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Indian police are accused of raping
and sexually assaulting at least 16
tribal women in multiple villages,
India’s human rights watchdog
said, unveiling what human rights
advocates claim is yet another
atrocity committed by local
security forces during a decades-
long insurgency in the heavily
forested region.

The National Human Rights
Commission said in a statement
Sunday it found least 16 women
were “victims of rape, sexual and
physical assault,” concluding an
investigation into reports that
police attacked several villages in
the Bijapur district in the
Chhattisgarh state during an
operation against Maoist rebels in
October 2015. The commission is
still in the process of collecting the
recorded statements of about 20
other victims of alleged sexual
assault.

“Prima-facie, human rights of the
victims have been grossly violated
by the security personnel of the
government of Chhattisgarh, for
which the state government is
vicariously liable,” the government
commission said in its statement.
The watchdog began its own
investigation after a news report
was published in the Indian Express
in November 2015, in which more
than 40 women from five villages in
the Bijapur district alleged state
police sexually harassed and
assaulted them, gang-raping
several of them.

One of the villagers, a 14-year-old
girl, was grazing her cattle when
she was allegedly blindfolded and
gang-raped. The news article also
reported that belongings of many
villagers were destroyed, stolen or
scattered by the forces passing
through the villages.

Chhattisgarh, a central Indian state
about 1,200 kilometers (about 745
miles) southeast of the capital New
Delhi, is a remote region that is the
epicenter of the decades-old
Maoist-inspired rebellion that has
resulted in the loss of thousands of
lives and was spurred primarily
among indigenous tribal
populations known as adivasis.
The communist fighters say they
are battling the Indian government
for land, jobs, and other rights for
poor tribal groups.

Adivasis tend to be poor and
uneducated, and have been targets
of mob violence for years from
various tribal groups in the country,
The Washington Post previously
reported. Locals and activists have
accused Indian security forces of
carrying out “collective
punishment” against adivasis for
their perceived connections to
Maoist rebels, whether they exist or
not, The Post reported.

Police launched an investigation
over the rape allegations, but no
arrests have been made yet.
Kishore Narayan, a lawyer
representing 14 victims, told AFP
the panel has backed their claims
and accused the police of
deliberately shielding those
responsible.

“The victims gave the names of the
policemen involved in the barbarity
but nothing has happened,”
Narayan told AFP. “They carried a
sham investigation and are trying
to obfuscate the case.”
He said they have filed a petition in
the Chhattisgarh High Court
demanding an investigation by a
special police team from outside
the state. A chief secretary for the
state government has been directed
to ensure that monetary relief, if
any, is paid to the victims,
according to the commission’s
statement.

Women Against Sexual Violence
and State Repression, a group that
helped flag rape allegations in the
villages, lauded the commission’s
intervention in the cases, and
claimed the findings validated the
group’s “assertion that sexual
violence is being used as a weapon
of war” in the region, it said in a
statement.
The organization said the cases
filed “may be only the tip of the
iceberg,” adding that reports of
sexual violence by security forces
continue to come in from other
villages in the region where search
and combing operations were
carried out.

The five villages where security
forces allegedly went on the
rampage, between October 19 and
24 in 2015, largely remain out of
bounds for even journalists, the
Hindustan Times reported. A
television reporter speaking to the
Hindustan Times called the area
“virtually a no-go zone,” saying the
authorities “treat everyone as
Maoists.”

Activists often accuse Indian
security forces of committing gross
human rights violations including
extrajudicial killings, arson, and
sexual assault in the conflict-torn
region, the AFP reported.
In March 2011, the residents of
Tarmetla, also in the state of
Chhattisgarh, were driven from their
homes by heavily armed police and
paramilitary soldiers who believed
militants were being harbored
there. An inquiry by India’s Central
Bureau of Investigation found that
the police had burned the village,
killing people and sexually
assaulting women as they went.

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