[The diversity of candidates offered in this year’s election —
from journalists in Delhi to the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of
Scotland’s India unit, Meera Sanyal, in Mumbai to activists like Ms. Sori in
Chhattisgarh — represents a party that moved at breakneck speed from its
inception in November 2012 to contesting national elections in April and May of
this year.]
By Nida Najar
 |
Nida Najar
Soni Sori, a tribal activist from Chhattisgarh, India, has been fielded by the Aam Aadmi Party from
the Bastar constituency in the state.
|
NEW
DELHI — In many ways, Soni Sori, a tribal rights activist from
Chhattisgarh, is a natural fit with the Aam Aadmi Party, which recently named
her as one of its three candidates for Parliament in the central Indian state.
The 39-year-old is a crusader for tribal rights, rallying
against a police force she has accused of torture and corruption, and her
ideology fits with the populist manifesto of the Aam Aadmi Party, which
translates as the Common Man Party. And as a woman contesting from a rural seat
far from Delhi, she represents demographics the party needs if it is to be
considered a national one.
“We want women, we want courageous women, we want educated
women, and we want activists,” said Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer and senior Aam
Aadmi Party leader, who initially reached out to Ms. Sori last month to see
whether she would run as an Aam Aadmi candidate in the Lok Sabha, or lower
house of Parliament, elections this spring.
But Ms. Sori represents a problem for the party as well. Until
she was granted interim bail by the Supreme Court in
November, which was made permanent in February, she had been imprisoned in
Chhattisgarh on charges of waging or attempting to wage war against the government
of India, among others, after being arrested in New Delhi in 2011. Her case is
still pending in a Chhattisgarh state court, though the party and many
activists dismiss the charges as baseless.
Also, Aam Aadmi’s attempt to reach beyond Delhi through
candidates who support a wide range of causes could create some tension within
a party that has yet to settle on a core ideology its members can rally around.
The diversity of candidates offered in this year’s election —
from journalists in Delhi to the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of
Scotland’s India unit, Meera Sanyal, in Mumbai to activists like Ms. Sori in
Chhattisgarh — represents a party that moved at breakneck speed from its
inception in November 2012 to contesting national elections in April and May of
this year.
That diversity — added to the fact that the party is relatively
untested by actual governance, aside from the party leader Arvind Kejriwal’s
49-day term as Delhi chief minister — points to a party philosophy that
raises more questions than answers going into the general elections.
Taken as an example of the Aam Aadmi Party’s attempt to branch
out, Ms. Sori represents one of those questions. Her home district of
Dantewada is one of the conflict-prone, mineral-rich tribal belts of the state
of Chhattisgarh, where Maoists — also called Naxalites for the Naxalbari region
of West Bengal where the movement sprouted — wage a bloody civil war against
the state.
A counterinsurgency supported by the government has engaged in
an often-violent campaign since 2005 to cleanse the villages of Maoist rebels,
with tribals, also known as adivasis, caught in between. In 2006, an anonymous
official told The New York Timesthat 60 percent of
Dantewada was off-limits to civil servants because of Maoist control.
In an interview in New Delhi in February, Ms. Sori said that
she, like so many adivasis, was one of the casualties of this conflict. She
said that she and her nephew were wrongfully arrested and framed on charges of
supporting Maoists and orchestrating payoffs between them and the mining
company Essar Group.
She has said that she was tortured, sexually assaulted and that
she had stones inserted into her vagina in police custody. Amnesty
International has called her a prisoner of conscience, and she organized
women who were charged with similar crimes to fight for their rights in prison.
“When I was in jail, I told these women, ‘You tolerate so much
physical torture; how can you not have the strength to stand up for yourself?’
”
Ms. Sori was born to a village council head who cultivated rice,
and her uncle was a member of the legislative assembly in the area for the
Communist Party of India. She said that she felt more affinity to Mr. Kejriwal’s
rhetoric than to that of the Communist Party.
She is a bit of a cause célèbre in Delhi — beyond
being courted by Mr. Bhushan, she met with the author Arundhati Roy and
Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian activist who was her teacher in Dantewada before, he
says, he was expelled by the government for questioning counterinsurgency
tactics.
The former Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhury wrote an
impassioned defense of Ms. Sori in 2011 when she was first arrested in Delhi
and transferred back to Chhattisgarh, before her alleged sexual assault in
police custody.
“I never thought the fight had gone so far, created so much
awareness,” Ms. Sori said. “I’m only realizing this now in Delhi. These are big
experiences I’m having here. My cause is feeling bigger.”
But the translation of her cause from one of prominence and even
modishness in liberal Delhi drawing rooms may be lost in a chaotic state with
little stability.
“A.A.P. is supporting these kinds of causes, but she is going to
fail in a big way,” said Sushil Trivedi, the former election commissioner from
Chhattisgarh. “Because the Aam Aadmi Party has no base here, they have no
public face. There should be some prominent people supporting her.”
In his view, Chhattisgarh will be a contest between the
Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., and the Indian National Congress party.
One of the biggest obstacles in her campaign is the Maoist
insurgency, whose members oppose democratic elections, preferring instead to
take up armed struggle. “That may be a great problem for her and a great
problem for maintaining law and order there,” Mr. Trivedi said.
Even if she is elected, the Election Commission is strengthening
its rules against lawmakers who are facing criminal charges. On March 10, the
Supreme Court ordered that any current lawmakers facing criminal charges must
have their cases wrapped up within a year of the charges being filed. The Aam
Aadmi Party cited an independent report that analyzed
the numbers of Congress and B.J.P. nominees with pending criminal cases, with
no mention of its own fielding of Ms. Sori days earlier.
In November’s state assembly election, 3 percent of voters from
Chhattisgarh used the “None of the Above” option on their ballot, including
more than 9,000 people from Dantewada, which Mr. Trivedi
interpreted as an expression of pro-Maoist sentiment, but others see as an
opportunity for the Aam Aadmi Party to exploit.
“They don’t like the B.J.P., they don’t like Congress,” said
Dinesh Kumar Dubey, a full-time Aam Aadmi Party volunteer from Bilaspur. “They
want another alternative.”
But he said he wasn’t sure that Ms. Sori was the right
alternative. “We have discussed it at the Bilaspur office, and so many active
members are against her,” he said. “We want her cases cleared.”
