Chhattisgarh girl refuses to join naxals

Her four-year-long battle against Naxals has rendered her “homeless”, but a tribal girl in a remote village in Chhattisgarh’s south Bastar district of Dantewada has refused to give in. Puja Markam (15), resident of Burgum village, refused to yield to pressures by the left-wing insurgent to join their cadre even though her young brother and sister were snatched by them in front of her after the death of their parents four years ago. “I had been subjected to coercions and all kinds of threats almost daily by the Naxals to draft me in the cadre for the past four years. They have made my younger brother and sister Maoists at the tender age of ten and nine respectively. We were orphaned when my father succumbed to mental and physical tortures inflicted by the Naxals after he refused to hand his three children to them,” Puja, who was rescued by the police while fleeing her home to escape the Naxals, told the police in Sukma on Friday. Puja had fled to Sukma from her village in the middle of the night on February 8 to escape Maoists and then boarded a bus for south Orissa district of Malkangiri.

“She was picked up by the local police when she was standing in Malkangiri bus stand. The child welfare committee of Malkangiri district later handed her over to Sukma district women welfare officer Pramila Singh”, Sukma district additional superintendent of police Santosh Singh told this newspaper. “I was completely shattered when my sister narrated her ordeal while visiting me once sometime ago,” Mr Singh quoted Puja as saying. While her brother, Madkami Hunga is a Maoist militia member, her sister Mangli has been accompanying Vinod, one of military strategies of Maoists in Bastar.