Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh: A five-year-old blows on a piece of polythene with full force. To win the game she needs to take it higher than her friend. Beside her, two children, both from different villages, are busy playing tug-of-war using a scarf, while close by two other kids burst into giggles as they enact a wedding scene, in which a two-year-old plays a bride and a three-year-old the groom.
All this in the backdrop of an intense volleyball game, being played by a group of older children.
Most of these children, who belong to different villages, were strangers to each other just months back, when their families were evicted from their homes from across 15 villages in several districts in Chattisgarh, for going to church and practising Christianity, according to the police. They now share space at a makeshift camp set up inside an indoor stadium in Narayanpur.
According to district authorities, 400 people, mostly women and children, were forced to leave their homes in separate incidents of violence, reported from the Narayanpur, Kondegaon and Kanker districts of Chhattisgarh in the past two months.
While the situation has understandably left the elders tense, for the children — who are too young to understand the gravity of the situation — the camp is a “happy place”, where they have made new friends and are not being asked to study or participate in household chores.
“To see them smile takes away our stress as well,” Soni Kawde, an Adivasi woman from Borawan village in Narayanpur district, now living at the camp, told ThePrint.
She added: “They are very happy to have found new friends. They play all day. Also, they are too young to understand what has happened.”
ThePrint’s national photo editor Praveen Jain captures some light moments at the Narayanpur camp, where according to the authorities, over 200 church-going Adivasi men, women and children have been living since having to leave their homes.
Also read: Adivasi identity, ST status, politics — what’s fuelling anti-Christian attacks in Chhattisgarh