Mahendra Karma

"No, No way he was not a crusader but lies among the oppressors and I think oppressors need this listing as well because crusaders and oppressors both are ideas, and only ideas are immortal not the humans, so listing mortals with their immortals ideas, and discriminating bad ideas with good and ideas those were bad and need societal condemnation ....  there you go boy, the first bad idea ...."

"Mahendra Karma of the Congress (I) is one of the major tribal leaders of the Salwa Judum. He is a known figure in the region, politically and otherwise. Originally from Pharasepal village, he belongs to the Kashyap clan. Pharasepal and its surrounding villages are known to have several landed households (their wealth measured by the fact that they sell 3-4 truckloads of rice), many of which are related to Karma. His father, Boodha Majhi, was a clan mukhia who also used to collect taxes for the raja.

Karma first began his political work with the All India Students Federation (AISF) while he was in the Law College at Jagdalpur. His active political career began around 1975. He went on to become a CPI MLA in 1978, but was denied a CPI ticket in 1981 on the grounds of his poor performance. He joined the Congress upon this, of which his brother was already a member. In the 1981 elections, which he contested as a Congress candidate, he lost the Dantewada seat to the CPI. Following turmoil in the Congress party, he joined the new party floated by Madhavrao Scindia, and was one of the two Members of Parliament elected on this ticket. In the eighties, he is seen to have established close relations with business interests in Dantewada and emerged as an opponent of the CPI-led Swayatta Andolan Following the formation of Chhattisgarh state,
Karma became a minister in Ajit Jogi’s cabinet. Karma is now the official ‘tribal leader’ of the Congress (I) in the state (till 2006)"

Malik Makbuja Scam:
Quoting from Tehelka Report (Story by Keya Acharya)

 "Nearly half a century ago, in 1955, Devinder Nath, an idealistic young ias officer, nervous at his first appointment as district collector (dc), found himself in a remote village called Bhanupratappur, in what is now Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district. The villages, inhabited predominantly by adivasis, were known for their magnificent teak and hardwood trees.
Earlier, local zamindars needing handy labour encouraged tribals to live inside forests but without access to its trees. After 1949, changed land laws allowed tribals right to forest lands, the latter on a government-fixed fee. Those holding tree rights thus became Malik Makbujas, currently an infamous phrase.
In Bhanupratappur, Nath found timber merchants duping Malik Makbuja tribals into bogus contracts surrendering their rights. In one case, a man gave up his trees in exchange for his young daughter and him to be taken to the cinema in town. In another, a tribal resisting a contractor was arrested by the local police for criminal intimidation. Nath described the robbing spree as the teak rush, “an exploitation, the likes of which, has rarely been seen anywhere in the country”.
With integrity and courage, there being no laws prohibiting these contracts, Nath curtailed the transportation of timber under the flimsy motor vehicle violation laws and got the chief minister’s unstinted support to see the mp Protection of Scheduled Tribes (Interest in Trees) Act, 1956, passed within six months.
The new law empowered only Malik Makbujas to seek permission from the collector to sell a fixed amount of their timber annually. These could be sold only through the forest department which fixed the rate, the idea being to give a fair price to the tribals. Nath, in his naivety and idealism, thought the collector as government administrator would ensure justice to the tribals. Fifty years later, a Bastar Commissioner, Narayan Singh, currently a member of the Chhattisgarh Land Revenue Board at Bilaspur, along with four additional collectors, all still serving, have been indicted in the country’s biggest environmental corruption case unearthed so far, now known as the Malik Makbuja scandal.
Tribals, tricked into thinking they were selling the trees, have through signed powers of attorney, lost their lands. They have been handed a pittance for their trees. The fraud has also involved redesigning government maps to show reserved forests as private lands.
Out of the Rs 12.14 crore that the forest department is recorded to have paid to the power of attorney holders for the timber (several cases have no records of money paid by the forest department), Malik Makbujas received approximately Rs 13.80 lakh."

excerpts - 

 "Soon after forming the anti-Maoist “armed civilian vigilante” movement, Salwa Judum (SJ) in 2005, Mr. Karma realised that there was big money in the anti-Maoist operations. A member of a business family of Bastar told this correspondent that they started financing Salwa Judum, sometime after its formation. “We wanted land prices to escalate, so we could sell it off. We felt if Maoists disappear and industries arrive, the prices will go up and SJ provided a solution,” he said. Eventually, Mr. Karma started getting state funding as well."

"Mr. Karma’s political career started waning as SJ collapsed. Finally, last Thursday, a Central Minister made it clear that ‘Bastar Tiger’ is no more the mascot of the party in Bastar. Perhaps the party realised that Mr. Karma had lost his base among his people after SJ. Out of this realisation his political masters announced his end on Thursday. His rivals, some of whom could well have been from his clan, killed him two days after."

Articles:

• A full PDF about Chhatisgarh in 2006 - Where the state makes a war on its own People
• The Hindu Article here
• The Hindu article here
• Livemint report here