Activist Bela Bhatia threatened, given 24 hours to leave Bastar

Two days after she helped a team from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) record testimonies of tribal women who had allegedly been raped by security personnel in Bastar, researcher and activist Bela Bhatia’s house was mobbed on Monday morning by a drunken crowd of people who threatened to burn the house if she did not leave the village immediately.

Speaking from the village on phone, Bhatia told National Herald, “They were abusive, threatening and drunk and it was the intervention by the Collector who rushed a police team to the village that helped bring the situation under control.”

Vigilante groups had earlier forced several lawyers assisting the tribals to leave Bastar.

The mob had arrived in a car and a number of motorcycles. Bhatia said there were around 30 men in the group that came to the village today. Bhatia has sought police protection after the mob gave her an ultimatum to leave the village for good by tomorrow.

The researcher, a Ph.D from Cambridge, has been hounded by vigilante groups allegedly patronised by Bastar Police ever since she exposed how the police was using rape as weapon in their fight against villagers who they accuse of sympathising with Maoists. Bhatia too has been branded a ‘Naxal’ for espousing the cause of these tribal women.

The researcher said she was being hounded for the past several months with strangers following her and the police summoning her landlord to the police station for ‘inquiry’. They would ask the landlord what he did for a living and why he had rented a part of the house to the researcher. Anonymous complaints, police claimed, had been received against the landlord and Bhatia and villagers did not want trouble.

Bhatia was instrumental in recording the testimony of 14 tribal women and helped them approach NHRC which ordered the state government to lodge three FIRs against security personnel in November last year. This was said to be the first time in the country when an FIR was lodged against security personnel under the stringent anti-rape law of 2013.

But while Chhattisgarh Government has made no attempt to take action against the security personnel, a fact-finding team from the NHRC was helped by Bhatia in tracking down the women on January 19 and January 20.

Presumably the same mob arrived at 1.30 am on January 22 to threaten her, but retreated following barking by her two dogs. They returned on Monday morning.