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INDIA'S HIDDEN WAR
This week’s Unreported World travels deep into the Indian jungle to expose how India’s aspirations for a superpower economy are resulting in an increasingly bloody civil war. Government funded militias are battling Maoist guerrillas for control of India’s mineral resources, and hundreds of thousands of tribal villagers are caught in the crossfire.
Friday 27 October 2006 7.35pm
This week’s Unreported World travels deep into the Indian jungle to expose how India’s aspirations for a superpower economy are resulting in an increasingly bloody civil war. Government funded militias are battling Maoist guerrillas for control of India’s mineral resources, and hundreds of thousands of tribal villagers are caught in the crossfire.
Friday 27 October 2006 7.35pm
Reporter Sandra Jordan and Director James Brabazon begin their journey at a giant steel plant in Raipur, capital of Chhattisgarh State. Just weeks before, Maoist rebels, known as Naxalites, had attacked the company’s mines in the nearby jungle.
The team head deep into the “Red Corridor”, a 100,000 square kilometre tract of land which is infiltrated by the Naxalites. It is this ancestral land that the Naxalites claim the State is trying to take from the tribal villagers and hand it over to big corporations to develop.
Over the last year, more than 100,000 people in the area have been forced out of their homes and into displacement camps. Their villages have been attacked, their homes burned and by both the rebels and also government backed militia called Salwa Judum, which is headed by one of the State’s most powerful politicians.
Salwa Judum translates as peace mission, but at a mass rally deep in the jungle the team film armed Salwa Judum officials interrogating villagers as its leader threatens the crowd to give up suspected rebels..
Unreported World travels to an abandoned village where they find a few remaining people living in desperation. They claim that Salwa Judum officials had come there, ordered them out and burnt their homes. A local Salwa Judum member confirms that they believe that anyone who remains in these villages are Maoist sympathisers.
But even the displacement camps are not safe for the villagers. At one camp, a squalid home to more than 4000 people, inhabitants tell Jordan that Maoists had attacked them a few weeks before, burning more than 300 shelters and killing 32 people.
The team make contact with the Maoists and arrange a rare meeting. After a four-day trek through the jungle, passing devastated villages and rivers polluted by mining effluent, they arrive at a rebel camp. Local villagers claim Salwa Judum members have committed terrible atrocities against them with the aim of forcing them off the land so that it can be opened up for development.
One of the rebels’ top commanders arrives to meet them. A university graduate, “Ganesh” tells Unreported World that they are protecting the tribal villagers against big corporations, supported by the State, who are forcing them from their ancestral land to plunder its mineral wealth. He refuses to apologise for the victims of attacks by the Naxalites, saying it is in the nature of war and that their armed struggle will continue.
Any resolution seems unlikely. Back in the city of Kanka, the team interviews the commander of the local government police training school who tells Unreported World that the State is training the security forces to fight more like the Maoists and come down on them "like a tonne of bricks".
The team head deep into the “Red Corridor”, a 100,000 square kilometre tract of land which is infiltrated by the Naxalites. It is this ancestral land that the Naxalites claim the State is trying to take from the tribal villagers and hand it over to big corporations to develop.
Over the last year, more than 100,000 people in the area have been forced out of their homes and into displacement camps. Their villages have been attacked, their homes burned and by both the rebels and also government backed militia called Salwa Judum, which is headed by one of the State’s most powerful politicians.
Salwa Judum translates as peace mission, but at a mass rally deep in the jungle the team film armed Salwa Judum officials interrogating villagers as its leader threatens the crowd to give up suspected rebels..
Unreported World travels to an abandoned village where they find a few remaining people living in desperation. They claim that Salwa Judum officials had come there, ordered them out and burnt their homes. A local Salwa Judum member confirms that they believe that anyone who remains in these villages are Maoist sympathisers.
But even the displacement camps are not safe for the villagers. At one camp, a squalid home to more than 4000 people, inhabitants tell Jordan that Maoists had attacked them a few weeks before, burning more than 300 shelters and killing 32 people.
The team make contact with the Maoists and arrange a rare meeting. After a four-day trek through the jungle, passing devastated villages and rivers polluted by mining effluent, they arrive at a rebel camp. Local villagers claim Salwa Judum members have committed terrible atrocities against them with the aim of forcing them off the land so that it can be opened up for development.
One of the rebels’ top commanders arrives to meet them. A university graduate, “Ganesh” tells Unreported World that they are protecting the tribal villagers against big corporations, supported by the State, who are forcing them from their ancestral land to plunder its mineral wealth. He refuses to apologise for the victims of attacks by the Naxalites, saying it is in the nature of war and that their armed struggle will continue.
Any resolution seems unlikely. Back in the city of Kanka, the team interviews the commander of the local government police training school who tells Unreported World that the State is training the security forces to fight more like the Maoists and come down on them "like a tonne of bricks".
