JAGDALPUR: In an early morning swoop in Jaipur, Rajasthan, on Monday, a team of Dantewada police from Chhattisgarh raided the residence of Kavita Srivastava, general secretary of PUC, the civil liberties group. "They said a khatarnak naxalite was being shielded in my house," said Srivastava.
The police said it was looking for Soni Sori, an adivasi school teacher accused of acting as a conduit for money being paid by Essar group to Maoists.
"Our team had information that naxalite accomplice Soni Sori was hiding at Srivastava's house. We sought the help of Rajasthan police and obtained legal search warrants but we could not find her there," said Ankit Garg, SP of Dantewada.
Who exactly is Soni Sori, what is her crime, and why would Dantewada police travel all the way to Jaipur to trace her?
On Sunday, a day before the Jaipur raid, this correspondent visited a government hospital in Jagdalpur, where on bed number 23 of the cramped surgical ward III, an old man lies awake, contemplating death, not his alone but that of his entire family. "I say just kill us, end our agony," he says, his voice soft and unwavering.
This 70 year old man, Madru Ram Sori, is Soni Sori's father. He holds himself up with dignity, despite gnawing pain from a swollen leg cast in metal fixtures. The three times village sarpanch and the brother of a former MLA, Madru Ram is recovering from a near fatal bullet injury, after he was shot by Maoists who attacked his house in June. "The Naxals are hitting us from the front and the police from the back. I ask the government to have mercy and end out misery, kripa kar ke hum sab ko maar do".
The Sori family's troubles offer a glimpse into the hellish world of Chhattisgarh's conflict zone, where a family has landed on the wrong side of both the Maoists and the police.
On the night of June 14, armed and uniformed Maoists stormed Madru Ram's house in Dantewada's Bade Bedma village and shot him. The bullet ripped the bone of his right leg. Then, aided by a large crowd of unarmed supporters, the Maoists proceeded to ransack the place, stripping it of everything - gold and valuables, sacks of grain and thirty cows. They tied up the entire family, took them away to the jungle and left the old man to die.
But Madru Ram survived and his family returned. "When we came back next morning, he lay there, saying 'paani paani'. There was no utensil, everything was gone. I grabbed the mitti ka bartan (earthernware) we use for pigs and quenched his thirst," says his 17 year old daughter Dhaneshwari.
For a family brutalised by the Maoists, it came as a shock when just two months later, on September 9, Dantewada police charged Madru's older daughter, Soni Sori, of being a 'naxalite accomplice' who was collecting 15 lakh rupees from a contractor of the Essar group.
"If my daughter was on the Maoist's side, do you think they would have shot me, and looted every single of my belonging?" Madru Ram asks.
The oldest among three brothers, Madru Ram was born in a family of village leaders. He could not study, but one of his younger brothers, Sonuram Sori, became the first postgraduate of the regionand a sales tax inspector. The other, Nandaram Sori, got elected as an MLA.
Madru, himself, continued to represent Bade Bedma as the sarpanch. For an illiterate man, who taught himself to sign, Madru strongly supported education. His daughter Soni made it to medical college but dropped out to take up a government teaching job. She was posted in sameli village as the adhiksheka or warden of a residential school for girls.
The Maoists were first seen near Bade Bedma in 1991, says Mahesh Kumar, a government teacher who served in the village from 1982 to 2006. But it was only after 2004, that their presence increased. "Three of the five para or hamlets part of the larger village started going for their meetings, but people from patelpara did not go," Mahesh adds.
Patelpara is the neighbourhood of the patel or village leader, in this case, Madru Ram. "They held it against me that my people did not join them," he says.
In 2008, the Maoists stabbed an old man, the father of the village kotwar or guard, and slit his throat. "No one even kills a chicken like that," recalls Madru. He called a village meeting. It was decided the son should file a police complaint. The police arrested one person in that case".
Perhaps, it was this arrest that the Maoists alluded to the night they took the family away to the jungle. "They said within the next year you must get our people released from jail, or else we will kill you," says Dhaneshwari. For the class 11 science student who lives in Jagdalpur town and had gone to the village for summer holidays, the sight of a Maoist meeting, with a row of victims being beaten by sticks, was chilling. But she still gathered courage to asked a Maoist woman why were they being pilloried. "She said 'tum log mil ke nahi rehte' (you do not display solidarity)".
"People of this area have been terrorised by the Naxals into doing their bidding," says Madru Ram. By the same logic, could it be that his daughter Soni had been coerced into aiding their agenda?
"Last year, the police implicated her in the attack on congress leader Avdesh Gautam's house. When the attack was taking place, my daughter was in this hospital, tending to her ailing mother," says the father.
But why would the police needlessly harrass her? Madru Ram says he tried to find out. He went to meet SRP Kalluri, then Dantewada's senior superintendent of police. "He asked me 'why does your daughter live and work in an interior area?' I replied, 'Sir, she needs the job to feed her three children'. He asked, she must be going for Maoist meetings and giving them supplies. I replied, 'Sir, doesn't everybody?'. He asked, do you? I said, no, but then I am an old man, I can afford to die. At that point, he laughed," recalls Madru.
Although her husband, a driver, was arrested, the warrant against Soni was never executed. As a government teacher who served as a hostel warden in Sameli village, it could not have been hard for the police to trace her, if it wanted.
Ramdev, Madru's son, claims it was no different this time. The day she was supposed to be picking up 15 lakh rupees for the Maoists, Soni was at Kuakonda police station to submit a letter asking for compensation for the family losses. "It was after didi returned from the police station and was resting at my house in Palnar village, that men in plainclothes arrived and asked for her and Lingaram, our nephew. They took away Lingaram but not her. The next day, she went to Kuakonda police station to trace Lingaram. Imagine our shock when a day later, the newspapers quoted the police as saying that Soni Sori was absconding".
That day Soni went into hiding. For the first few days, she called her brother and father. "But for four days, there hasn't been a single call," says Ramdev.
"We have appointed a dedicated team to trace her. From the evidences so far, we are certain of her involvement in the Essar case," says Ankit Garg, the superintendent of police.
"I cannot sleep. I constantly worry. Is my daughter dead or alive?," says Madru Ram, for the first time his cataract ridden translucent eyes brimming with tears. "But then, as I say, we should all die'.
