Attack on Soni Suri and cause behind it : An editorial by The Hindu
A sordid record in Chhattisgarh
Editorial
Adivasi rights activist and
Aam
Aadmi Party leader Soni Sori was attacked by motorcycle-borne
assailants in Chhattisgarh on February 20. They threw an acid-like
substance on her, which left her in deep pain, and her face swollen
with chemical burns. This was not the first physical attack on Ms.
Sori. As international human rights watchdogs have reported, Ms. Sori
was also allegedly tortured and sexually assaulted by the
Chhattisgarh police while in their custody in October 2011. The
latest attack on her comes in the wake of a series of developments
that suggests a government-endorsed clampdown on free speech and
dissent in the State. Earlier this month, Malini Subramaniam, a
journalist associated with the news portal Scroll, and Jagdalpur
Legal Aid, a group of human rights lawyers working with Adivasis,
were allegedly forced out of the State for highlighting police
atrocities against the tribal population. Both the journalist and the
lawyers have claimed that their landlords were intimidated by the
police into issuing eviction notices on them. It is worth noting that
Ms. Sori had been trying to lodge an First Information Report against
the Inspector General of Police, Bastar Range. She has been leading a
powerful Adivasi movement that has sought to hold the State
administration accountable for the killing of Adivasis in fake
encounters, arbitrary arrests, and alleged sexual assault and torture
of Adivasi women by the police and security forces. She had planned
to highlight these issues through a 200-km march from Bijapur, set to
end in Jagdalpur on International Women’s Day, March 8, before she
became a target of the latest attack.
For some time now, free speech and dissent have been on the
retreat in Chhattisgarh. The official excuse for this has been the
ongoing
civil
conflict between the state and Maoist insurgents. But the
fact that individuals who have no connection with the conflict are
being forced out, suggests a larger anti-democratic agenda at work.
And this is in keeping with the pattern across the world where
so-called underdeveloped but mineral-rich regions have fallen prey to
fierce corporate plunder of natural resources at the expense of the
local population. The Bastar
region is rich in minerals as also Adivasi settlements, and the
people are loathe to giving up their land for resource-extraction. It
is their resistance to being forcibly evicted from their land —
best exemplified in the figure of Ms. Sori — that is the trigger
for the crackdown on democratic rights in Chhattisgarh. Given
the current political scene where a perverse form of nationalism is
threatening to shut down free speech, the attack on Ms. Sori
represents another front in the battle against the criminalisation of
dissent. The kind of spotlight that has been illuminating the
absurd charges of sedition against the JNU students needs to also be
focussed on the likes of Ms. Sori who have been waging such battles
for a long tim
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