Suchitra Vijayan
On May 21, 2025, the Indian government announced it had killed 27 alleged Maoists in the forests of Abujhmad, Bastar Division, Chhattisgarh. Among the dead was Nambala Keshava Rao, known as Basava Raju, the 72-year-old General Secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). By mid-morning, Home Minister Amit Shah had declared the operation a “landmark achievement.”
The killings were followed by open celebrations. Videos of soldiers dancing with weapons in front of the dead were deliberately circulated. The operation was carried out by the District Reserve Guard, a paramilitary force composed primarily of surrendered Maoists-turned-police informers. Their very existence violates the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling in the case of Nandini Sundar vs. State of Chhattisgarh, which declared such forces unconstitutional and condemned the Salwa Judum model of vigilante counterinsurgency. That judgment warned that arming civilians for combat was unlawful and directly tied to the dispossession and degradation of Adivasi communities. But it has been ignored in both letter and spirit.
This latest “encounter” follows a familiar script. There is no evidence of crossfire. Eyewitnesses and activists, including Soni Sori, report that many of the dead were unarmed—some barefoot, some still in slippers. “Not one of the bodies had a weapon beside them,” she wrote after travelling to Bijapur to meet grieving families. “Some were Sangham members, some were students, some were only eighteen. None of them were leaders. None of them were armed.” She described how the corpses were left to rot in the open, decomposing in the heat, covered in insects. “Every corpse was covered in worms,” she wrote. “The officer’s cruel words were becoming reality before my eyes.”
Sori documents what she sees not as a security operation but as a message, a form of militarised punishment directed at resisting populations. “If the one fighting for the government dies,” she writes, “he is wrapped in the national flag and given a state funeral. But if the one fighting to protect his land dies, his body is left covered in worms.”
Eight of the bodies were incinerated by the police in a deliberate act of destroying evidence: no postmortems, no return to families, no cold storage. Families who tried to claim the bodies were harassed, denied information, and turned away. A public statement from civil society groups and legal observers called these acts a war crime. “The suspected extrajudicial execution, the forcible incineration of bodies, obstruction of families, and deliberate concealment of remains,” it read, “constitute violations of both treaty-based international obligations and customary humanitarian law.”
What happened in Bastar is not simply a killing. Legal scholar Ujjwal Kumar Singh once described it as a “performative spectacle of sovereign violence.” The state does not hide these deaths; it displays them. It relies on a linguistic sleight of hand: once someone is called a Maoist, due process no longer applies. The label becomes a death sentence.
India has long used “encounters” as a euphemism for state executions. But today, the encounter has become a ritual, a public theatre of impunity. The figure of the Maoist, real or imagined, now functions as an all-access pass for suspension of law. No arrest. No trial. No evidence. The corpse becomes a prop, the killing a message.
These executions violate the Indian constitution, Supreme Court rulings, and international humanitarian law. The case of EEVFAM vs. Union of India (2016) ruling rejected retaliatory force as unconstitutional and reminded the state that “killing an ‘enemy’ is not the only available solution.” As the All-India Lawyers’ Association for Justice (AILAJ) recently wrote, “The only concern ought to be the prevention of loss of human lives.” Even during insurgencies, the state remains bound by the Constitution and international humanitarian law.
Since January 2024, over 400 people have been killed in Bastar by state and central forces. All of them were Adivasis. Most will never be named. What was once an exception has become routine: the state kills first and refuses to answer. This is no longer just a case of extrajudicial executions—it is the institutionalisation of militarised lynching, carried out with official sanction, draped in camouflage, and sustained by silence.
There is no ambiguity about what happened in Abujhmad. The state violated its own laws, ignored repeated ceasefire offers, deployed unconstitutional militia tactics, and left the bodies of the dead to rot. In the weeks leading up to the May 21 killings, the CPI (Maoist) issued at least three public statements expressing a willingness to negotiate. In an April 22 video interview with Bastar Talkies, Maoist leader Rupesh declared a unilateral ceasefire and Civil society echoed this call. However, the government first responded with silence and then with fire.
Insurgencies in India do not begin with weapons. They begin when the state arrives uninvited, declares land empty, signs a mining lease, and tells a people their language, memory, and existence do not count. The Maoist movement rose in resistance to this, and as a refusal to disappear.
What happened in Abujhmad is not an aberration. It is the blueprint. The Indian state has normalised the use of spectacular, militarised violence against its own citizens. It kills, then celebrates the killing. It denies families the right to mourn. It destroys evidence and calls it justice. And it does so not in secret, but in public, with applause.
C. Polis Project
