Gunning Down The Footsoldiers

The ‘smugglers’ shot dead on April 7 were mere woodcutters and porters, the lowest level at which the red sanders smuggling mafia operates. Paid  Rs 700-1,000 daily, these labourers usually have no clue about the kingpins operating from the higher levels.

At the lowest level are men like those killed, usually from Tamil Nadu. They fell, carry and load wood on to trucks. Teams are led by mestris. At the next level are the transporters: drivers, and pilots who guide them and scout for paths to avoid forest department personnel. At the third level are the exporters, who mostly send the wood to China, where it fetches Rs 1 lakh per kilo against Rs 3,000-5,000 in India. Exporters usually operate out of Chennai: the wood is spirited out in shipping containers and sent to China, Japan and across Southeast Asia. At the highest level are those who coordinate operations and deals, usually political leaders who work through a second line of loyal recruiters (to hire axe-men and porters) and fixers (to keeps the wheels greased by negotiating and paying bribes to police and forest department officials).

The recruiters, or agents, offer lucrative advances, from Rs 15,000-25,000, to villagers from neighbouring Tamil Nadu. The daily wage is Rs 700-1,000. If a man is killed, the family is paid Rs 5-10 lakh and its members are taken care of. If he is arrested, the smugglers take care of his legal expenses and so on. The agents make some Rs 1 lakh per week, while the labourers face the heat if the forest department or police strikes.

According to K. Jayasree, convenor of the Kadapa Human Rights Forum, there are at least 2,000 labourers from Tamil Nadu in the Kadapa, Chittoor and Nellore and Rajahmundry jails. Woodcutters are usua­lly from Krishnagiri, Vellore, Tiruv­a­nn­amalai, Dharmapuri and Salem districts of Tamil Nadu. Most of them are from backward communities or denotified tribes. Jawwadimalai, a village in Tiruvannamalai, is famous for its skilled woodcutters. Here, young men even practise carrying logs on their shoulders before being recruited. Many of these hundreds of men in jail, Jayasree says, were picked off buses that were coming from Tamil Nadu and held under preventive detention laws.

According to the APCLC’s M.K. Kumar, seven woodcutters from Tamil Nadu were killed in 2014 after being branded smugglers. In the case of the killing of the two forest officials, 424 labourers were named as accused, and out of them 74 are absconding. The rest are in jail. APCLC’s Kranthi Chaitanya, an advocate, is defending 104 of these accused and all of them are Tamilians. He says none of them has the money or understanding of the law to defend themselves. In fact, many of them do not even know what they are accused of exactly.

“The reason this encounter has come to light is because of the large number of deaths,” says Jayasree. “Otherwise, we have been witness to such cases of one or two being killed in various encounters.” She says this problem is bigger than that of Tamil fishermen being held by Sri Lanka. “I wonder why the governments of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have had no talks on this.” The influx of Tamil labour into AP has increased in the last decade. “One, they don’t speak Telugu, so they can’t pass on information to the police. And they are expert tree-cutters, having worked at coffee and silver oak plantations in Yercaud and elsewhere,” she says.

Since many of them belong to denotified tribes of Tamil Nadu, they do not find a political voice. It is estimated that at least 1,000 woodcutters from various districts of Tamil Nadu are currently working in the Sesha­chalam forests, spread over 345 sq km.