Date of Incident: 18th February, 2016 Place of Incident: Jagdalpur, Bastar District, Chattisgarh Details of the Incident: According to sources on 17 February, 2016 night, police visited the landlord of lawyers and women Human rights defenders Ms. Shalini Gera and Ms. Isha Khandelwal of Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group in Jagdalpur town. The landlord is a driver by profession. The police took him away to the police station. He was kept there till next day early morning. He was dropped back in a police vehicle and his car was impounded. Shocked and shaken landlord informed both the lawyers at 2:00 am in the morning that he has no option but to ask them to vacate the house and office within a week. Both Ms. Shalini and Ms. Isha have been receiving thinly veiled threats regularly that the police are closely monitoring NGOs providing "legal aid to Naxalites" and their clients are time and again informed that the police are about to arrest them for their Naxalite related activities. The police have been claiming before the visiting journalists and researchers that they are merely a "Naxalite front". The defenders believe that it is because of their legitimate work, various officials of the police are involved in conspiring against them to drive them out of the region. Local police had been diligently investigating "anonymous" complaints about them claiming that they are "fraudulent" lawyers and due to that they had been compelled to make multiple trips to the police station with all impeccable certificates and sound credentials to disprove the baseless allegations against them. Then the local Bar Association, clearly prompted by the police, took out a resolution prohibiting them to practice in the local courts. The move was then countered by challenging this resolution in the State Bar Council and obtaining an interim order allowing them to practice. Unable to get them by any other way, now, the police are resorting to intimidatory tactics and thereby putting undue mental pressure on their landlord and his family. These untoward incidents have come at a time when the whole countryside of Bastar region is on fire. Under the guise of anti-Naxal operations, the security forces are in dulging in rape, pillage and plunder. With teams of women activists, Jagdalpur Letgal Aid Group have documented at least three cases of mass sexual violence in the past three months itself, where security forces have run amok in the villages, stripping women, playing with their naked bodies and indulging in gang rapes, looting their precious food supplies, and destroying their homes and granaries. The number of so-called "encounters" is at an all-time high in the region, people are simply "disappearing" from villages in large numbers, only to show up in the list of "surrendered" or "arrested" Naxalites several days or weeks later. The local police and administration are talking in one voice of "clearing" the area within one year. Social mobilizations are being orchestrated by the police to provide a cover to their illegal harassment of journalists, lawyers, activists. When mass gang rapes in Bijapur were being uncovered, a group calling itself the "Naxal Peedit Sangharsh Samiti" under the leadership of the ex-Salwa Judum leader Madhukar Rao, took out noisy belligerent rallies against Soni Sori, Bela Bhatia and "outside NGOs", threatening all of them with physical violence if they entered Bijapur again.