Villagers dispute claims of Andhra police in Chhattisgarh encounter

ChhattisgarhKanchal Kanchal village is twenty five kilometres inside Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district but the operation was led by Andhra Pradesh's elite force Greyhounds that has a reputation for well planned precision strikes against the Maoists. But even planned strikes remain mired in the messiness of Chhattisgarh's conflict arena, where villagers and security forces continue to offer sharply divergent accounts of events. Unlike previous controversial encounters, where the divergence centred over the identity of those killed, in Kanchal, even the number of casualties is disputed. Security forces admit to gunning down one woman, who they identify as Kunjam Deve and claim was an armed and uniformed Maoist cadre. "We had information that about twelve Maoists were camping in the village. Deve was one of them. She was killed while others escaped," says A V Ranganath, SP of Khamman district, bordering Bijapur.However, villagers say Deve was a middle aged mother of three who had gone to fetch water from the nearby river and was caught in the crossfire. Three days after the operation, when this correspondent visited the village, womenfolk from Deve's family stood by the river, mourning her death. Her teenage daughter Bhime was inconsolable.Mystifyingly, villagers insist a second woman was also shot dead, a claim rejected by the police. No one in the village, however, could identify the second woman. Some suggested she was an unknown labourer crossing the river on way to Andhra Pradesh. Kanchal falls on the route taken by adivasis traveling for seasonal work in Andhra's chilli fields. But in private conversations, a few villagers admitted the second woman was a Maoist. "There was indeed a team of Maoists in the village and a woman cadre was killed in the encounter, but it wasn't Kunjam Deve," said one villager, who requested anonymity. "Deve was just an ordinary villager, whose husband had been executed by the Maoists in 2008 on charges of being a police informer. The family has endured a double tragedy."A note by a division-level secretary of the CPI Maoist states that two women were killed in the Kanchal encounter but is silent on their identity.