The Chhattisgarh police seem to have lost all sense of decency, legality, even sanity. The Supreme Court’s recent judgement

ordering the disbanding of the state-sponsored anti-Naxalite Salwa Judum militia has not dampened their obsession with crushing the Maoists.

Last month, they arrested a young Adivasi, Lingaram Kodopi, in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district. They last week raided the house of Kavita Srivastava, People's Union of Civil Liberties general secretary, in Jaipur.

Forty policemen forced their way into the house, ransacked it and took away various objects, without showing them to the residents, and without producing a search warrant in advance. Such harassment of a well-known human-rights defender is a grave offence.

The police wrongly said they had firm information that a key Dantewada Naxal, Soni Sori, was hiding in Srivastava's house. Sori was arrested the next day in Delhi.

Sori is the aunt of Kodopi who, the police claim, was caught red-handed in a village market collecting a Rs. 15-lakh bribe from the Essar business group for the Communist Party-Maoist. Sori was also arrested, say the police, but escaped. But this doesn't match eyewitness accounts. By the police's own version, the hardcore Maoists miraculously escaped.

The whole thing sounds like a cock-and-bull story. Sori's family is a victim of the Maoists. In June, Maoists attacked her house, badly wounded her father, looted valuables, and trussed up the entire family and abducted it into the forest. The father is still in hospital.

The family is also a victim of police excesses. In 2009, Kodopi was forced to join Salwa Judum. He was released

through legal intervention. But the police in July last year claimed he was a senior weapons-trained Naxal commander.

The claim appeared so laughable to all who knew Kodopi as simple and politically untutored that it was retracted. Kodopi worked with Gandhian activist Himanshu Kumar, who ran an ashram in Dantewada until the police burnt it down. Kodopi seems to be an innocent caught between the Naxals and the police.

Kodopi soon enrolled himself as a journalism student near Delhi. Earlier this year, after the police set three villages in Dantewada on fire, he

returned there and video-recorded the victims' testimonies.

Kodopi seems to have been targeted for intense harassment because he's an upright and honest citizen who knows Gondi, the local language, and the forest terrain, and because he has exposed police atrocities.

This makes him "dangerous" in the same way as Binayak Sen, an outstanding public-spirited health activist and civil-rights defender, who too had documented state excesses.

Sori was arrested when visiting a local police station last month with a petition seeking compensation for the attack on her home in June. The police claimed, without evidence, that she was part of the Maoists' bribery operation.

These incidents show the Chhattisgarh administration has become lawless. Citizens feel insecure against its depredations. It has no intention of honouring the Supreme Court verdict declaring Salwa Judum

unconstitutional. It has passed a law creating an "auxiliary armed force" to "assist security forces" dealing with the Maoist/Naxalite violence.

The Act says that notwithstanding "any judgment, order or decree of any court," all Salwa Judum recruits shall have "the right to remain at the post." In fact, their salaries will be upgraded and they will be given six months' special training.

Nothing could constitute a greater violation of the Supreme Court's judgement. The SPOs can now practice Chengiz Khan-style violence to "teach the Naxalites a lesson" and strike fear in the hearts of innocent civilians.

In this, the state government must have felt greatly encouraged by the Centre's decision to file a review petition against the original judgement.

This said, "the fight against Maoist/Naxalite violence cannot be conducted purely as a mere law and order problem... The primordial problem lies deep within the socioeconomic policies pursued by the state on a society that was already endemically... suffering from gross inequalities. Consequently, the fight against Maoists/Naxalites is no less a fight for moral, constitutional and legal authority over the minds and hearts of our people."

In violation of this Constitutional advice, the state will brutalise people even further. This is a recipe for its total loss of legal and moral authority, and for the degeneration of governance into something resembling martial law, like in parts of India's Northeast.

Already, 15 helicopter gunships and large numbers of unmanned aerial

vehicles have been inducted into the central-eastern Adivasi belt. Roughly 91,000 paramilitary personnel have been deployed, 65,000 of them trained by the Indian Army in counterinsurgency.

The Army is itself monitoring the Maoist "threat," according to a recently released WikiLeaks cable which quotes an "unusually candid" conversation with the present Army chiefVK Singh from February 2010, when he headed the Eastern Command.

None of this bodes well for India's democracy. The Naxalites or Maoists are not a wholesome, democratic political currentdespite their articulation of popular grievances and aspirations in India's increasing skewed society, with its multiple deprivations and injustices.

Added to this are the problems specific to the Adivasi belt arising from the plunder of its rich mineral and forest wealth.

The Maoists' strategy of overthrowing the Indian state through an armed revolution is utopian, and fails to recognise both the strength and value of democracy, and the armed might of the state.

Their methods, which include senseless violence, sometimes against their own cadres (to enforce loyalty), as well as innocent civilians, are unworthy of those who want a social transformation. They also selectively collude with "class enemies" like mining and industrial corporations and traders, and resort to extortion to raise resources.

However, the Naxalite problem cannot be resolved by the use of military/paramilitary force, but only by a combination of normal police methods and redressal of the genuine grievances which create cesspools of discontent, which the Maoists exploit.

By stooping to the same lawlessness as the Maoists, the state risks losing its legitimacy, thus degrading India's democracy.

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist. Email: bidwai@bol.net.in.