Gory tales behind Naxal recruitment programmes

Nabal Singh was barely 12 years of age when he was snatched away from his parents by the “dadas”, as the Maoists are called by the tribals, from his native village of Kummakoleng in Chhattisgarh’s south Bastar district of Sukma on a summer day 13 years ago.

He vividly remembers the gory manner in which his parents were treated by the rebels when they tried to resist the ultras to take him away to induct him in the Maoist cadre.

“We were taught to adopt violent means to mobilise fresh cadres in villages. We were constantly reminded our own cases by our seniors while being trained in to draft new cadres. We used to torture the elderly parents when they hesitated to part with their wards exactly in the manner our parents had been subjected to tortures when we were snatched away from them”, Nabal, who was among 23 ultras who surrendered before the Bastar police on Thursday told media persons.

“I used to torture village elders to force them to draft their wards in Naxal cadres. But, in the night the memories of my parents being tortured at the hands of the Naxals, unfailingly, used to haunt me”, he recounted.

Nabal was in-charge of recruitment of Naxal cadres in his area. Mayaram Baghel (25), who also returned to the mainstream along with 22 other rebels on the day, narrated how he used to coerce the elderly people in the villages, particularly the village heads, by using violent means to force them to mobilise the youth of their respective villages to join the red cadre.

“Those villagers who refused to attend the meetings convened in their respective areas by the Naxals have been evicted from their homes and later their properties confiscated and distributed among other villagers. This was a sort of terror tactic to make them toe our line”, he said.