Govt to identify tribals displaced due to Salwa Judum

The Centre will ask the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments to identify tribals who allegedly fled Chhattisgarh due to the Salwa Judum movement around 15 years ago and settled there, according to officials.

Salwa Judum was a militia that had been deployed as part of anti-Maoist operations in Chhattisgarh. It was operational between 2005 and 2011, before it was banned by the Supreme Court.

The action came on a complaint of an NGO, CGNet Swara Foundation, that wrote to the ministry claiming that over 5,000 families had fled Chhattisgarh due to the controversial militia force formed by late Congress leader Mahendra Karma in mid-2005 to counter the Maoists.

"We received a complaint on May 12 stating that a number of tribal families fled to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from Chhattisgarh due to Salwa Judum. We have to take all state governments on board and verify these cases," a senior official of the Tribal Affairs Ministry said.

"Once the verification process is completed, we will sit together and decide the next course of action. We will have to see what political stand the Chhattisgarh government will take on it, whether it acknowledges that these families were displaced due to Salwa Judum," the official said.

Another official from Chhattisgarh said that once it is established that these families belonged to the state, a process can be initiated to rehabilitate them under the Forest Rights Act, 2006.

Experts say the previous BJP-led administration had backed the movement and the Congress government at the Centre had ceased it.

The Supreme Court banned the militia force in 2011 after it acquired a notorious reputation for allegedly burning villages, killing people and sexually assaulting women after terming them Maoist sympathisers.

According to the NGO's founder, Shubhranshu Chaudhuri, the militia force led to the displacement of 5,000 families from Chhattisgarh. These families settled in Andhra Pradesh, which got bifurcated in 2014, he claimed.

The NGO claimed these families had been living without basic facilities in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and could not benefit from the Forest Rights Act (FRA), which provides for giving land rights to those living on forest land for at least three generations before December 31, 2005.

These internally displaced people (IDP) have been demanding that the government give them land at any other peaceful place in Chhattisgarh in exchange of their original holdings in the state under clause 3(1)(m) of the FRA, Chaudhuri said.

"These IDP are afraid of returning to their villages in Chhattisgarh, which are still in the grip of naxalism. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, they are not treated as tribals," he said.