A 10-year-old ghastly encounter of alleged smugglers of Red Sanders that left 20 poor workers dead was suddenly resurrected on Saturday, thanks to the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) in Chennai that held a discussion on it, throwing up nuggets of disturbing information. The PUCL, a human rights organization formed after the Emergency 25 years ago, had taken up the case of the gunning down of the workers reportedly in the Seshachalam forest in Andhra Pradesh on April 7, 2015 and had even drawn the attention of then Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa to it because all the victims hailed from Tamil Nadu.Subsequently the incident faded from public memory, though some human rights activists like civil liberties lawyer from Andhra Pradesh Kranthi Chaitanya were following up the case filed against the encounter but to no avail. Since the PUCL in Tamil Nadu decided to revisit the case with the hope of bringing to book the persons behind the killing of poor workers, it invited lawyer Chaitanya, veteran journalist Ilangovan Rajasekran who had reported that incident then and some other activists familiar with the event to recall the case history. Chaitanya revealed that no one was ever punished with regard to the encounter though it was established that none of the 20 workers, who were normally engaged by contractors for cutting trees in the forests, had entered the jungles ahead of the encounter. Call records had proved that they had been in other places till the previous day. Since a worker would require at least three days to enter the forest, fell the trees and chop them into the kind of logs they were accused of smuggling out, the logs lying next to the corpses in photographs were not theirs. But looking back, soon after the Red Sanders Anti-Smuggling Task Force (RSASTF) shot dead the men, reportedly on April 7, 2015, between 5.30 and 6.00 am, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) had sought a report from the State government and the Andhra Pradesh High Court had asked why no case of murder was filed. Then, a network of 7 human rights and civil liberties groups was formed for a fact finding mission and detailed investigations were carried out. The Andhra Pradesh government also constituted a Special Investigation Team, monitored by the High Court, on April 20, 2015. Despite things moving so fast with so many agencies coming in to find out the truth behind the sensational case that rocked the nation and the interim report of the fact-finding team establishing that the workers were not shot in an encounter but brutally murdered by the RSASTF and made available to the media in Chennai on August 25, 2015, why nothing moved forward after that. Even the fact-finding team clearly stated that there was no evidence of any encounter at the two sites they were reported to have happened. Why then did the court or the government remain silent? Above all, why were the workers killed mercilessly? Well, journalist Rajasekaran during the course of his reporting of the incident was told by an official that it was to instill fear among workers accompanying smugglers into the forest to fell trees. But no smuggler was booked by the forest department or encountered by the RSASTF later because they were well off persons with high connections, the deliberations revealed. Even now there are godowns operating in the outskirts of Chennai to store Red Sanders logs that are continued to be smuggled to places like China where they are highly in demand, the discussants who included PUCL activists T S S Mani and V Suresh, elucidated. So what is Red Sanders? To give a perspective, it is also called as Red Sandalwood, which means it is considered to be precious and has an extremely highly value in the underground market. The Chinese have multiple uses, including medicinal purposes, of it and is traditionally used for making furniture also. The point is that some smuggling gangs want to get the high value logs from the forests and employ the poor workers from Tamil Nadu to do the job for cheap labour – when compared to the profits the gangs make by smuggling it out of the country. It was also suspected that some politicians were involved in the smuggling racket when the demand for Red Sanders skyrocketed during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In such a backdrop the gunning down of the workers – all of whom were picked up from other places, as it was established later, ruthlessly killed and their bodies strewn on the periphery of the forest to create an impression that they were walking out with the precious logs – became a scandal then. The official version was that when the police stopped them from taking out the logs, they being smugglers used firearms and the police, RSASTF to be precise, had to open fire in retaliation. All those theories were debunked by the civil liberties groups that blamed the police and other officials for the so-called encounter. Yet for 10 years if the case was forgotten with the victims and relatives getting no justice, it was because civil liberties is no more an issue for the educated class that would once jump at a custodial death in a police station. Perhaps the PUCL discussion on the 10-year-old encounter could mark the beginning of a reversal.
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