Maoists: Long and violent history of govt intervention in Bastar

On March 26, 1966, police surrounded a palace in Jagdalpur, Bastar, within which a deposed maharaja and a group of tribals had barricaded themselves. Following a bloody ‘night-long encounter’, the bullet-ridden bodies of the ex-raja and seven of his supporters were recovered the next morning (the number of dead was to rise).


In a speech in Parliament on the massacre four days later, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, quoted the ex-raja’s brother as saying that police tricked the ex-king into coming out of the palace where he was holed up, and then shot him. They burnt the body without waiting for the raja’s wife, then in Delhi, to reach the remote district. A delegation of members of parliament who attempted to visit the site, were turned away by police (a subsequent delegation succeeded).

A one-member judicial enquiry was ordered, even as then Union home minister Gulzarilal Nanda rejected calls for the probe to be overseen by a Supreme Court judge, or investigated by the CBI. That encounter, in which the ex-ruler of the tribal kingdom of Bastar was killed has a long backstory — it’s a story which forms a small but significant subtext to the broader history of how successive governments have dealt with tribals and their grievances in the region. The story also has unexpected echoes in the present and with what happened last week.

The Tale of the Raja

When India attained independence in 1947, Bastar was the 12th largest princely state in the country. As independence neared, princes across the country manoeuvred to ensure that their autonomy and status were untouched as much as possible under the new Congress dispensation, and the then ruler of Bastar, Pravinchandra Bhanj Deo, was no different. He approached the nizam of Hyderabad and attempted to strike a deal by which Bastar would be absorbed by Hyderabad state. That attempt at a deal was foiled by two men — one was Sardar Patel.

The other was Ravi Shankar Shukla, who went on to become the first chief minister of Madhya Pradesh (under which Bastar was governed) in the 1950s. And incidentally, Ravi Shankar Shukla’s son is VC Shukla, the veteran Congress politician, who was critically injured in last week’s Maoist attack. When Shukla senior took over as chief minister, he immediately butted heads with Pravinchandra. The royal, all of 22 years old, was hardly a match for the veteran politician.

Pravinchandra alleged that Shukla was trying to get him to back Congress candidates in elections due at the time. When Deo didn’t play ball, the raja was stripped of his privy purse and his estates were confiscated and put under the jurisdiction of the Court of Wards (essentially a government administrator).

What followed was a prolonged battle between Pravinchandra and the Madhya Pradesh government to get his estates back. Initially, it seemed the issue had been resolved when the raja joined the Congress. But this was short-lived and the raja soon quit the Congress and continued to battle the party and the MP government.

Local Grievances

The government attempted to use his brother Vijaychandra Bhanj Deo (whose statement Vajpayee later quoted) as a foil against him. In 1961 (when Shukla was no longer CM), police fired upon a large crowd of tribal protestors lead by Pravinchandra, who was later arrested. Twelve protestors were killed. Then chief minister KN Katju, who was still in place at the time of the palace massacre, five years later, turned down demands for an enquiry. Violent protests continued to erupt over the next few years.

Its unclear in all this how popular the England-educated Pravinchandra actually was with the tribal population. What is clear is that his battle to get his estates back converged with broader tribal unrest in Bastar which had been simmering for years and had increased since 1947.

A flavour of the shift from rule under the Raj and the princely state, to rule by the Indian government, is given by MN Govindan Nair, a communist member of parliament who visited the area. “Millionaires have sprung up in that region of Bastar through forest contracts, through control of transport, through trade,” he told the Rajya Sabha during a discussion on the massacre.