New Delhi: The decades of cat-and-mouse between the police and red sandalwood smugglers have yielded some extraordinary stories: of precious, fragrant logs hidden among bags of flour or inside lengths of PVC pipe, of crime kingpins who, when not smuggling sandalwood, had sidelines in trafficking opium and humans.
Yet few stories have been as unsettling as the one unfolding now.
Six days after a state anti-smuggling task force fatally shot 20 loggers in the state of Andhra Pradesh, saying that officers had opened fire in self-defense during a chaotic, violent confrontation, two witnesses told India’s National Human Rights Commission on Monday that the workers had been detained when they were riding buses toward a work site, then shot while in custody.
Violent confrontations are not unusual in the forests of southern Andhra Pradesh, where illegal loggers have been known to set fires to distract the authorities while they covertly cut and remove trees.
The sums of money at stake are enormous: The price for a ton of red sandalwood – used in East Asia to make musical instruments and ornamental furniture, and as an extract to treat erectile dysfunction – starts upward of $30,000, said forestry officials. They added that top-quality wood could be sold in China and Japan for far more – up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a ton.
The Human Rights Commission voted to open a judicial inquiry into the police shootings, and called on the state government of Tamil Nadu to provide police protection to the two witnesses, their families and village leaders.
Two men whose associates were killed by the police last Tuesday described a chilling, controlled encounter. Sekar, 54, who uses only one name, said he had boarded a bus with three other men from his village after being promised work on a construction site. After several hours, the bus was boarded by a man in civilian clothes, who removed Sekar’s friends from the bus. Sekar said that he believed that the man was a policeman who believed that his friends were loggers.
Sekar, who had taken a seat beside a woman, remained on board. It was only after he had returned to his village, the next day, that he learned his three friends had been shot in the forest, supposedly while assaulting the police.
“On hearing this, Sekar fainted and took ill,” said an account by People’s Watch, a nongovernmental organization that filed a petition on behalf of the eyewitnesses.
A second witness, Balachandran, said he had joined his father and seven neighbors who had been recruited for work, but missed a bus because he was getting a drink. As he tried to catch up with his friends, he got a telephone call telling him the rest of the men had been detained. When Balachandran returned to his village, he learned that his father and the other seven men had been killed.
From the first, activists questioned the account given by the police, who said they had raided a large wood-cutting operation and come under attack with axes, arrows and heavy rocks, forcing them to open fire in self-defense. The men were killed in two groups – nine shot in one location, and 11 in another – and their bodies left strewn on the forest floor.
“How it is possible that you kill 20 people out of a group of hundreds and nobody else is injured or arrested?” said Chilka Chandra Shekar, who filed a public interest lawsuit in the high court of Andhra Pradesh, where the men were killed. A report filed by Shekar’s fact-finding committee also noted that “in the random firing, every single bullet seems to have found its mark – the upper body of the victim.”
Vrinda Grover, a Supreme Court lawyer representing People’s Watch, said the senior officers in charge of the operation should be charged with murder.
“Such a brazen and arbitrary killing under the guise of an ‘encounter’ calls for an urgent investigation,” she said. “Unless accountability is secured and the perpetrators punished, such extrajudicial killings will continue.”
