Bastar:
Congress Candidate Devati Karma moves out of his home for election canvassing and more than 30 gunmen follow her. Armed with AK-47, INSAS rifles and sten guns, these men follow her in the SUVs without any number plate. The convoy of this Congress candidate looks like a marching army with thousands of CRPF and Chattishgarh Armed Police Jawans standing alert on either side of her campaign route. But she is not the only candidate in Bastar who moves in such a high security cover. We met Mahesh Gagra, sitting MLA and BJP's candidate from Bijapur assembly seat, in broad daylight, yet he is surrounded by a dozen armed men who look around all the time with ever vigilant eyes.
This is election battleground of Bastar where no car has a number plate in order to avoid Maoist attack who lay landmines with the help of informers. To keep the rebels away from the route of candidates, jawans of paramilitary forces and Chhattisgarh police move as advance Road Opening Party or RoP before any candidate moves out for election campaign.
Congress candidate from Bijapur seat Vikram Mandavi is so cautious that he doesn't want to come on camera at all to avoid any identification. There are hardly any banners, posters or slogans even when there are only two weeks left for voting.
Today almost 100 thousand troops are on ground to facilitate free and fair election in just 18 seats of Bastar on November 11. Devati Karma's husband and former Congress MLA Mahendra Karma was killed in an audacious Maoist attack five months ago in Jeeram Valley in Bastar along with other Congress leaders including state party president Nand Kumar Patel and senior leader VC Shukla. Devati's son Chavindra Karma says, "We cannot campaign openly in the interior areas as Maoists are always behind us. So our workers are meeting door-to-door silently."
Syed Sattar Ali, who escaped the Maoist attack in May, is now incharge of Mrs Karma's election campaign. He says, "They (Maoists) are out all the time and keep tracking our movement. We are always very concerned about how to reach from one place to another. So we do not declare our election campaign very early. It is known at the eleventh hour and a Road Opening Party is deployed to keep the route safe." Election Commission has given almost 600 extra companies of paramilitary forces and more than a dozen helicopters will be deployed to keep vigil and airdrop the polling parties in most sensitive polling stations. Despite this, candidates are not going in the interior villages where Maoists run Jantana Sarkar (peoples government) and have declared no poll zone.
Maoists have put banners and posters and dropped the placards appealing not to cast any vote in the elections. We found several such posters on the way to Bijapur which is a war-torn part of Bastar. "We cannot take any chances when such a motivated cadre is out there to oppose the elections. We are not going out to campaign where it is not safe and we are just hoping that people will come out to defy the Maoists diktat," says Mahesh Gagra.
"There are 50 per cent of polling stations where no one will be able to go. Not a single candidate, not a single polling agent," says S Karimuddin, a local journalist who has been covering this part of India for more than 25 years. But still there are a few candidates who can venture in some parts of assembly seat of Konta with the help of 'locals'. How can they do that? Don't Maoist attack them for campaigning in liberated zones? "They are soft on rebels and speak a language patronising their cause. So Maoists don't attack them," says a source who has been helping this reporter for a long time.