lackadaisical attitude and incomplete training on counter-insurgency is making the Army and the police vulnerable, which can be countered by operational governance
launching their deadliest attack of the year, 300 armed Maoist guerrillas ambushed a 150 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) patrol, which was guarding a road building project in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh on April 25, killing 25 personnel and seriously wounding seven. The Sukma tragedy shows that there was a complete failure of the intelligence agencies and the CRPF personnel lacked alertness and took it easy while patrolling. The sources of their latest weapons and equipment are both Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence and China, including their training clandestinely.
Following the ambush, Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) teams of the CRPF were deployed as reinforcement to conduct search operations but they failed to retaliate. Road projects in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha-Andhra Pradesh border are being built under the ‘Road Connectivity Project for left Wing Extremism Affected Areas’, which aims to construct 5,400 km of roads and 126 bridges.
Voting in large numbers by people defying Maoists does not amount to a vote for State violence, but for democracy. In any case, decades-long resistance and endemic suspicion prove that obtuse action can lead to a stalemate and turn people against the State in much of North-East India and Jammu & Kashmir. When the new Government takes office, a top internal security issue on the agenda will be the Maoist rebellion.
Even with the steady squeezing by the State security apparatus of Maoists in the past four years, the insurgency offers a sharp mirror to India's failures. This is not only on account of active rebellion, but what the Maoists, at least on the face of it, seek to fight: Poor governance, runaway corruption, weak delivery of the criminal justice system and a socio-economic structure that, away from urban gloss, grinds down the forest-dwellers, the poor, the low caste. Those displaced on account of projects, but not rehabilitated, add to this pool of negative energy.
Tackling these root causes of rebellion requires dedicated action over several years, which a Prime Minister, in a position of strength in a party, and a party in a position of strength in Parliament, can achieve. That one, without the other, can remain largely ineffective is exemplified by outgoing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Congress-led UPA. But even a relatively stronger Premier, party and coalition will require coordination with the bureaucracy and independent-minded State Governments in a range of areas from spot-on implementation of socio-economic programmes to policing. The temptation for the Chhattisgarh Government is to take flashy action, not unlike what Maoist rebels practice from time to time to re-assert their reduced presence. There will also be pressure to deploy the Army in all-out operations against Maoists.
The most vocal is a band of Army veterans, who advocate bulldozing of rebellion with indiscriminate force. Quite dangerously, such a fringe has as accouterments several top-flight, quite influential global bankers and economists of Indian origin. In the event of BJP-led Union Government, there could be added pressure from my-way-or-else advocates of conflict resolution and aggressive industrialisation by Chief Minister Raman Singh.
The Government is tempted to listen to such advocacy. It may also be tempted to do so by recent attacks on police and paramilitary outfits in various States by Maoist rebels, including one in April that also killed several polling officials in Jharkhand. Temptation may persist even as such acts erode sympathy — a Maoist apology, even the one offered by a top rebel spokesperson, won't negate public revulsion at the killing of non-combatants. The Government may even misread the massive participation in lok Sabha elections by voters in several Maoist-affected districts in the face of electoral boycott, called by the rebels.
The Maoist insurgency will vanish only if we are able to win the hearts of common people living in these areas. The Army should not battle the Maoists. To do so may lead to a bloodbath that will involve non-combatants; and will backfire with resentment of the so-called saved. The same will happen if police and paramilitaries, or State-sponsored vigilante groups initiate a bloodbath. However, as the Army for its personnel does, CRPF personnel should be trained at the counter-insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) in Vairengte, Mizoram before deploying them in the Naxal affected areas. CIJWS is a training and research establishment of the Indian Army specialising in unconventional warfare, especially counter-insurgency and guerrilla warfare. It is one of the premier counter-insurgency training institutions in the world.
The way ahead, saner minds in the security establishment maintain, is agile, empathetic statecraft and unflagging good governance. This needs to be spearheaded by modernisation and better training of forces, and operational superiority — both, what is called area domination as well as pin-point strikes — to compel an already stressed Maoist project to peace talks. Even the announcement of the merger of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) with a much smaller entity, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-leninist) Naxalbari, shouldn't deter the Government from that path.
Massed police and paramilitary forces got the better of that situation (and great brutality against non-combatants was practised both by the State and rebels), but the area continues to be a tinderbox on account of patchy governance. The Maoists' southern project is a call by partners in a cyclical trough, and can be quickly countered with governance and operational finesse. To do otherwise would be mindlessness over what truly matters.
(The writer is a defence analyst and commentator)