How Chhattisgarh police cremated bodies of Maoist leader and cadres without their families’ consent

On May 27, as the body of the Maoist general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao went up in flames in an Adivasi graveyard surrounded by a police cordon in Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur, his younger brother Nambala Ramprasad stood enraged outside a local police station.

“After death, the body of the deceased belongs to the family,” he said. “What Chhattisgarh police has done is very wrong and unacceptable.”

Ramprasad, who lives in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, had rushed to Chhattisgarh on May 22, a day after news broke that the state police had killed 72-year-old Rao, better known as Basavaraju, the top leader of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), and 26 others in a security operation.

Ramprasad even secured an order from the Andhra Pradesh High Court directing that the police hand over the bodies of those killed to their families after the postmortems had been done.

However, instead of handing over Rao’s body to his brother, Chhattisgarh Police cremated him and seven others, claiming in a statement that they had no “clear legal claimants”.

The statement, released after the cremation on Tuesday, did not identify those cremated, barring Rao, and Kosi alias Ungi, a Maoist cadre from Komatpalli village in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district. This left many anxious relatives in the lurch.

Since May...

Read more