Women Maoists face sexual abuse: Telangana police

HYDERABAD: A day after Telangana police said that undue pressure on women cadre in Communist Party of India (Maoist) is leading to suicides, top sources in the police told TOI that the women cadre are allegedly facing sexual abuse. This information came to light after Maoist central committee (CC) member Sudhakar surrendered before the police.

Sources said: “We came to know about exploitation of women cadre by some male members of Maoist party in several states including Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.According to Sudhakar, they expected that the situation will improve after Keshav Rao took over as general secretary of CPI (Maoist), but the situation did not improve and the exploitation of women cadre continued. Earlier, such incidents used to be sporadic, but now we have information that these incidents are rampant.”
Officials said that as per the information, the situation is no different even in the Telangana state committee of the Maoist party, which is operating mostly from Chhattisgarh. However, on Wednesday when mediapersons questioned Sudhakar about exploitation of women cadre, he had denied it.
While addressing a press conference on Wednesday, Director General of Police (DGP) M Mahendar Reddy did not get into the specifics and said that undue pressure on women cadre has been leading to suicides. He also referred to five different cases of suicide, which included the death of Keshav Rao’s wife.
Police sources said that after Ganapathy stepped down as the general secretary of Maoist party, he continued to be a CC member and as per the information given by Sudhakar, Ganapathy is in Abujhmad area of Chhattisgarh.
Telangana Civil Liberties Committee president, G Laxman, said, “The issue of women committing suicide has never been heard of in the past 40 years in the history of Naxalism. The theory of sexual abuse leading to suicides being cited by the police is absolutely false and we do not believe it. There are regular checks and balances within the party and punishments are handed over even for small mistakes irrespective of the position held by the guilty. For example, action was taken against few persons in the recent Ramagundam incident.”
Laxman said that Sudhakar must have given such a statement under police pressure. “Actually, Jumpanna is a very senior comrade to Sudhakar. When Jampanna, who also surrendered some time ago, had no such information of sexual abuse or suicide, how can Sudhakar know about it?”