Intensive combing operations on Monday in the jungles of Wayanad district for the Maoists who exchanged fire with Kerala police’s Thunderbolt commandos on Sunday failed to yield any concrete result even as the incident indicated the alleged failure of the State police in properly assessing the magnitude of the threat despite their 22-month-long anti-Maoist operations. Searches will continue on Tuesday.
Deputy Inspector General of Police (Kannur Range) Dinendra Kashyap, heading the anti-Maoist task force, confirmed on Monday that those who had fired on the Thunderbolt commandos on Sunday in the jungles in Vellamunda, Wayanad were indeed Maoists. The extremists, who fired three rounds on the police, had escaped into the forest.
Confirming that there had been eight Maoists in the group that fired upon the police, Kashyap said that shreds of clothes and caps used by Maoists had been found during the search operations. Reports said that 13 spent bullets the Maoists could have used were found from the area where the exchange of fire had taken place.
Adivasis living in the area confirmed that suspected Maoists used to visit their colony and talk to them. An Adivasi woman said, “They came and talked with us. They took tea from us and left the place after having it.” However, Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala claimed that Maoists had not been successful in making Adivasis their cadres or sympathisers.
“They are indeed trying to influence the Adivasis by intervening in public issues,” he said. Admitting that Maoists activities had been noticed in five of the 14 districts of the State, Chennithala said that since the area where the incident took place was near a “tri-junction” of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, there would be joint operations of the three States.
The Home Minister refused to go into the details of the police’s search operations in the Wayanad jungles. However, some former Naxalites expressed the doubt that the publicity the incident was getting perhaps indicated the possibility that some Maoist(s) might have fallen into the police net.
Despite the Home Minister’s claim that the Government was viewing the Maoist threat quite seriously, reports said that there are serious doubts over how effective the police operations had been in Wayanad in dealing with the communist extremists who were now adopting a remote replication of guerilla tactics.
“Questions are being asked as to what the police were doing in the jungles of northern Kerala for the past two years,” admitted a retired top official. The task force has been engaged in the hunt for Maoists in the forests of Wayanad, Kannur, Kozhikode and Malappuram since February, 2013 but they have not been able to sight or apprehend even a single Maoist.
Naxalite-watchers say that the Maoists said to be active in Kerala could have come to the conclusion that they are now ready for limited rebellions — as seen in two recent incidents — completing the phase of ideological campaign. They say that the extremists are convinced that they have been successful in their ideological campaign among a large number of Adivasis.
A report said that the Kerala Maoists, who are anchoring their activities on the issues concerning land, water and environment, had already completed a comprehensive survey of the unauthorised quarries in the Western Ghats in the State.