Oh, It Happens

The law required that Sori be produced before the Dantewada magistrate on October 10, after a few days in police custody. Since she was in no condition to walk to court, being badly injured in the head and the spine, the magistrate ought to have gone and seen Sori where she was, in the presence of the police personnel who had held her in custody. But this important procedure was for some reason assigned to the magistrate’s office assistant.

Cut to Delhi, where Sori was arrested, on October 4, in a joint operation by police from Delhi and Chhattisgarh for allegedly ferrying protection money from industrial group Essar to the Maoists. A lower court and the high court in the national capital denied her interim bail and granted police transit remand to take her to Chhattisgarh even though she cried out loud her fears that she’d be tortured and killed. The courts said they would not intervene, at that stage, in the “due process of law”. But the high court, indeed, asked the Chhattisgarh police to report to it in a few days on Sori’s condition: it was to be ensured she was safe and unharmed in any way. But the Dantewada police, under superintendent Ankit Garg, failed in that duty. For Sori, as for hundreds of others like her caught in the jungle warfare of State vs Maoists, due process of law has meant torture, physical and mental, inflicted in police custody or in tedious petition work. On October 11, admitted to a Dantewada hospital for treatment of her injuries, Sori began a hunger strike, her spirit still alive in protest.

Sori has been implicated in five cases of Maoist violence, her husband is in jail for being a Maoist, her nephew Lingaram Kodopi has been arrested as a Maoist extortionist. Police allege she is either a Maoist or a Maoist sympathiser even though Maoists had once shot her father in the leg, accusing him of being a police informer. Sori herself had been threatened by the Maoists for refusing to hoist their red flag instead of the Indian tricolour at her ashramshala. She says the police is putting her through this ordeal because she and Lingaram haven’t played along in the deadly shadow game of sleuth, scout and informer, of rebel, provocateur and double agent. Courageous woman that she is, Sori once moved the Supreme Court to get Lingaram freed from illegal detention of more than two months. A trained journalist, Lingaram is now videographing evidence of police atrocities in the villages and has offered it to the CBI. The State must of course punish such moral courage by inflicting upon her the “due process of law”.

A few cases were surreptitiously lodged against her and left lying dormant; then she was suddenly declared an absconder even though she was all along attending to her duties as a head teacher at the ashramshala and drawing salary. The latest case against her alleges she and her nephew collected money from an Essar group contractor, paid by the industrial group for protection from Maoist attacks on their interests in the region. Among the evidence against her is a record of calls from her cellphone to that of the contractor. This, she says, the police created after taking away her cellphone.

The courts will do well to seriously think about what Sori has undergone and is undergoing—as we went to press, the SC was to decide on a medical investigation of her injuries—and see if it amounts to “due process of law”. They might also ponder over how the State hounds and brands anyone confronting its oppression like Sori did and how it extends guilt by association to rights activists who support bravehearts like her: Chhattisgarh police raided activist Kavita Srivastava’s house in Jaipur on October 2, rummaging through wardrobes and drawers in search of Sori, who was eventually held in Delhi, where she had gone to seek the Supreme Court’s protection against the cases foisted upon her. In closing, it might also be pointed out that Chhattisgarh’s BJP government hasn’t touched the Ruias, who own the Essar group, while it has unleashed some of its fury on a few Essar employees. Most of the fury, however, has been reserved for aam adivasis like Sori and Lingaram, who, trapped though they are in a conflict they’d rather have nothing to do with, endure through sheer moral courage.