[Five years ago, she was a consultant in the Bay Area
pharmaceutical industry, and a homesick member of the large Indian diaspora
there. But on trips back to India, she became more and more passionate about
social justice. Sudha Bharadwaj, a firebrand trade unionist and lawyer working
mostly with laborers in steel plants and mines, urged her to look at
Chhattisgarh, where human rights abuses are often overlooked in the clamor of a
long-running conflict.]
 |
|
The lawyers Parijata Bharadwaj, left rear in a black scarf, and Guneet
Kaur,
center rear, talking to villagers about police violence.
|
JAGDALPUR, India — On a quiet night last November, the human
rights lawyer Shalini Gera was brewing tea in her drab, small-town office,
which doubles as an apartment, when her basic Nokia phone began vibrating on a
plastic table.
The call came from an informer in a remote village, several
hours from her home in Jagdalpur, a dusty market town surrounded by forests
that for the last decade has been the main theater of India’s
war against Maoist guerrillas known as Naxalites, named after the town
Naxalbari, where the guerrilla movement formed in the 1970s.
The local police had surrounded the village, aiming to coax out
a man suspected of being a militant. When he did not emerge, the police instead
arrested 26 bystanders and charged them with digging up part of a nearby
highway, ostensibly part of a Maoist-led sabotage campaign. The caller warned
Ms. Gera that the police had beaten many, some badly, before forcing them to
confess.
Ms. Gera, 44, told her caller that she and her colleagues would
travel to the village as soon as possible, though their operation is so
bare-bones that they can afford to travel only by infrequent public buses. As
usual, there was no hint of panic in her voice.
“We’ll only be able to prove that the police have beaten these
people if we get these things called medical legal complaints made,” Ms. Gera
said after ending the call. “Normally, that doesn’t happen.” Medical legal
complaints are doctor-attested documents that let lawyers in India lodge legal
complaints against the police for brutality toward those in their custody.
Ms. Gera likes to joke that, until recently, the closest she got
to rural life was in San Jose, Calif. But here in Jagdalpur, in the central
state of Chhattisgarh, she has become intimately familiar with the rhythms of a
deeply troubled countryside — and the legal travails of the region’s indigenous
people, known as adivasis.
Five years ago, she was a consultant in the Bay Area
pharmaceutical industry, and a homesick member of the large Indian diaspora
there. But on trips back to India, she became more and more passionate about
social justice. Sudha Bharadwaj, a firebrand trade unionist and lawyer working
mostly with laborers in steel plants and mines, urged her to look at
Chhattisgarh, where human rights abuses are often overlooked in the clamor of a
long-running conflict.
“What we really need here, more than anything else, are good
lawyers,” Ms. Bharadwaj told her at the time.
Sick of engaging from the sidelines, Ms. Gera abandoned two
decades of climbing the American academic and professional ladder, and set off
on a drastic career change.
In 2010, Ms. Gera enrolled in Delhi University’s law program.
There, she met Isha Khandelwal, 24, who also had redirected her trajectory from
studying computer programming to studying human rights law in the capital.
Together, and with the help of Ms. Bharadwaj, they founded a private legal aid
group, operating on a shoestring budget comprising scholarships, donations, and
personal savings.
Legal aid for adivasis is hard to come by. Article 39a in
India’s Constitution mandates free legal representation for a huge percentage
of the population. Still, more than two-thirds of inmates in Indian prisons —
more than 265,000 people — are awaiting trial, according to the latest figures
from the National Crimes Records Bureau. The situation is still more dire for
the mostly adivasi defendants of southern Chhattisgarh, where both the
Naxalites and the state’s armed forces have been accused of countless
extrajudicial killings and the razing of entire villages, contributing to an
entrenched security mentality.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Ms. Gera said. “We’re not saying that
Naxalite attacks don’t happen. But when it comes down to it, most of these
cases are completely baseless.”
In July 2013, Ms. Gera and Ms. Khandelwal, together with another
recent graduate, Parijata Bharadwaj, 25, who is no relation to Sudha, moved to
Jagdalpur and founded the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, leaving behind fretful
friends and families in cities far removed from the conflict. A year and a half
later, the three are now four — joined by Guneet Kaur, 24, a recent law degree
graduate from the University of California at Berkeley. The team of young
lawyers is now known by a nickname reminiscent of a made-for-TV drama: JagLAG.
They live together, sharing spartan quarters in the
office-cum-apartment. Mealtime conversations revolve around the dozens of cases
they are juggling. There are no weekends, and trips home are few and far
between.
Ms. Gera goes almost every week to the district court in a
nearby town called Dantewada. On a recent morning, in an empty hallway of the
court, she took a black sports coat out of her backpack, unfolded it, put it
on, and affixed a white advocate’s collar around her neck. In a country where
court complexes are ordinarily filled with commotion, this one was a scene of
relative serenity. Barely a handful of people milled about. Lawyers and judges
sat on plastic chairs in the courtyard, sipping tea in the winter sun.
It is not that there are not cases to process — in fact,
hundreds of cases are pending in Dantewada. According to government statistics
on jails in Chhattisgarh, only three out of the 600 or so inmates in
Dantewada’s prison are convicts. The rest await trial in a jail that was only
built for a capacity of 150, sleeping in shifts for lack of floor space.
Most of the accused are poor and adivasi, and more than
three-quarters of the cases deal with grave crimes such as murder. Charge
sheets are filled with insinuations that the accused are tied to Naxalite
factions, and bail is rarely granted because the accused are seen as national
security threats.
The swell of so-called “undertrials” does not reflect an
increase in arrests but an achingly slow judicial process. The rate of arrests
in the region is roughly the same as in the rest of India, but only 10 percent
of cases in Dantewada are wrapped up within a year, and more than 40 percent
take more than two years to conclude, Ms. Gera and her colleagues found when
they reviewed court documents.
It was while poring over those documents that JagLAG discovered
the cases of Midiyam Lachu and Punem Bhima, who had spent six and a half years
in an overcrowded jail awaiting trial. The four women were the first to
discover that neither Mr. Lachu nor Mr. Bhima’s names appear even once on the
charge sheet pertaining to the attack in which they stand accused. The lawyers
surmise that neither the judge nor the men’s previous legal aid lawyer had ever
bothered to read the charge sheet. After pointing out the oversight, JagLAG
procured bail for them last year, though the judge has declined to drop the
case entirely.
Sudha Bharadwaj, who mentored the JagLAG lawyers, said she
believed that the authorities used stalling tactics to sideline people they
thought were potential Naxalites. “The police, in collusion with the courts,
are draining the water to kill the fish,” she said. “The state is conflating
adivasis with Naxalites.”
When Naxalite attacks do happen, an already hostile environment
gets more hostile. Last Dec. 1, 14 officers from a counterinsurgency unit of
the police were killed in
the most deadly attack of 2014. Weeks earlier, people thought to be Naxalites
killed a nephew of the president of Dantewada’s Bar Council. At a condolence
meeting, however, lawyers and judges directed raw feelings toward JagLAG,
questioning its motives and political affiliations.
Even a simple mention of JagLAG can unleash a stream of
invective in some antiterrorism and law-enforcement circles.
“All you people are responsible for this havoc,” said S.R.
Kalluri, the inspector general of the police based in Jagdalpur, referring to
the JagLAG lawyers and a reporter who accompanied them to Dantewada. “I know
very well you are Naxalite supporters.”
Even prominent national activists have been arrested under
suspicion that they sympathize with the Naxalites. Binayak Sen, a doctor and
civil liberties advocate in Chhattisgarh, was sentenced to life in prison in 2010on
charges of sedition that many say were based on fabricated evidence. Twenty-two
Nobel laureates signed a petition protesting his incarceration, and the
European Union sent observers to monitor his trial.
“The police and the state are showing a classic terrorism-era
attitude here — you’re with us or against us,” Ms. Gera said. “But really,
there are other options.”
