Most of the people who had originally come to the camp were forced to do so by the Salwa Judum. Now the situation is that many of them have gone back.

In the first phase, the conditions in the camp were appalling. There was no sanitation. Food was minimal. People lived in knee-high slush. Eventually semi-permanent house were provided. But there is no provision for employment. There were food-for-work programmes.

The government literature refers to them as 'Salwa Judum base camps'. This is military language, which means you go out from the base camps to conquer the surrounding population.

As more villages were burnt, more camps came up and now you have smaller camps coming up.

Any village which is not in the camp is declared Maoist. They are denied food and health services.

The police say they are merely protecting the Salwa Judum. But you along with several other activists have claimed that the police mobilised the Salwa Judum.

There are several different indications as to how the group is formed. There is a police video which talks about 'operation Salwa Judum'. It talks about how the police mobilised villagers in January 2005 itself. There is a collector's work report which talks about how the Salwa Judum should be conducted.

There is also a local spark which was provided by some incident in Kothru. There are many versions. It's not clear. But it's not important how Salwa Judum was formed.

The point is not how it originated. The fact is that it is supported by the government, justified by the government and it has engaged in atrocities.

Even if it was a spontaneous movement, the minute it degenerated into violence, the government should have said, 'stop it'. This is vigilantism and this is wrong. But they continued to justify it.

The police say there are no registered complains against the Salwa Judum, although HRW has recorded 50 eyewitness accounts.

We have been facing this problem in Chhattisgarh. The police say there is no violence committed by Salwa Judum. And we see with our own eyes, the violence committed by the Salwa Judum. Villages are burnt and people are killed. People are giving us testimonies and telling us their family members are killed. A woman showed me the bones of her husband and son.

What the government is saying is that because people have not filed FIRs nothing has happened. But people can't file FIRs in such a situation. When the police itself are attacking you, you are not going to go to the police station the next day to file complaints.

The NHRC team went there this summer and they say when they saw a couple of such incidents, the villagers fled after seeing the security forces. So in such situations how will people file FIRs? And if that's going to be the only proof of the violence taking place, then you are never going to get the proof.

The police attribute the violence to the Naxalites. So how do we know if it's the security forces, the Salwa Judum or the Naxalites? Even the HRW report speaks of violence from both sides.

Both sides are doing the killing. You will never know the complete truth. There will be many cases where it's murky. But by and large people tell you about the killings. And when they say Salwa Judum, there is no reason to disbelieve them on such a large scale.

The police say from village to village it's a different story in Chhattisgarh. It's a large region. Let's not look at its people as a monolithic group. Within the region there are disparities, can you talk about that?

Official figures say 644 villages out of 1,220 have been affected. Within that you can have affected in various degrees. There are some villages entirely burnt, people have fled to Andhra Pradesh. Those villages are still uninhabited.

There are some villages where the sangam members or those who were active among the Naxalites. They are not armed; they don't have uniforms. But say the Naxalites wanted food; they would arrange it for them. So they would be the helpers. And they are in large numbers across the district because the Naxalites have been very well entrenched. The Naxals have been in the region for the past 20 years and they have lot of popular support. So practically every village has a sangam.

So in some villages the sangam member's houses are burnt, and rest of the village has gone to live in the camps. In some other villages nothing was burnt, because people shifted to camps before anything could happen to them.

In some cases the Naxalites burnt the houses of Salwa Judum leaders. But by and large the violence has been due to the Salwa Judum. So it's different from village to village.

Image: Women rest outside their hut in the temporary camp in Dornapal village in Dantewada district.

Also read: Understanding the Maoist threat

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