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On May 27, as the body of the Maoist general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao went up in flames in an Adivasi graveyard surrounded by a police cordon in Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur, his younger brother Nambala Ramprasad stood enraged outside a local police station.
“After death, the body of the deceased belongs to the family,” he said. “What Chhattisgarh police has done is very wrong and unacceptable.”
Ramprasad, who lives in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, had rushed to Chhattisgarh on May 22, a day after news broke that the state police had killed 72-year-old Rao, better known as Basavaraju, the top leader of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), and 26 others in a security operation.
Ramprasad even secured an order from the Andhra Pradesh High Court directing that the police hand over the bodies of those killed to their families after the postmortems had been done.
However, instead of handing over Rao’s body to his brother, Chhattisgarh Police cremated him and seven others, claiming in a statement that they had no “clear legal claimants”.
The statement, released after the cremation on Tuesday, did not identify those cremated, barring Rao, and Kosi alias Ungi, a Maoist cadre from Komatpalli village in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district. This left many anxious relatives in the lurch.
Since May 22, the relatives of five deceased Maoist insurgents from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been waiting in Narayanpur district, equipped with three ambulances with deep freeze containers to carry their bodies back.
“We do not know whose bodies have been cremated, as the bodies were not even shown to us – not even a glimpse,” said Dara Saraiyya, the uncle of Sajja Venkata Nageswara Rao, another senior Maoist leader, known as Naveen alias Madhu, who originally hailed from Prakasam district.
Officially, the Chhattisgarh police through its statement maintained that “there were no legal claimants” to seven of the eight bodies cremated. But, according to some media reports, senior officials feared that funerals of the Maoists could be turned into public events used for the “glorification of their propaganda” and hence acted to prevent such possibilities.
Hours after the cremation, Nambala Ramprasad went to the office of the Narayanpur police superintendent the next morning to request that the ashes of his brother be given to him.
He was asked to sign a declaration stating that the family was unable to provide legal documents to establish a relationship with the deceased, and the body had decomposed and posed a risk of disease spread, therefore, the police and administration were allowed to cremate the body in Narayanpur.
Ramprasad refused to sign the declaration and left for Srikakulam with the empty ambulance.
Matter taken to court
On May 21, as soon as he heard the news that his brother had been killed in a security operation in the forests of Bastar in Chhattisgarh, Nambala Ramprasad, 61, went to the local Kotabommali police station in Srikakulam district. He was told to travel to Chhattisgarh to collect the body of his brother.
The next day, when he reached Jagdalpur, the regional headquarters of Bastar region, he received a phone call from the police superintendent of Srikakulam district. Rao said the officer asked him not to bring the body back to the district, citing instructions from the Andhra Pradesh government. Four other people traveling along with Rao, including the driver of the vehicle, were threatened through their local village councillors, he alleged.
Expecting trouble, Ramprasad returned to Andhra Pradesh the next day. His elder brother Nambala Dilleshwar filed a writ petition at the High Court in Amaravati. He asked for the body of his brother and that of Sajja Venkata Nageswara Rao, another Maoist cadre from Andhra Pradesh who was killed in the encounter, to be handed over to their family members.
The Andhra Pradesh advocate general as well as the Chhattisgarh advocate general objected to the petition, arguing that the petitioners should approach the High Court in Chhattisgarh as the bodies were in the custody of the authorities in that state.
The deputy solicitor general, appearing on behalf of the Central Reserve Police Force, said that force had no role in the matter but submitted that the reason for not handing over the bodies was to avoid a law and order situation that could arise “under the guise of performing final rites”.
Nevertheless, the Chhattisgarh advocate general submitted before the court that after completion of the postmortem “the bodies would be handed over to the relatives of the deceased”.
Setting the argument of jurisdiction aside, the High Court dismissed the writ petition with the directions that the bodies be handed over to the families in compliance with the submissions made by the advocate general of Chhattisgarh.
Apart from Nambala Keshava Rao and Sajja Venkata Nageswara Rao, another deceased insurgent from Andhra Pradesh was 35-year-old Sangeeta Saipogu from Kurnool district. Two other deceased Maoists belonged to Telangana – 35-year-old Bhumika alias Vijayalaxmi from Ranga Reddy district and 30-year-old Rakesh Saraiyya alias Naveen from Hanamkonda district.
A long wait
In Chhattisgarh, the relatives struggled to get access to the bodies.
“We were shunted between hospital and the police thana, asked to produce papers and family photographs,” said Dara Saraiyya. He added that his nephew Rakesh had left home to join the insurgent movement in 2016, “so we have no family photograph as such”.
Displaying the authorisation letters approved by the local police station, Ramprasad said: “We have all the necessary papers from local authorities to show we are blood relatives of the deceased.” He added: “I have not met my brother for the last 45 years. How can I get them a family photograph?”
For five days, the families waited but no senior police officer came forward to explain why the bodies were not being handed over to them. In contrast, the bodies of most of the deceased Maoist cadres from Chhattisgarh were handed over to their families after they showed an Aadhaar card to identify themselves – barring Kosi alias Ungi from Bijapur, whose family was told by the police to cremate the body in Narayanpur since it had decomposed.
“They merely said so, but they did not show us the body,” said a young relative of Ungi. When asked if the family agreed to the body being cremated in Narayanpur, the relative said, “Ab hum kya bol sakte hain – now, what can we say?”
A hasty cremation
On the morning of May 27, the relatives of the dead Maoists gathered at the office of the Narayanpur police superintendent but he did not meet them. Around noon, they were asked to reach Narayanpur police station. They rushed there along with the ambulances, followed by journalists, only to be asked to wait.
Around 4 pm, amidst a heavy downpour, word leaked that the bodies were being taken to an Adivasi graveyard.
Soon, vehicles began to roll towards the identified cremation ground. A large closed vehicle identical to a police van went in, likely carrying the bodies given the stench emanating, followed by a truck laden with petrol cans and two tractors with logs of wood. They travelled past a waste dumpyard to reach an Adivasi graveyard heavily guarded by police personnel. No one, barring a few journalists, was allowed to get close to the area.
By 5 pm, fires were seen blazing at several places on the ground.
Among those present at the spot was an Adivasi journalist, Bindesh Patr, who expressed shock over the police intruding upon the Adivasi community’s burial ground and using it to carry out cremations.
“It is an insult to our Adivasi culture,” he said, sounding anguished. He tried contacting the collector and superintendent of police, but it was in vain. The station head officer of the Narayanpur thana refused to let him inside.
Violation of orders
Refusing to participate in the cremation, which took place around 2 km away from the main city, the relatives of the deceased insurgents gathered outside the Narayanpur police station to address the local media.
“We were kept captive through the afternoon,” said Nambala Ramprasad. “We were asked to agree to allow the bodies to be burnt which each of the family refused to.” Family members who were inside the police station since 11 in the morning emerged around five in the evening.
Bela Bhatia, a lawyer and activist who has been assisting the families in their attempt to recover the bodies, said: “This is not only violation of the AP High Court directions to hand over the bodies to the family members after postmortem, but complete violation of national and international laws that directs the State to preserve and dispose human dead body with human dignity.”
Hours before the cremations took place, Nambala Ramprasad, through his lawyer, approached the Andhra Pradesh High Court again to file a contempt petition, seeking action against Chhattisgarh officials, including the state principal secretary, the director general of police and the inspector general of police.
“Perhaps fearing the court would compel them to hand over the bodies, the police committed an even greater travesty of justice by consigning the bodies to flames, which has only made the matter worse for Chhattisgarh government and police,” said C Chandrasekhar, the advocate representing Ramprasad.
Before he left for Andhra Pradesh, Ramprasad added: “What the police has done today is utterly disgraceful, but I have full faith in the judiciary in giving justice to the family members.”
All photographs by Malini Subramaniam.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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