There is a shop called Tea and Coffee at the centre of Bijapur, a city in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region, nearly 400 kilometres from Raipur. It is enveloped in the aroma of freshly brewed ginger tea. Bubbling saucepans fuel conversations at what was once the Old Bus Stand. In the shopping complex that now stands here, one unit is shuttered, opening only occasionally.
Just 10 days ago, it would burst into life around 10 a.m. every day, with a steady stream of visitors from across the country. Tea and Coffee owner Kapil Jhadi was kept busy with orders here. “Journalists, politicians, social workers in remote villages, even policemen in uniform, would come,” Jhadi says.
But that was before January 1, the day Mukesh Chandrakar, 33, who occupied the space as an office, disappeared. On January 3, Mukesh’s body was found in a septic tank, about 3 km from here. A journalist who began the YouTube news channel ‘Bastar Junction’ — which now has 1.59 lakh subscribers — Mukesh had run a report on the poor condition of a road in Bijapur. Police say he was murdered by three brothers, all construction contractors, Mukesh’s distant relatives: Suresh Chandrakar, Dinesh Chandrakar, and Ritesh Chandrakar. The three, and Mahendra Ramteke, an employee, were taken into custody.
Soon after people heard the news of Mukesh’s murder, there was an outpouring of emotion on X, with journalists from across India speaking about how he was the go-to person for anything related to the Naxal-prone region. There were also conversations on how grassroots journalists never got their place in the sun, and about their safety. Memorial meetings were held, from Raipur to New Delhi. For Jhadi, who followed his work, “His reports touched the core issues of interior Bijapur and the whole of the Bastar region.”
Mukesh, who was a freelancer with NDTV, had worked on the story of road-construction corruption with Bastar Junction’s correspondent Nilesh Tripathi. The video, released on December 25, exposed the poor quality of a 52.4-km-long stretch, connecting Gangaloor and Nelasnar villages in Bijapur. A day later, the Chhattisgarh government had announced an inquiry into the matter.
Capturing stark realities
Mukesh’s journalism captured the stark realities of life in Bastar’s conflict-ridden zone, where left-wing extremists have waged a decades-long war against the Indian state. His stories tracked villagers risking their lives to source basics like salt, risky makeshift bridges and crumbling roads, parents losing children to blasts, children sustaining bullet wounds in encounters between the police and Naxals. These were documentaries of the everyday struggles of tribal communities caught in the crossfire. A teary-eyed tribal woman who attended Mukesh’s funeral said he was like a god for her. “He had helped me get a job. I appeal to the government to find his killers and arrest them as soon as possible,” she told TV cameras, before the alleged killers were arrested.
Nearly 2 km away from the office is Mukesh’s modest home: a one-BHK (bedroom-hall-kitchen) that he rented with a cousin and a colleague. Mukesh’s older brother, Yukesh, 36, a TV journalist, who is married with two children, lives in an adjacent house within the compound.
The house where Mukesh lived in Bijapur city, where his older brother Yukesh (right) is seen.
| Photo Credit:
SHUBHOMOY SIKDAR
It was in this compound that the brothers had their last conversation on January 1, between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. The chat was about celebrations. “Mukesh and I had planned to have a little celebration of our own on December 31, but he had to go to Dantewada. I went back home and slept,” says Yukesh, as he attends to a stream of visitors, including State Congress president Deepak Baij and Bijapur’s Congress MLA Vikram Mandavi.
On January 2, Yukesh learnt from his son that Mukesh — Bittu for the family — had gone out. Given his inconsistent schedule and knack of breaking stories, no one suspected anything initially, assuming that he had left to cover a story. “I dialled his number, but it was switched off. Even that wasn’t unusual. Around 1 p.m. my older (step) brother (Purushottam) called me to ask if all three of us brothers could drive to our village Basaguda, as the paddy procurement season was on and our crops had to be sold. Mukesh was still unavailable,” says Yukesh.
The search
In his complaint to the police, Yukesh noted that he had called Nilesh, the journalist with whom Mukesh had prepared the report on the Gangaloor-Mirtur stretch. “Nilesh told me that he had spoken to my brother around 6.30 p.m. the previous day, and Mukesh had told him that Ritesh (one of the now-accused men) was to visit him,” the complaint notes. Yukesh says it was Nilesh who suggested that the police be informed.
Yukesh began the search, followed by other Bijapur journalists, like Ganesh Mishra and Pinaki Ranjan Das, who were close friends. “Mukesh’s laptop showed his last location near a shed owned by Suresh (another of the now-accused men),” says Mishra. The shed has nearly 17 rooms in which the contractor’s labourers reside and a badminton court where outsiders, including Mukesh, played sometimes.
Suresh Patragitri, 30, who works for a web news portal ‘Lalluram’, says he accompanied a police team to the shed on January 2, and while the rooms were searched, nothing was found there. Patragiri and another journalist, Pushpa Rokde, 40, from ‘Prakhar Samachar’ recounts that the journalists noticed a newly constructed concrete slab that covered a septic tank.
“The next day (January 3) I asked two women who lived there about the slab. They told me it had been constructed around 8, the previous morning. We cross-checked with some badminton players, who confirmed they had not seen the cover earlier,” says Rokde, who has been a journalist for a couple of decades. The contractor had allegedly told the police that he wanted to construct a bathroom over it. “But the septic tank underneath would have needed an outlet for the gas. It only added to our suspicion,” Rokde adds.
While they informed the police, journalists claim it took nearly a day and intense pressure from the community to get it broken open on January 3 evening. Mukesh’s body with injury marks all over was retrieved then.
As soon as the news of the death spread, the spotlight shifted to other aspects: the story Mukesh and Nilesh had done against the backdrop of the overall risks journalists face in Bastar, where the alleged nexus between officials and construction contractors often escape scrutiny amid stories of conflict.
Following the outcry over the death, a special investigation team (SIT) was formed. Suresh’s properties were demolished by the government. On January 7, the Chhattisgarh Public Works Department (PWD) suspended his registration as a construction contractor.
Vested interests at play
The news report Mukesh and Nilesh had worked on was aired on NDTV’s regional (Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh) network on December 25. The project, initially tendered at ₹50 crore, ballooned to ₹120 crore despite no changes to the scope of work, the report said. Chhattisgarh government’s PWD is the agency dealing with such contracts.
Nilesh says that he and Mukesh were travelling to interior Bijapur for a different story when he noticed the poor quality of the road and got curious. The Hindu visited the road which remains potholed, despite what appears to be some recent patchwork on certain stretches.
After the report was aired, there was a State raid on Suresh’s premises apart from the inquiry, according to local news reports. After the recovery of Mukesh’s body from Suresh’s shed, older stories about the contractor’s meteoric rise from a cook to a multimillionaire who travelled in luxury cars and had a grand wedding, where he had travelled in a helicopter to receive the bride, started doing the rounds.
The septic tank in a shed owned by Suresh Chandrashekhar, in which Mukesh’s body was found. The septic tank was covered with a recently constructed concrete slab, which planted seeds of doubt in the minds of other journalists.
| Photo Credit:
SHUBHOMOY SIKDAR
Nilesh, who has worked as a journalist for a decade and knows the perils of practising the profession in India’s interiors, feels burdened by the death of his colleague. “But there was a need for people to see the story, because Mukesh had continuously raised the issue of corruption and irregularities,” he says.
Of the three brothers who are now in police custody, Ritesh was a friend of Mukesh’s, says his brother. After the murder was unearthed, Bastar Inspector General P. Sundarraj said that the duo was having dinner together in the shed when the two had an argument over Mukesh being a ‘hindrance’ in Ritesh’s work despite them being family. Ritesh and Ramteke allegedly attacked Mukesh with an iron rod.
However, the police is looking at Suresh, who was arrested in Hyderabad on January 5, as the person behind the conspiracy, as he is now the ‘prime accused’.
“We are collecting all the technical and material evidence in the case,” says Mayank Gurjar, the head of the SIT now probing the case.
The journey to journalism
Mishra says that Mukesh’s confidence in his reportage was rooted in his well-oiled network. The duo had travelled to all but 50 of the 650 villages in Bijapur. “He had empathy for last-mile villagers,” he says.
One of Mukesh’s earliest reports that made a mark was about the incarceration of an innocent youth for over a year and how his life had been ruined by this. Then there is the more popular story about how he was a part of a team that secured the release of a Central Reserve Police Force jawan abducted by Maoists in 2021.
In a conversation last May with this reporter, he had said that his sensitivity towards the tribals was rooted in his past, which was full of hardship, but also had stories of kindness.
Mukesh was born in Basaguda, a village nearly 50 km from Bijapur. His father passed away when he was just two and a half years old, leaving his unlettered mother, an anganwadi worker with a meagre salary, to raise him and his brother in a tribal area without land or rights to forest produce. They survived on the kindness of tribal neighbours who would give them a part of their crops or produce.
One of the stories that he recalled was how he would sleep outside a Vizag hospital where his mother Kaushalya (now deceased) was being treated for cancer because he could neither stay inside the women’s ward nor afford accommodation. “On days it rained, there was no sleep,” he had said.
To begin with, Mukesh had worked in a garage as a mechanic to make ends meet. The family’s struggles worsened during the Salwa Judum movement, a counter-insurgency force, which displaced them to a relief camp. The inspiration to join journalism came from his older brother, and after spending nearly eight years in mainstream national media, he decided to start his own channel.
A Raipur-based journalist of a national daily said she had encouraged Mukesh when he discussed it with her. “I told him that it was a good move, as Bastar journalists often remain anonymous or exist as footnotes in reports filed on the region despite their groundwork. The cloak of anonymity would go, and he could tell his own stories,” she says.
Besides his daily reports, Mukesh provided regular explainers, breaking down the complexities of a long struggle and the implications of it for those living in the area. Mukesh knew Bijapur district — a large area of which is covered in the dense Abujhmad forests — like the back of his hand, and often ventured beyond to travel the larger Bastar region.
According to his friends and fellow journalists, the monetisation of his YouTube channel, his recent car purchase, and tests with operating drone cameras in and around his office were to take his reportage to the next level. But these were cost-intensive exercises.
Das says Mukesh had exhausted his savings. He had bought a patch of land nearby, spending a major chunk of his savings, with the thought of constructing a home there some day.
“Financial security is always a challenge for us here, but the larger question of security for journalists remains unanswered. Even my family, based in Kanker, has asked me to quit the profession and return home,” says Das. These views were echoed in meetings of press people in Delhi and Raipur.
Mukesh’s office is opened sometimes. The set-up remains the same: books on tribals, land rights, Bastar, the Constitution, Karl Marx. There is an empty chair on which he sat, a poster of a skyscraper behind it, and the computer on which he edited his videos. On January 6, after eight security personnel and a driver were killed by Naxalites, Das, Mishra, and a few other journalists finish their day of reporting and sit here. They discuss Mukesh and the need for Bastar journalists to stay united. “If Yukesh is okay, we will pitch in to pay the rent and continue running this office. Bhai ke office ko marne thodi na denge (We won’t let our brother’s office die),” says Das.
Published – January 10, 2025 12:40 am IST
