Who What Killed Mukesh Chandrakar

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Chapter 1

Divergent Roads

_{How Mukesh and Suresh, beginning from the same village in Chhattisgarh, took two rather different routes to survive poverty and conflict.}

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In his nasal voice, Mukesh would often remind the 200,000 subscribers of his YouTube channel, “Ab aap Bastar Junction dekhne shuru kar chuke hain. (You have begun watching Bastar Junction.)” 

Bastar, a region in the south of Chhattisgarh, is better known outside for four things, in this order: An on-going conflict for decades between armed Maoists and the State. Its deciduous forests. Its minerals, such as coal and iron. And, its Adivasi people. 

For 10 years, Mukesh covered stories of pain, suffering, hardships, and celebrations of the people in Bastar for big Delhi-based newsrooms, but more strikingly as a YouTube journalist through his channel Bastar Junction. In his inimitable youthful style, every second day, he would hone in on a new theme, primarily from the Bijapur district.

“He was the kind of journalist whom even highly educated and trained journalists would envy,” said Prakash Chandra Hota, who had supervised Mukesh’s work as Editor News18 for three years. His journalism set a benchmark for what was possible—not by paratrooping in, but by living through an armed conflict. His 486 videos since May 2021 have over three and a half crore viewership.  

“It required a great effort to contain his energy. He would reach out to any place beyond his designated reporting area, be the first to get the facts and truth out,” Hota recalled.  

“He was ambitious, as any good journalist should be, which is one of the reasons why he started his channel Bastar Junction. He beat all mainstream media in reporting the conflict,” reminisced Hota.  

“Bebaki se Bastariyon ki baat duniya se hogi. (We will have a fearless conversation about the people of Bastar).”

That’s how Mukesh described the purpose of his YouTube news channel.

His reporting may have been cutting edge, but to keep it so, he had to negotiate his life through rough terrain. He would face equal pressure from the two sides of the conflict to ‘contain’ his reporting. The police, as well as the armed and banned CPI (Maoist) party. He navigated carefully. Till he was killed. 

In his death as well, the two sides of the conflict again mimicked each other: They mourned his death and condemned his killing.  

“It is deeply saddening to come before you to address matters about him and in his absence,” said P. Sundarraj, Inspector General of Police, Bastar Range, when addressing an overcrowded room of journalists on January 4 to brief them on the preliminary findings of Mukesh’s murder.   

“We condemn the brutal murder of Mukesh Chandrakar … born and brought up in an Adivasi region, Mukesh established an identity as a local reporter. He responsibly exposed people’s political, social, and cultural concerns,” the banned CPI(Maoist) said in a statement on January 6.

It seemed Mukesh's murder was trouble they didn't want. It drew attention to the new roads being built in the region, in the name of development.

Mukesh Chandrakar was born into a poor family in Basaguda village. He lost his father, a co-operative bank employee, to a stroke when he was less than a year old, and his mother, an anganwadi worker, to cancer at the age of 21. His brother, Yukesh, elder to him by five years, whom he called Dadda, became his guardian and role model.  

Oscillating between a tearful breakdown and cheerful recollection, Yukesh spoke of life before their mother’s death. Their mother would attend to her duties as an Anganwadi worker 16 kilometres away in Awapalli from Basaguda. To supplement the low wages, she also sold Mahuva liquor at the weekly market in Tarrem village, 12 km from home. She would be away for 10-15 days, sometimes an entire month. She had to often leave behind the two, who fended for themselves, staying with a neighbour. Sometimes they accompanied her.

When the Muhuva bloomed in the forest, Yukesh would help his mother collect them. Mukesh would tail him. “He would ask questions about everything under the Sun. I often did not have answers for him.” 

Their mother was committed to educating the two. But Mukesh’s primary school education in Basaguda was erratic. Yukesh convinced his mother to send Mukesh to faraway Dantewada for his secondary school education. Yukesh went to study more than 200 kilometres away in Jagdalpur as his mother then shifted to Awapalli, closer to her workplace.

They were away when the area saw the violent rise of state-sponsored Salwa Judum - an illegal vigilante army of Adivasi people created by the state to fight the left-wing extremists. Their mother too moved to the relative safety of a Salwa Judum camp in Basaguda. Adivasi people who were not living in the camps were being targeted by the state-sponsored vigilante group. This is when she was struck by cancer. Mukesh was back in Awapalli in 2008 when his brother Yukesh got embroiled in a case and was imprisoned for nearly two years in prison. “You can imagine what the situation must have been like for that young brother of mine”, Yukesh told us while staring at the worn-out and battered aluminium plate he pulled out from the kitchen. They had shared their meals in it as children.

Their mother died in 2014. That the brothers were in debt due to their mother’s medical treatment was well known. Many local journalists stepped in to help them. Yukesh, always inclined to read and write, took to journalism. He joined a local news organisation, Dandakaranya Samachar. Mukesh tailed him yet again. From collecting Mahuva flowers, Yukesh had now grown to write, meet people, and even question government officials at times. Mukesh was in awe and was ready to pick up the pen as well. And the camera. 

“Once he held the pen and the mike, there was no stopping,” laughed Yukesh. The younger brother would take to more edgy bits of life and profession, and flourish. 

Amidst the armed conflict, he emerged as a journalist who mattered. Some days, the state and the Maoists cadres disliked him for his reporting. Some days, they used him as their interlocutor.

In 2021, Mukesh was part of a team that rescued a Central Reserve Police Force officer who had been abducted by the left-wing extremists. “ले आये @crpfindia के वीर जवान को।” Mukesh wrote in a X (Twitter) post. We have brought back the Central Reserve Police Jawan.

Till one day Mukesh was killed for reporting on a badly constructed road that leads to an iron mine. 

His elder brother gushed with pride sharing the X (then Twitter) post that showed the CRPF jawan riding pillion on Mukesh’s motorcycle. 

As Mukesh established himself as a journalist, he, like many others, felt the suffocation of working as a stringer or correspondent for Delhi- and Raipur-based news channels. The work of local journalists like him often went unacknowledged or, worse, remained unpublished for reasons unrelated to journalism. Like several other colleagues, he also set up an independent YouTube channel, allowing him to decide what to report and how, rather than having someone in a remote newsroom in Delhi make those decisions for him.

This had its risks. Now Mukesh was on his own. He got his fair share of threats and warnings. Sometimes from the state police and on other occasions from the armed Maoists. When the latter threatened local reporters for ‘being dalals (conduits) of government and private companies’, Mukesh took the lead in fighting back. His camera rolled to expose the Bijapur Congress MLA for making loose comments against his fellow journalists. 

Paratrooping journalists from the state capital, Raipur, and Delhi would often ask his help to negotiate the hostile world he called his home. He would help them navigate safely, often on his motorbike. He would do the odd story for Delhi-based TV networks and speak with more candid, earthy ease on his Bastar Junction to grow a following that would be the envy of many. 

On January 3, his body was found dumped inside a septic tank in Chattanpara, a premise behind the new bus stand in Bijapur, owned by a contractor, Suresh Chandrakar. 

Suresh

Suresh Chandrakar, too, lived in Basaguda village. He came from a poor Scheduled Caste family. He too was ambitious. But, his ambition was of a different kind. 

Suresh’s family had moved a few generations ago to Basaguda village, just as Mukesh Chandrakar’s family had. “I vaguely remember seeing him once in Basaguda walking on a road, nothing beyond that,” said Yukesh, dismissing claims that they were related. “We got to know each other well only in Bijapur,” said Yukesh. 

By the time Suresh was in his youth, the once vibrant and busy market, Basaguda, had turned into a violent zone with the armed Maoists pitted against Salwa Judum, and the state armed forces. While Mukesh’s mother was scrambling for survival, safety, and livelihood, Suresh had eyed an opportunity:

Suresh Chandrakar, ran a business scamming the Adivasi population. He helped take loans from banks in their name and pocketed a substantial amount for himself, several people close to him in Basaguda told us. He knew no bank official would venture into the violence-hit area to recover the money. As Salwa Judum violence escalated, Chandrakar, like many, was forced to make a choice.

He became a Special Police Officer (SPO). The Special Police Officers were appointed by the Chhattisgarh Police through an open call to local youth. It was a euphemism for the vigilante force comprising Adivasi people set up by the government against the left-wing extremists. “During those days, there were only two options – you either sided with the government and police or got labelled as a Maoist (Left-wing extremist),” remarked Himanshu Kumar, a social activist who was hounded out of Dantewada for raising concerns against atrocities during the period by Chhattisgarh police. In 2011, the Supreme Court eventually declared Salwa Judum and the appointment of SPOs to be unconstitutional and illegal.

The SPO Suresh Chandrakar worked as a cook at the Superintendent Police’s office, said local journalists. SPOs were paid between Rs 1,500 to 3,500 as monthly honorarium. Suresh was looking for more. With the patronage of the SP, he began his journey as a small-time contractor, constructing barracks for security forces and police stations. “Perhaps he found this to be far more lucrative than his paltry paid SPO job,” said Ganesh Mishra, a journalist from Bijapur.

That was the beginning of Suresh as a contractor. Over the next few years, Suresh flourished, paving his future with money from road contracts.

“Contractors rise up the ladder with luck and sheer hard work. But there are other things to be taken care of,” Ajay Singh, a contractor from Bijapur district, told us. “Contractors have to keep local politicians in good humour, extend favours when sought. All this is part of the game. It has been difficult for me,” he said with a smile when we met him at his residence in Bhairamgarh in early February. 

He should know. Singh was with the Congress for a decade and a half. Then he joined the BJP. But that dalliance did not last long. He remains a small-sized contractor with work hard to come by. If political patronage is essential, how do contractors survive a change of regime in the state, we asked him. “Contractors play their games carefully and usually won’t take on a politician. The politicians need them for resources,” he explained.

“Unko bhi to funds ki zarurat hoti hai (Politicians also require funds),”

he laughed. Politicians also require funds.  

The BJP was in power in Chhattisgarh for 15 years from December 2003 to December 2018. Congress swept to power with a thumping majority in 2018 and lasted a single term till 2023, when the BJP swung back to power. Through this period, Suresh hustled and flourished. 

By 2021, he had become rich enough to hire a helicopter to bring his bride home and powerful enough to show off his wealth with confidence against the backdrop of extreme poverty and the raging conflict between the government and the armed Maoists.

His house, close to the new Bus stand in Bijapur, had a fleet of vehicles. One Mercedes Benz, two BMWs, a couple of SUVs such as Toyota Innova and Mahindra Scorpio and Thar, a few motorcycles, and of course, several JCB machines and dump trucks lined up on the encroached forest land.

Armed conflicts give birth to and perpetuate a political economy that thrives amidst and on the violence. Suresh epitomises it. 

Many we spoke to suggest the contract that catapulted Suresh into the big league was for the Nelsanar-Kodoli-Gangaloor (NKG) road. It’s on this road that Mukesh and Suresh’s lives collided violently. This is the road that Mukesh was allegedly killed for.

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Chapter 2

At the end, a mine

_{In Bastar, old rural roads are for people. The two-lane paved ones are for minerals.} 

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The NKG road circumscribes the west side of the Bailadila hill range, which stretches approximately 40 km from North to South and is 5-10 km wide. 

To different people, the Bailadila range looks different. For the government and the mining companies, it is a lucrative large mound to be dug up, to draw out the estimated 2,300 million tonnes of high-grade iron ore distributed across 14 distinct deposits. 

To a geographer, it's the natural boundary between Bijapur to the West and Dantewada to the East.

In Gondi language, it means the ‘Hump of an Ox’. For the Gond adivasi community, the range is the abode of their deities, with the Nandraj peak in the range – the highest in Chhattisgarh - the residing space for Nandraj, the deity, highest in order of their belief system, as Nandini Sundar, social anthropologist from Delhi University, tells. Nandraj is the ‘Pataap’, the owner of the mountains and giver of knowledge. Since Nandraj was born in the hills of iron and minerals, his family, wherever they went and whichever hills they resided in today hold minerals, believes the community, Sundar tells. 

The Bailadila foothills nestle Adivasi life. Ninety-one villages in the eastern foothills in Bijapur and 35 tucked in the western foothills falling in Dantewada. 

The villages are on the edge and not in the hill forests. This works well for the miners. They don’t need to displace people to mine the hills for the lucrative ore. In practice, the displacement or destruction of the faith of the Adivasi or their grazing lands, sources of water, and forest produce is not of much consequence to the miners. 

Built in the 1980s, till the year 2000, the NKG road, earmarked as a Major District Road, had buses plying, enabling travel from the remote villages on the Bijapur side to the district headquarters. The single-laned dusty forested track of NKG road enabled easy access on bicycles, motorcycles, and even tractors transporting people when the season to pluck tendu patta came around. Then, Salwa Judum, the government-sponsored vigilante, emerged to take on the Maoists, and the violence escalated. The road was abandoned.

In 2010, the government put out the tender to re-lay and build the 52.4 km NKG road. Building roads amid an armed conflict is an art of navigation. The NKG road bid from the government did not attract big players. The road contract was too fraught with security risks. Consequently, the government broke down the construction of the road into several contracts for small stretches of 2-3 km each. This would encourage Chhattisgarh-based, B-category contractors like Suresh Chandrakar to bid.  

The road, broken into 30 parts, was contracted to six different contractors. Suresh Chandrakar bagged 18 parts of the contract, totalling 32 km alongside contracts for five bridges and culverts across the stretch.

The road was to be widened from 3.5 metres to 7 metres. The Western side of the hills did not have an easy route out for the iron ore from the Bailadila mines. The road was to become one. Built in the name of development, while nibbling away lands and forests of the tribals, the road was to be opened wider to truck away the ore to fuel India’s growth story and to ensure access for the state armed forces. 

The road work did not take off. The mines were waiting. In 2015-16 the government upped its focus on building road infrastructure in the conflict areas. It came in parallel with the push to open more of the Bailadila range to iron-ore mining. 

Starting 2021, the Union government amended the laws to permit private miners to get into iron ore mining. Private miners were brimming with hope for iron, from the Bailadila hill range. Till date, only government-owned companies had controlled the mining in the region. Now an aggressive push for opening new mines to private players would run in parallel with the push for developing the roads to take the ore out of the potential new mines. While several villages protested about the mines being opened up without consent on their traditional lands, they also had to deal with the road infrastructure being sped up, incentivised by higher contract prices. 

In response to applications under the Right to Information Act, the state government informed us, the contracts for the roads were revised from an estimated Rs 73.08 crore in May 2010 to Rs 188.78 crore in 2021. The cost of laying the road was raised from Rs 1.84 crore per km to effectively Rs 3.60 crore. 

According to official documents obtained through RTI, the revision was to include an additional 43 culverts/bridges along with changed dimensions of 78 culverts/bridges already planned for. Suresh’s contracts which added up to Rs. 54.86 crore in 2010 now were worth nearly three times at Rs. 146.455 crore in 2021.

Another state contractor we spoke to on the condition of anonymity said some of the revision of costs was justified. Surveys prior to road construction were difficult due to security issues. The requirement of the number of bridges and culverts can shoot up once the contractor begins looking at his specific stretches closely. However, an escalation of three times was out of the ordinary, he admitted.

“Such an increase in contracts usually happens with saath-gaath (collusion) at all levels," he said with a snigger. He did not proffer any specific proof of such collusive corruption on the NKG road. Clearing the bills for his road contracts was easy for Suresh Chandrakar, he said. “He had easy access to the rank and file in the concerned departments,” he said. 

Access is the key to all contracts in a conflict zone. The contractor did not offer any proof of his claims. We sought them from other quarters during our reporting. The proof was not difficult to find. 

Mukesh Chandrakar found it on the NKG road itself. 

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Chapter 3

A contract to kill for

_{The road that paved the way for riches and led to a murder}

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In December 2024, NDTV’s journalist Nilesh Tripathi published a news report with Mukesh’s help on how bad the newly constructed stretches of the NKG road were.  

Tripathi told us the Bijapur district collector admitted to the poor construction of the road and claimed he had admonished the contractor for it. Tripathi reached out to the contractor, Suresh, as well for a response. Suresh claimed the road conditions were bad because heavy vehicles plied on it, and the pressure to complete the roads in haste had led to the bad quality. Tripathi asked Suresh to send his response in writing or as a voice note. Instead, Suresh requested a meeting in person. When Tripathi said he was not around to meet in person, Suresh inquired if there was a reporter from the area involved in the story that he could speak to instead. Tripathi shared Mukesh’s name. Suresh then disconnected the call. 

The story led to a flurry of action by various state government departments. The party in power now was the BJP, and Suresh was associated with the Congress. One cannot conclude if that was the reason for such prompt action. A day after the story was published, on December 25, the Public Works Department in Raipur, headed by Deputy Chief Minister Arun Sao, announced a four-member investigation team to inspect the road. Two days later, the state tax authorities raided the contractor’s premises, revealing an alleged tax evasion of Rs 2 crore.  

The quick reaction would make it seem the condition of NKG road and Suresh’s contracts had somehow remained hidden in plain sight from everyone, despite an elaborate security corridor, and Tripathi and Mukesh’s report had revealed some secret state of affairs.

Mukesh went missing on January 1, 2025, after informing a colleague in Raipur about meeting a local contractor. His brother, Yukesh Chandrakar, reported him missing on January 2. The next day Mukesh’s body was found in a septic tank, freshly sealed with concrete slabs. 

The state government acted with alacrity, setting up a special investigation team, however, the investigation itself raises several questions. By January 5, the police had arrested the contractor Suresh Chandrakar, his brothers Ritesh and Dinesh, and employee Mahendra Ramteke for the gruesome murder. The charge sheet of over 1,200 pages filed in March alleged Suresh had hatched the plan to kill Mukesh for the news reports.

Suresh would continue to be pummeled by state action. His road contracts were cancelled, and so was his registration as a contractor.  

The forest department too woke up to suddenly find he had encroached on forestland and bulldozed parts of it. A forest department staff member we spoke to claimed that Suresh had encroached on the forest land over five years ago, but refused to discuss how long the department had been aware of the encroachment.

A retired Executive Engineer and two junior level district officials were named in another First Information Reports for cheating and misuse of authority as well as negligence of duty in ignoring the poor condition of the road. 

The ‘system’ was busy finding its fall guys. The story of Mukesh’s murder needed a quick closure for Bastar to get back to its business of ‘development’, conflict and mining. 

Another contractor we spoke to about the allegations of corruption that suddenly surfaced surrounding the NKG road said Mukesh’s murder had brought them to light, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about roads being paved with corruption. “Aap jitna andar jayenge, utna hi kichad milega (the deeper you dig, the more dirt you will find),” he said, suggesting the prosecution of merely lower-level officials was just an eye-wash.

Kick-backs at all levels were a given, he and several other contractors admitted. From bribing the police officials to provide security for road construction, to buying off peace with the Maoists was par for the course, all of them acknowledged.  

Through the use of the Right to Information Act, we reviewed the reports of the state public works department inspections carried out after Mukesh’s death. Patches of the road were found to be “incomplete”, “in poor condition”, “in progress”, and “of substandard quality”. For years, all this had gone unnoticed and unchecked while payments were made to contractors by the government for the successful completion of work. The inspection report noted ‘substandard’ construction for 32 km of the road, yet over 75% of the payment has been made to Suresh Chandrakar in advance. 

We spoke to the chief engineer of the public works department, G R Rawate. He said work had begun on the road only after 2014. 

“Monitoring of construction activities in Maoist areas suffers due to shortage or non-availability of Road Opening Party,” he said. Road Opening Parties are teams of police personnel deployed to ensure road stretches are safe for others to travel on.  

“How often in the last 10 years has the PWD department reviewed the road construction?” we asked. 

Rawate shook his head. “Can’t say, it is the responsibility of engineers posted at the district. Visits to these locations are impossible without security cover,” he emphasised.

Other contractors also said their work depends entirely on the Road Opening Parties, and they are often not available, leading to delays and an increase in construction costs. 

The 52.4 km of the NKG stretch has one state armed forces camp every five kilometres. A total of over 3,000 security personnel are supposed to safeguard the stretch. These are not always available to provide safety because they get deployed in operations, said several contractors. 

The public works department staff charged after Mukesh’s death with ‘dereliction of duty and corruption’ in the NKG stretch also argued before the court that they could not undertake monitoring and evaluation of the construction because the area is Naxal sanvedansheel ilaka (areas sensitive to Maoist activities). They got bail.

A Real Threat

The security threat is real. Civilians as well as security personnel have been killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the road stretches in Bastar. Attacks by armed Maoists on equipment and people employed by contractors are regularly reported. Finding and defusing IEDs are a priority for the state forces. Suresh Chandrakar, too, had one of his vehicles burnt down by the Maoists, according to a local reporter.

The security risks have kept the big contractors out, but those from Bastar who know the security and political terrain, like Suresh, take on these risks, stand to earn well. Government programmes budget for road contracts in LWE areas at nearly 2.5 times the usual. The NKG road contract was an exception even by these standards. After a revision, the contract price for a kilometre of NKG road was pegged at Rs 3.6 crore per km as compared to the average Rs 25 lakh per km in peaceful areas. 

The police occasionally alleged collusion between the contractors and the Maoists. The contractors speak of paying senior officials to ensure police protection during construction. Pay offs of all kinds are an open conversation when done off the record. Almost as if those sitting in Delhi and Raipur have built these ‘costs’ into the high budgets for roads in LWE areas. 

One seasoned contractor from Bijapur denied he had ever paid a price for seeking the support of road-opening parties. And then he went on to say, “Apne raaji-khushi me kuchh contractors deten hai, wo alag baat hai….kaun leta hai kaun nahi, ye nahi bata sakta. Some contractors might offer money of their own volition…but who takes money and who doesn’t, I won’t want to get into that.” 

Mukesh’s murder led to a breach of the unsaid rule: The only stories that go out of Bastar are of the battle between the Maoists and the state armed forces. Not of the life, politics, and business that this conflict breeds. 

A political blame game ensued after Mukesh’s murder. Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai said, "The contractor is a Congress functionary," after the contractor was arrested on January 5, four days after the murder. Congress spokesperson Sushil Kumar Anand accused the BJP of ‘inducting him into the party’, citing an alleged visit of the contractor to the chief minister’s house 10 days before the incident. Both said the alleged criminal should be punished. 

The state, which often decides the pace at which justice and law progress, showed uncanny haste in the case of Mukesh’s murder. And to get back to the business of building roads. A tender for completing the ‘balance work ‘ on the 7.5 km of the NKG road was up for bidding within a month of the murder. 

Mukesh’s murder and the evidence of corruption unearthed had been turned into a one-off case of crime. The state was keen to get on with their business and mission against Maoists, the miners were keen to get the road in place, and the Maoists were keen to get on with their fight.

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Chapter 4

Development by Force

_{How roads that make contractors rich eat the lives and livelihoods of the poor in Bastar.}

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Soon after Mukesh reported on the state of the NKG road in 2024, the state forest department woke up to suddenly find the road, which had been under construction since 2021, had been built in violation of forest laws. 

The old road was a single-lane one. The new road contract was to convert it to a two-lane road. In effect, the 3.5-metre-wide original road was to now become 7 metres wide and an additional 2 metres required on the sides. The chief conservator of forests, Jagdalpur, Ramesh Chandra Dugga acknowledged to us that it meant acquiring additional lands along the road, including private, revenue and forest land.

Through the Right to Information Act, we came to know that the divisional forest officer of Bijapur had filed four preliminary offence reports for these violations and filed for recovery of Rs 68.49 lakh from the state public works department for the destruction of forest property. 

“We move in for surveys and subsequent diversion only when the department concerned approaches us for forestland diversion,” Dugga told us, justifying the lack of oversight by his department over the road construction, even though almost all roads in the region necessarily have to cut through forest tracts and biodiverse rich pockets. 

Dugga agreed that the broadening of roads in the belt could only be done by devouring forest lands. To ensure this happens easily, the Union government had earlier eased the rules for forest clearances to ‘linear projects’ such as roads. 

The NKG road devoured not only forestlands but also private agricultural lands of the Adivasi. Often without their knowledge or permission. When the construction for the road began in earnest in 2021, villages such as Burji, Pusnar, Palnar and Bechhapal protested demanding their gram sabha be consulted before executing the contract because the road was destroying their agricultural land and forests where productive trees were being cut down.  

However, protests against roads and the attendant security camps were declared ‘anti-development’ as well as Maoist-instigated and were cracked down upon. Several villagers were beaten up, and others were arrested. Some are still behind bars. Journalists were prohibited from entering these stretches.  

We know because we have often tried to travel along these roads to report on the protests. ‘The place is filled with landmines’, ‘road opening is underway’, ‘permission has not been granted by senior officer’ were some of the reasons proffered to deny us the right to report.

A week after Mukesh’s murder, we travelled again on the NKG road. It was completely abandoned but for a few villagers who walked on the shoulder of the road. Some women were returning from Gangaloor market barefoot along with their infants and young children who held onto their mother’s dhoti while walking, while some men were cycling down to the Gangaloor market with large white plastic cans filled with sulfi to sell in the market or to security personnel in the camps. 

“I was in jail for over two years while this road was being made,” said Gangu Kunjam, as we stopped to speak to the two young men in Palnar village.  

What was the offence, we asked him. 

“Wahi Naxali case – barood lagaya, wire mila, parcha mila (The same old accusation that we are Maoists, that we installed improvised explosive devices, that they had found wires and pamphlets on us)” he said giggling. Life in Bastar teaches you to laugh at your state-sponsored misery. 

Kunjam along with his brother, Joga Kunjam, and a third villager was cleared of all charges after two years in the prison. Kunjam spent Rs. 30,000 on lawyers.   

In the two years, his village had changed. He could barely recognise it, he said. “Apne gaon me hun ya kidhar (Am I in my village, I wondered),” he said, laughing. So much had changed, he said, shaking his head in dismay. Between Palnar and Timmenar, over 1,000 trees have been cut down, he said. 

Riding ahead another three kilometres, we reached Timmenar village where, adjacent to the road, we met several farmers removing the topsoil from their farm and constructing a medh (bund).  

“We are removing the murrum from the road construction (powdered rock used for the construction of roads) that has settled here after the rains,” Baburam Kunjam explained as he went about his work. On a rotational basis, the villagers of Timmenar were clearing the murrum in each other’s fields that fell close to the road.

The road has made our land less fertile, he said. Since the old road had to be converted into a two-lane road, the height of the road was increased by three-four feet, for which the contractor just ran the JCB in the nearby field and scooped the mud to put it on the road before covering it with murrum, he explained. “Now the murrum is filling into the field which they have to empty and prepare for the coming monsoon,” he explained. 

The new road ate farmlands. Karam Kumar, another villager from Timmenar had half an acre of land to farm. Now his farm was filled with murrum, and he could not farm much of it, he said, standing at a distance from his plot. As opposed to the five quintals of paddy he got out of the farm earlier, this year he got only three, he said with a lament. He also lost one mango tree, and two of his mahuva trees were also damaged, he added. “They uprooted it with a JCB machine,” he said with a sigh.  

We met many other farmers in Timmenar who had similar stories to tell. Kowa Oyam lost his entire one acre to the Timmenar security camp. Oyam was cultivating the land but had no patta (formal land record) to show. The local revenue officer promised he would get one. But before that could come through, the security camp had been built on his land. “How do I now prove I used to cultivate that land?” he said despairingly.

About 30 km from Gangaloor and a little distance before the Bechhapal security camp, we came across a bridge that has completely collapsed. The bridge fell on August 2, 2024, said 30-year-old Guddu Kadti, who had hopped on our bike eager to show the place. Kadti lost his five acres of rich, fertile paddy farm to the bridge that collapsed and settled on his farm. “I would have got about 4-5 quintals of paddy this year, but I got nothing,” he bemoaned. Complaints to the administration had fallen on deaf ears, he said. He would have to go and do some coolie work to support his five children and wife, he sighed. 

Rajuram Kadti had a similar tale. “I lost 7 acres of land to the Bechhapal security camp,” he said, showing his land ownership papers. The land records showed 4.168 acres of land in his possession, which he said was incorrect. He had seven acres, which the security forces forcibly took away to establish the camp overnight, he insisted.  

Why did he not object and bring this to the notice of the Tehsildar or other higher officials?  

“He was in jail then,” said the other villagers who had gathered around him, in chorus. Several said Rajuram Kadti was fairly vocal about his opposition to the road and camp. He was slapped with 39 cases accusing him of being a Maoist. He spent over five years in prison. By the time he came out, the camp sat on top of his land. 

Why did he not pursue it further with the administration? “Zyada bakwas karega to phir jail jayega (You will end up behind bars again if you talk this crap),” he said he was told. He shut up.  

Many villagers said the lack of formal documentation of their land rights comes in the way of them seeking a fair deal. “Hum to bus door se apne pedon ko kat-te aur khet ko ujadte dekhte hai” (We only watch from a distance as our trees are chopped down and our farmlands destroyed),” one of the gathered villagers told us. 

On paper and in government records, the roads and the camps continue to be constructed and operated for the benefit of villagers such as Kadti. 

In Bastar’s reality, it is the contractors such as Suresh who make a killing from constructing the roads, the miners who need them most to truck out the mineral wealth and journalists such as Mukesh who pay the price with their lives and livelihoods for telling us the stories of these roads of development. 

Post Script: As we three sign off on this report, an intense battle ensues between the Maoists and the state armed forces on the border between Bijapur in Chhattisgarh and Telangana. The roads continue to be built. The Bailadila hills will be opened to new mines. 

Aap Bastar Junction pe khade hain.

‍You are standing at Bastar Junction. From where Mukesh Chandrakar told stories of his homeland.