On the afternoon of 15 June, at least a dozen personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force attacked more than ten residents of Anjedbeda village in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, according to interviews conducted by social activists from the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha, a coalition of human-rights organisations. Manki Tubid and Kamal Kishore Purty, the social activists, compiled nine of these testimonies in their fact-finding report and shared them with me and other media persons.
The activists visited the village after Prabhat News, a local Hindi newspaper, published a report on 17 June saying that the villagers had been attacked by “armed Maoists.” To the contrary, the activists mentioned in the fact-finding report, the villagers said that the CRPF had attacked them at random while some of them were fixing khaprail, a type of tile, on the roof of a villager’s hut. While a majority of Anjedbeda’s residents are from the Ho community—listed as a Scheduled Tribe in the census—and mostly communicate in the Ho language, the CRPF personnel insisted the villagers speak in Hindi, the report states.
The social activists also video recorded some testimonies and circulated these online. We showed video testimonies of four locals to a resident of Chaibasa who speaks in the Ho language. The resident, who wished not to be named, confirmed that the locals were describing an attack by the CRPF.
According to the fact-finding activists’ report, at around 12.30 pm that day, the residents of Anjedbeda’s Chidiyabeda settlement were fixing khaprail on the roof of Bauj Surin’s home, when more than a dozen CRPF jawans reached and surrounded the house from all sides. Surin is a village resident. The personnel asked the villagers who were tiling the house to climb down from the roof. As the villagers could not understand what the jawans were saying, it took them a while to understand their gestures and climb down. The villagers were made to sit on the wall of an under-construction house nearby, the report mentions. “There, they were asked where are the Naxals,” the activists wrote in the report. “Due to the language barrier, they were unable to answer. Then, they were separated, their hands were tied behind their backs and they were beaten up.”
Among the villagers who were working on the roof was Sinu Sundi, a 17-year-old, Tubid told me. According to the fact-finding report, Sundi said he had heard a woman say, “Policemen are coming.” He replied, “So, we aren’t doing anything wrong,” and continued to work. The soldiers started yelling at them in Hindi and gesturing for them to come down. “They asked where are the Naxalis,” Sundi told the activists, according to the report. “When we replied we didn’t know, they said speak in Hindi, then I said I didn’t know. They beat me with a moonga stick, which was kept nearby.” The fact-finding report quotes Sundi saying that the personnel called him a Naxal too. “They took off my shirt from my shoulder to see a patch that had become black type from carrying wood, and then the CRPF personnel said, ‘He is a Naxal.’ They made me lie on a wooden slab on my stomach, and beat me up, leaving wounds.”
Tubid told me that a 19-year-old villager named Sidiyu Jojo was explaining to others what the personnel were saying. Jojo, who was also among the men who were fixing the roof, understood Hindi a little and but did not know how to speak in the language. According to the fact-finding report, Jojo said the personnel asked him where they can take water from and he started walking them to the well in the village. “Some people from the force started to hit me from behind, from the rifle butt,” Jojo said to the activists. “I showed them where they could take water. I was then made to sit to on the side, kicked from behind and then I fainted. When I regained consciousness, they made me carry the bottles to the place we were doing the tiling work.”
COMMENT