school or a hospital. We don’t mind security deployed for road construction either. But we don’t want a camp. Once it is established, everything from our movements to our customs will be scrutinized. We don’t want to live in fear of both the Naxals and the police.”
The CRPF has claimed that the ones who were killed were Maoists and not the villagers. The police also alleged that the protests were organized by the Maoists. And that they fired retaliating the firing by the Maoists.
The villagers, however, refute all these claims. The villagers have denied the presence of the Maoists and told that those who were killed were all farmers. They say that it was the police that open fired and that no policeman was injured because there were no attacks from their side. The villagers also say that while the CRPF took away the three dead bodies and reported the same, there were about 9 deaths in total and that the other six bodies lie with the villagers.
About 60 protestors including the head of the Silger village have written to the governor of Chattisgarh, seeking intervention and protection from the authorities due to the increasing violence from the CRPF. They have also sought for a police inquiry into the incident.
Bhardwaj added to the thread of tweets regarding the issue that, “I’ve witnessed and covered quite a few encounters and ambushes and killings in Bastar. What happened today was absolutely unprecedented. There isn’t perhaps any such instance of firing on Adivasis after Salwa Judum.”