Used to walking miles with heavy piles of collected minor forest produce on her head till recently, 80-year-old Kaate Netam of Chhattisgarh struggles to even get up these days.
She fell off a motorcycle a few months ago, and sitting on the courtyard of her house in Pahunar village — nearly 350 km south of capital Raipur and 40 km from the district headquarters of Dantewada — pretty much sums up her daily routine since the accident.
That being the case, she is not ready or capable of a commute that involves a long walk followed by crossing the Indravati river on a boat to cast her vote for the coming Chhattisgarh Assembly polls, unlike in the past. In, or rather till 2018, that’s how she and her fellow villagers exercised their franchise because a security threat didn’t allow polling stations to be set up in the vicinity.
This time, they won’t need to go through the “ordeal”.
The panchayat office, where the voting for the Dantewada Assembly constituency will take place on November 7 in the first phase of polling in the State, is right in front of Ms. Netam’s residence. Her son says he would happily carry his mother there. The Panchayat Bhawan, which also houses a polling station for another adjoining village, has been there for years, but a security vacuum existed, according to the booth-level officer Surendra Pawar. Posted as a BLO in the Pahunar panchayat since 2003, Mr. Pawar says this would be the first time people would cast their votes for either Assembly or Lok Sabha polls in the village itself.
A kilometre-long bridge over the Indravati close to the village entry inaugurated last year, and a Central Reserve Police Force camp on its other foot that came up a year before it, have paved the way for voting to be conducted in Pahunar. This is one of the 40 polling stations in the insurgency-hit Bastar region where the average distance between the local population and the polling centre has been reduced to half.
Inspector General of Police (Bastar) P. Sundarraj says that compared to the 2018 Assembly elections, in the 2023 elections polling would be held in 126 new locations. “Out of these 126 locations, 40 are those polling stations which would be relocated to their native villages due to improvement in the security scenario,” he says, citing Pahunar in Dantewada, and Minapa and Silger in Sukma, as areas which would benefit from the exercise.
In Chhattisgarh’s Bastar, an area of around 6,000 sq km still remains outside the control of the administration. Hamlets such as Pahunar and neighbouring Cherpal fall closer to those vacuum areas, and despite having a sizeable number of voters, following the convention of a booth not being more than two km away from a voter has not been possible over the years. Mr. Sundarraj says that in the past elections, some residents had to travel as long as eight km but also admits that even in 2023, relocations also mean taking a booth further away in certain cases.
No campaigning
Unlike Jagdalpur and Dantewada cities, no campaigning by political parties and candidates is going on in the interior regions, and the only visible signs of an approaching election are the door-to-door campaigns taken up by the Election Commission of India. Ms. Netam remembers voting in the past elections too, but from whatever is communicated through her replies in Gondi (translated by her son who speaks fluent Hindi), she isn’t sure who are her choices or what are the issues.
That’s not the case with her fellow villager, Sairam Kashyap, 45, who says the main contest is between the Congress’ Chhavindra Karma, the son of the late Congress leader Mahendra Karma and sitting MLA Devti Karma, and Chetaram Arami of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The bridge to the camp that has improved access to the polling centre, and even otherwise, has given him hope and helped him clearly identify his polling issue. “It’s the lack of proper roads inside the villages,” Mr. Kashyap says…”Even two wheelers cannot ply during the rains. It becomes excessively difficult to reach anywhere inside the village, leave alone Geedam or Dantewada. But I doubt anyone party leader or worker would come here to take a note of that,” he says, as he points at the dusty surface next to him.
The Hindu had to abandon its journey towards the adjoining Cherpal village, as the condition of the connecting stretch was found to be worse, making it non-motorable for a small car, this despite no recent spells of rain.
Cherpal, along with Pahunar, is one of the eight villages that come under the surveillance of the new CRPF camp mentioned earlier. It was in a government school in Cherpal that Maoists had recently left pamphlets with anti-police, anti-government and anti-election messages written on them.
Showing the pamphlets at the camp, its in-charge, Assistant Commandant Himanshu Lal says the security challenge remains intact as in Handwa, an area a few km away from Pahunar, the deep Red Zone starts as the terrain is dominated by hills and dense jungles which give an edge to the ultras.
The key issue
Security is a key issue in all 12 seats of Bastar in these elections. Citing the drop in the number of casualties, both the BJP-ruled Centre and the Congress that rules the State have repeatedly said that there has been a decline in violence while claiming the credit for the same.
Mr. Sundarraj feels infrastructure and security are deeply intertwined. He says that more than 1,900 km of critical roads like Palli-Barsur, Basaguda-Silger, Pratapur-Koylibeda, Narayanpur-Sonpur, Arapur-Jagargunda road apart from many other village connectivity roads have been completed in the region in the last five years and opening of 65 new security camps have enabled the same.
However, not all of those camps have come without resistance. The proposal to set up a CRPF camp at Muker village in Sukma district was met with strong resistance from the locals. In May 2021 it snowballed into a major flare-up during which three protesting villagers died in police firing.
Two of the 40 relocated polling stations have come up between the security camps in Muker and Silger. Unlike the twin Pahunar polling stations, the catchment population that comprise residents of five nearby villages is more scattered here. Chaiti Sukka, an anganwadi worker, says the villagers couldn’t vote in the past.
“We are yet to make our mind,” she says on the possibility of voting, alluding to the threat she and her fellow villagers face from the Maoists who in the past have had issued poll boycott calls.
