JAGDALPUR, India — On a quiet night last November, the human rights lawyer Shalini Gera was brewing tea in her drab, small-town office, which doubles as an apartment, when her basic Nokia phone began vibrating on a plastic table.
The call came from an informer in a remote village, several hours from her home in Jagdalpur, a dusty market town surrounded by forests that for the last decade has been the main theater of India’s war against Maoist guerrillas known as Naxalites, named after the town Naxalbari, where the guerrilla movement formed in the 1970s.
The local police had surrounded the village, aiming to coax out a man suspected of being a militant. When he did not emerge, the police instead arrested 26 bystanders and charged them with digging up part of a nearby highway, ostensibly part of a Maoist-led sabotage campaign. The caller warned Ms. Gera that the police had beaten many, some badly, before forcing them to confess.
Ms. Gera, 44, told her caller that she and her colleagues would travel to the village as soon as possible, though their operation is so bare-bones that they can afford to travel only by infrequent public buses. As usual, there was no hint of panic in her voice.
“We’ll only be able to prove that the police have beaten these people if we get these things called medical legal complaints made,” Ms. Gera said after ending the call. “Normally, that doesn’t happen.” Medical legal complaints are doctor-attested documents that let lawyers in India lodge legal complaints against the police for brutality toward those in their custody.
Ms. Gera likes to joke that, until recently, the closest she got to rural life was in San Jose, Calif. But here in Jagdalpur, in the central state of Chhattisgarh, she has become intimately familiar with the rhythms of a deeply troubled countryside — and the legal travails of the region’s indigenous people, known as adivasis.
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“All you people are responsible for this havoc,” said S.R. Kalluri, the inspector general of the police based in Jagdalpur, referring to the JagLAG lawyers and a reporter who accompanied them to Dantewada. “I know very well you are Naxalite supporters.”
Even prominent national activists have been arrested under suspicion that they sympathize with the Naxalites. Binayak Sen, a doctor and civil liberties advocate in Chhattisgarh, was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 on charges of sedition that many say were based on fabricated evidence. Twenty-two Nobel laureates signed a petition protesting his incarceration, and the European Union sent observers to monitor his trial.
“The police and the state are showing a classic terrorism-era attitude here — you’re with us or against us,” Ms. Gera said. “But really, there are other options.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2015, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Shoestring Legal Aid Group Helps Poor in Rural India . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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