My father’s murder
The seven days after my father’s coldblooded murder by the Maoists has added seventy years to my life. I am no longer the naïve girl who used to think that neither the Maoist crisis nor anything as monstrous as this could destroy our beautiful world. When my father, Lucas Tete, bled to death in the name of an ideology, something precious in his small-town tribal daughter’s heart also died.
Enem aabaya elaa jeeyom yenlong thenlong laadtaa. (In her tribal mother tongue of Khadia, it means: Life without my father feels very empty.) While my mother and two younger sisters are still inconsolable and see no future after Aabaa’s (father) mysterious murder, I am doing all I can to tell them that there is still hope in life.
For the first time in the 21 years of my life, I am thinking deeply about the Maoist insurgency and its bloodthirsty soldiers. I am also seeking answers about why Aabaa was singled out for murder on September 2 while the three other non-tribal policemen held hostage simultaneously by the Maoists in Bihar’s Lakhiserai jungle were released safely three days later.
As the hostage crisis dominated television news channels and newspapers, my family lived on hope alone for four days till they were informed that the left-wing rebels had gunned down Aabaa because the Bihar government refused to negotiate with them.
I knew a policeman’s job is a dangerous one, but never before had I thought that this job could make a policeman so helpless and bring so much pain to his family; the government on the other hand, at whose bidding the policeman works, remained so indifferent in the face of a life-threatening crisis.
The Bihar government certainly did little to resolve the hostage crisis and save the lives of the four policemen held captive by the Maoists till the news of my father’s murder broke. Even worse was the fact that while the Maoists had claimed that they had killed another policeman after holding a kangaroo court, it was my father’s body that was laid on a deserted jungle track a day later.
My father was the only tribal man among the four policemen held hostage by the Maoists. Like most others in our exceedingly consumerist society, even the Maoists, who have always claimed to champion the causes of the tribal people, found a tribal policeman an easy kill. Did they choose the safest route to get away with a sensational murder by relying on the prevalent wisdom that we are soft targets and unlikely to cause any political storm in the election-bound Bihar? Even in Jharkhand, tribal policeman Francis Induwar was abducted and brutally beheaded by the Maoists just a year ago.
The Bihar government, which clearly failed to handle the crisis and let the Maoists kill a hostage policeman and go victorious, has provided no explanation about how it secured the release of the three other policemen. Both the Bihar government and the police are silent about why the Maoists, who claimed to have killed policeman Abhay Yadavand, delivered my father’s bullet-riddled body. The government maintains secrecy, but I want to know what secret talks they held with the Maoists.
As the daughter of a policeman who was killed amid mystery and silence, I want a CBI probe into the negotiations held between the government and the Maoists and the steps that the government took to ensure safe release of the four policemen. I have never felt shy or uneasy about being the daughter of a low-ranked policeman; not even after my father was killed in cold blood while the government watched. But I am riddled with questions for being a tribal citizen in India.
My father was an important source of happiness in my small hamlet of 45 families. Every time he came to visit us, he would bring a few gifts for our neighbours. The last time he came, just before Independence Day, he brought 40 blouses for the village women. He just enjoyed giving gifts and spreading happiness. He wanted to live in the village and marry off his three daughters one by one among festivities after retiring from police service.
He had a lot of faith in my goodness and wanted me to become a teacher so that I could train young people to be good to their fellow people throughout their lives. I will certainly become a teacher.
Aabaa’s formal education had stopped at Class 12 due to my grandparents’ abject poverty, but Aabaa always wanted to study further. He became a policeman only to support his family, but I always suspected that he had really wanted to be a teacher. He is no longer around for me to ask him if he dreamt of holding a piece of chalk in a classroom instead of carrying a gun and chasing criminals in jungles.
I have never touched a gun. My father never brought his service gun home. I always believed that the need to use a gun has to be the last step, and should be used in a truly uncontrollable crisis. I wonder why the Maoists have to live by the gun when we call our country a democracy. I wonder what real and lasting changes have come our way through the bloodshed that has followed India ever since its independence. I would be asking my father these questions if he comes alive again or if I met him in my next birth. But till then, I have to wrestle with these questions myself.