2013
The May 25 Maoist attack on the Congress convoy in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district, that killed 28 and injured another 30, brought the focus back on the raging insurgency in the tribal heartland of India. It jolted the political establishments, both at the centre and state, to renew their resolve to fight it with greater intensity. But this was not happening for the first time. It has become a routine after every major Maoist strike, and yet, there is not even a hint of a rethink on the strategies. Nobody seems to ask some of the obvious questions: Are we doing it right? Can we do it differently or attempt different things for better result? After all, the Maoists are mounting much more devastating attacks and inflicting a higher number of casualties now. And in spite of the isolated instances of success, like in Saranda or Jangalmahal for example, there is little to think that we are succeeding in our objective of either winning away the tribal from the Maoists or denting the capacity of the Maoists to strike big in any significant way.
The festering insurgency is extracting a very high cost. The union home ministry data shows, the Maoists have killed 5,772 civilians and 2,065 security personnel between 2001 and 2012; destroyed hundreds of schools, aanganwadi centres and mobile towers. Add to that the killings of civilians in questionable encounters (in Bijapur’s Sarakiguda in June 2012 and Edasmeta on May 17 this year), and destruction of properties (in revenge attack on three villages in Dantewada following the 2010 massacre of 76 CRPF personnel, and during the security forces’ first foray into the Abujhmad area in March 2012). Also, add thousands of crore of rupees being pumped in, in the name of development of the tribal belt by the centre (for example, this year Chhattisgarh has been given Rs 2,400 crore for MGNREGS work alone, and Rs 1,600 crore for PMGSY in last two years, according to rural development minister Jairam Ramesh) and the states (annual allocation for a Bastar district is to the tune of Rs 735 crore).
Not to forget the plight of hundreds of thousands of people, a large number of whom are tribals, trapped in the conflict zone (spanning nearly 200 districts), their future prospects and potential to rise above their miserable living conditions held hostage to the conflict between the Maoists and the state.
In such a situation, it is time to ask some tough questions and explore the possibility of doing it differently. But before that a quick glance at what is happening now.
Current approach: What happened immediately after the May 25 will illustrate how the response has become mechanical.
Two days after the incident, the centre rushed two battalions of central paramilitary forces to Chhattisgarh, to reinforce the 28 already deployed there and declared that joint operations would be launched in Chhattisgarh. It also advised the insurgency-hit states to develop their own Greyhound forces, on the line of Andhra Pradesh. In Raipur, chief minister Raman Singh promised to intensify the fight and ruled out any possibility of peace talks.
There were all-party meets too, at the centre and in the state. There was even a chief ministers’ conference on internal security in New Delhi where the issue was discussed at some length. Addressing the chief ministers on June 5, the Prime minister repeated his government’s counter-insurgency strategy: “I must point out here that the challenge of Naxalism has received our serious attention for quite some time now. We have adopted a two-pronged strategy to deal with the challenge: conducting proactive and sustained operations against Maoist extremists; and, addressing development and governance issues in Left Wing Extremism affected areas.”
Talking about the future course, he said: “I must also emphasize here that the two-pronged strategy that we have followed so far needs to be strengthened and pursued with rigour.”
The Prime minister repeated himself at the all-party meet that followed (June 10). The all-party meet endorsed his formulation in its resolution and said: “We also urge the State Governments to draw upon their own resources as well as the resources provided by the Central Government to re-establish the rule of law and accelerate development activities in the affected States.”
Clearly, the approach is: More of the same – hot-pursuit of the Maoists and aggressive development – very much in the same old-fashioned way even though it hasn’t proved very effective.
Developmental approach: First, the development part. Three examples will demonstrate what is wrong with our current approach and how it can be redesigned for better results: Saranda in Jharkhand, Mendha-Lekha in Maharashtra and Abujhmad in Chhattisgarh – all Maoist-hit areas.
After the security forces secured the Saranda forests in late-2011, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh stepped in and launched a Saranda Development Plan (SDP) with much fanfare. The plan was to rapidly develop the area with a view to bring it back to the mainstream. He released about Rs 250 crore meant for various welfare programmes of his ministry, like MGNREGS, PMGSY, Indira Awas Yojana, electrification (solar lanterns) etc, at one go, for 56 villages of Manoharpur block in West Singhbhum district. My former colleague Sarthak Ray of Governance Now lived in the area for six months in 2012 to track the progress of SDP. His verdict: “It has failed because the locals are questioning the very purpose of the development. They are asking why there is so much concentration on building roads. They think the roads are being built to allow private mining companies to operate in the area.”
They are not wrong. In spite of protest from Ramesh, the centre and the Jharkhand government have recently allowed the Jindal and Rungta groups to mine iron ore there. Earlier, only SAIL was working in the area and had been given additional block for mining after the Saranda forest was cleared off the Maoists.
Under SDP, there was a plan to build 10 integrated development centres (IDCs) to provide various government services. Until June 2013, only one IDC building had come up (in Digha), without any sign of services being provided at any time soon. Similarly, only the first installment for the Indira Awas Yojana houses has been given so far, not the rest.
Contrast this with the example of Mendha-Lekha, a tribal village in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. This village of about 400 people was the first one in the country to get ownership over bamboo (by way of transit pass that allowed them to trade) in April 2011 under the Forest Rights Act. Until then, bamboo was the property of the forest department even though PESA had granted ownership rights over the minor forest produce (MFP) to the gram sabha of the scheduled (v) area way back in mid 1990s.
In 2012, the villagers harvested and auctioned their bamboo for the first time, earning Rs 1 crore in the process. After paying generously for the labour, the village saved Rs 50 lakh and put it in a fixed deposit account. It is now planning to use a part of this saving for better management of their 1800-hectare community forest (Rs 25 lakh) and on health and education (Rs 12.5 lakh each). This year, they are going for e-tendering in October and expect to earn more than Rs 1 crore.
In 2011, the planning commission had estimated that ownership of MFP (bamboo, tendu, apta etc) alone would bring Rs 50,000 crore of direct income for the tribals. In spite of the Mendha-Lekha example, how many tribal villages in the country have actually got the ownership rights to trade in MFPs? Maharashtra is the only one to have allowed about a dozen villages to trade in bamboo and another one-and-half dozen in tendu. No such report has come from the rest of 8 states having scheduled V areas. The SDP has no component dealing with FRA or ownership of MFPs.
The implementation of the Forest Rights Act is poor too. All claims should have been settled by December 2010, as per the central government’s directive. Here are a few examples about the status of its implementation. Jharkhand has received only 42,003 claims and granted 15,296 rights (the state has provided no details of the individual and community right claims or settlement). Maharashtra has given 101,356 individual rights (out of 340, 927 claims) and 1,869 community rights (out of 5,048 claims). Odisha has given 314,420 individual (out of 518,075 claims) and 1,046 community rights (out of 4,605 claims). (All figures valid as on May 31, 2013 and sourced from the union tribal welfare ministry website.)
Chhattisgarh declared a 100% claim settlement in early 2010. Later in the year, a joint committee was set up by the tribal welfare and environment and forests ministries (headed by retired bureaucrat NC Saxena). The committed submitted a report saying that there was large scale “wrongful rejections” and “blatant irregularities”. It also said that in large parts of the Maoist-hit Bastar region the process of settlement had not even begun. The tribal welfare ministry data shows, as on May 2013, Chhattisgarh has granted 214,668 individual (of 487,332 claims) and 775 (of 4,736 claims) forest rights.
A noticeable feature of the FRA implementation is a re3latively smaller number community right claims and settlements. My own visits to the tribal areas of Ganjam district (Maoist-hit) in Odisha in October 2012 showed why. One the one hand the villagers didn’t know about this right and on the other, the administration had not even initiated a drive to collect and grant such claims. Same was the case in Rayagada district (where Vedanta is trying to mine the Niyamgiri hills for bauxite) two years earlier.
Imagine, how dramatically the lives of tribals will transform if they get their forest rights and ownership over MFPs.
Now, Abujhmad. This region, spreading over Bijapur and Narayanpur district of Chhattisgarh and Gadchiroli of Maharashtra (nearly 4,000 sq km in area), has long been held to be the Maoists’ main base, where its military headquarters is located and from where they run their “Jantana sarkar”. But when the security forces entered the Chhattisgarh part of the region in March 2012 for the first time, they were shocked at what they found. Tusha Mittal of Tehelka magazine, who entered the region two months later, described her experience in these words:
“It is a measure of both the complexity and the pathos of the Maoist-tribal crisis in India – and the inadequate narrative that has built up around it – that when Operation Hakka actually got off the ground, and the troops entered the great unknown, what they found in Abujhmad was not the military HQ of a deadly and well-organised insurgency but scraggly villages and forlorn clusters of leaf and bamboo huts. Their biggest recovery seems to have been an inkjet printer….” (Tehelka, May 2012)
It is a sad comment indeed on the state of governance that Abujhmad has had no land or revenue survey, no policing and little presence of government for more than six decades after independence. In fact, it was opened to the outsiders only in mid-2009, having been shut for nearly 30 years and required a special permission of the collector to enter the area.
A planning commission report of 2000 identified 5 major problems of tribal belt –(a) land alienation, (b) indebtedness, (c) relation with forests, government monopoly over MFPs, and non-implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, (d) ineffective implementation of Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996 (PESA, 1996) for Schedule V areas and (e) involuntary displacement due to development projects and lack of proper rehabilitation. These issues continue to be grossly neglected even today.
None of these issues have been addressed meaningfully.
Security approach: As far as the security aspect goes, the May 25 incident is evidence enough of an ad hoc approach, complacency and a clear disconnect among various forces battling the Maoists. It was a huge security failure – the basic drill of avoiding movement in a large convoy in a conflict zone, with so many high-value individuals, taking the same route twice; sanitization the route by checking for mines and making physical deployment of force, police escorts etc were all violated – as well as an intelligence failure (a significant Maoists movement, consisting of about 200, went unnoticed and unchallenged). There are police stations about 10 km apart on either side of the ambush site, along with a company of CRPF each (at Tongpal and Darbha) and yet, the security forces reached the site only the next day. Though the exact number of personal security guards travelling with the convoy is not known, their number is reported to be close to 30 (Mahendra Karma, one of the Congress leaders killed in the incident, had Z-category security). These security men were no match even in terms of arms and ammunitions. Though the ambush continued for two hours, no help came their way.
The CRPF has now submitted its own inquiry report to the union home ministry (National Investigation Agency is conducting a full-fledged inquiry, whose report is awaited), giving itself a clean chit even while admitting that a good 12 km between Tongpal and Darbha (a 23 km stretch) had not been sanitized at all. The ambush site falls in this stretch. The report says only 5 km each from Tongpal and Darbha was sanitized by the road opening parties. It passed the blame on to the state police saying that it does only what it is asked to by the police. (Indian Express, June 28, 2013) Surely, the CRPF is not supposed to act dumb.
In the given scenario, pumping more paramilitary forces in, who are ill-trained (CRPF started training in jungle warfare only after losing 76 personnel in 2010 Maoist ambush) and ill-equipped, both physically and mentally, is no answer. There may be comfort in number, but that hardly pays. This is reflected in the way the forces are getting killed by the Maoists and also, in the way the security forces are killing innocent villagers (CRPF killed villagers for two successive years in Bijapur, in 2012, 2013, during the ‘beej’ festival) and burning their huts (in Dantewada and Abujhmad) in the name of anti-Maoist operations.
More than 100,000 central forces are now deployed in anti-Maoist operations (CRPF alone has sent 85 battalions, that is 85,000 personnel) in the central India, supported by UAVs, helicopters and the states’ security paraphernalia. But they have no intelligence wing worth talking about or a good coordination with the local police force. Often the security forces got into trouble by launching operations with vague intelligence inputs. The condition of policing is appalling. Soon after May 25 incident, Chhattisgarh chief minister told an English news channel that the difference between two police stations in Bastar was 100 km. Needless to say, inducting more force and adopting a hot-pursuit policy is plain foolishness in such circumstances. The ground needs to be prepared first, with better policing and credible intelligence. Also needed is training for the paramilitary forces in the nature of their engagement with the civilians. They need to know that they are essentially “protectors” of people, not an assaulting army.
Ajai Sahni, executive director of Institute of Conflict Management, has this to say about the over-all security approach: “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been repeating, incessantly and vacuously, since the early months of his first tenure commencing May 2004, that the Maoists constitute the greatest internal security challenge to the country. And yet, nearly a decade later, there is no evidence of any coherence of assessment, let alone strategy, within the national and state security establishments; no recognition of the most fundamental reality that, unless the intelligence and policing apparatus throughout the country is enormously strengthened, professionalised, modernized, and made autonomous of the corrupt and perverse control of political parties and personalities, no crime – leave alone a significant and widespread insurgency – can be brought under control. As has been emphasised again and again, unless the crisis of capacities and capabilities is addressed, Darbha will only be a momentary link in a long and interminable chain of insurgent excesses. (South Asia Intelligence Review, May 27)
There is little to argue against this. But shockingly, very little attention has been paid towards these matters. After the 2012 Sarakiguda fake encounter, the union home ministry attempted to rewrite the standard operating procedure (SoP) for the security forces but it had no component on educating and sensitizing the security forces towards their primary duty as protectors of the people.
The May 25 Maoist attack on the Congress convoy in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district, that killed 28 and injured another 30, brought the focus back on the raging insurgency in the tribal heartland of India. It jolted the political establishments, both at the centre and state, to renew their resolve to fight it with greater intensity. But this was not happening for the first time. It has become a routine after every major Maoist strike, and yet, there is not even a hint of a rethink on the strategies. Nobody seems to ask some of the obvious questions: Are we doing it right? Can we do it differently or attempt different things for better result? After all, the Maoists are mounting much more devastating attacks and inflicting a higher number of casualties now. And in spite of the isolated instances of success, like in Saranda or Jangalmahal for example, there is little to think that we are succeeding in our objective of either winning away the tribal from the Maoists or denting the capacity of the Maoists to strike big in any significant way.
The festering insurgency is extracting a very high cost. The union home ministry data shows, the Maoists have killed 5,772 civilians and 2,065 security personnel between 2001 and 2012; destroyed hundreds of schools, aanganwadi centres and mobile towers. Add to that the killings of civilians in questionable encounters (in Bijapur’s Sarakiguda in June 2012 and Edasmeta on May 17 this year), and destruction of properties (in revenge attack on three villages in Dantewada following the 2010 massacre of 76 CRPF personnel, and during the security forces’ first foray into the Abujhmad area in March 2012). Also, add thousands of crore of rupees being pumped in, in the name of development of the tribal belt by the centre (for example, this year Chhattisgarh has been given Rs 2,400 crore for MGNREGS work alone, and Rs 1,600 crore for PMGSY in last two years, according to rural development minister Jairam Ramesh) and the states (annual allocation for a Bastar district is to the tune of Rs 735 crore).
Not to forget the plight of hundreds of thousands of people, a large number of whom are tribals, trapped in the conflict zone (spanning nearly 200 districts), their future prospects and potential to rise above their miserable living conditions held hostage to the conflict between the Maoists and the state.
In such a situation, it is time to ask some tough questions and explore the possibility of doing it differently. But before that a quick glance at what is happening now.
Current approach: What happened immediately after the May 25 will illustrate how the response has become mechanical.
Two days after the incident, the centre rushed two battalions of central paramilitary forces to Chhattisgarh, to reinforce the 28 already deployed there and declared that joint operations would be launched in Chhattisgarh. It also advised the insurgency-hit states to develop their own Greyhound forces, on the line of Andhra Pradesh. In Raipur, chief minister Raman Singh promised to intensify the fight and ruled out any possibility of peace talks.
There were all-party meets too, at the centre and in the state. There was even a chief ministers’ conference on internal security in New Delhi where the issue was discussed at some length. Addressing the chief ministers on June 5, the Prime minister repeated his government’s counter-insurgency strategy: “I must point out here that the challenge of Naxalism has received our serious attention for quite some time now. We have adopted a two-pronged strategy to deal with the challenge: conducting proactive and sustained operations against Maoist extremists; and, addressing development and governance issues in Left Wing Extremism affected areas.”
Talking about the future course, he said: “I must also emphasize here that the two-pronged strategy that we have followed so far needs to be strengthened and pursued with rigour.”
The Prime minister repeated himself at the all-party meet that followed (June 10). The all-party meet endorsed his formulation in its resolution and said: “We also urge the State Governments to draw upon their own resources as well as the resources provided by the Central Government to re-establish the rule of law and accelerate development activities in the affected States.”
Clearly, the approach is: More of the same – hot-pursuit of the Maoists and aggressive development – very much in the same old-fashioned way even though it hasn’t proved very effective.
Developmental approach: First, the development part. Three examples will demonstrate what is wrong with our current approach and how it can be redesigned for better results: Saranda in Jharkhand, Mendha-Lekha in Maharashtra and Abujhmad in Chhattisgarh – all Maoist-hit areas.
After the security forces secured the Saranda forests in late-2011, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh stepped in and launched a Saranda Development Plan (SDP) with much fanfare. The plan was to rapidly develop the area with a view to bring it back to the mainstream. He released about Rs 250 crore meant for various welfare programmes of his ministry, like MGNREGS, PMGSY, Indira Awas Yojana, electrification (solar lanterns) etc, at one go, for 56 villages of Manoharpur block in West Singhbhum district. My former colleague Sarthak Ray of Governance Now lived in the area for six months in 2012 to track the progress of SDP. His verdict: “It has failed because the locals are questioning the very purpose of the development. They are asking why there is so much concentration on building roads. They think the roads are being built to allow private mining companies to operate in the area.”
They are not wrong. In spite of protest from Ramesh, the centre and the Jharkhand government have recently allowed the Jindal and Rungta groups to mine iron ore there. Earlier, only SAIL was working in the area and had been given additional block for mining after the Saranda forest was cleared off the Maoists.
Under SDP, there was a plan to build 10 integrated development centres (IDCs) to provide various government services. Until June 2013, only one IDC building had come up (in Digha), without any sign of services being provided at any time soon. Similarly, only the first installment for the Indira Awas Yojana houses has been given so far, not the rest.
Contrast this with the example of Mendha-Lekha, a tribal village in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. This village of about 400 people was the first one in the country to get ownership over bamboo (by way of transit pass that allowed them to trade) in April 2011 under the Forest Rights Act. Until then, bamboo was the property of the forest department even though PESA had granted ownership rights over the minor forest produce (MFP) to the gram sabha of the scheduled (v) area way back in mid 1990s.
In 2012, the villagers harvested and auctioned their bamboo for the first time, earning Rs 1 crore in the process. After paying generously for the labour, the village saved Rs 50 lakh and put it in a fixed deposit account. It is now planning to use a part of this saving for better management of their 1800-hectare community forest (Rs 25 lakh) and on health and education (Rs 12.5 lakh each). This year, they are going for e-tendering in October and expect to earn more than Rs 1 crore.
In 2011, the planning commission had estimated that ownership of MFP (bamboo, tendu, apta etc) alone would bring Rs 50,000 crore of direct income for the tribals. In spite of the Mendha-Lekha example, how many tribal villages in the country have actually got the ownership rights to trade in MFPs? Maharashtra is the only one to have allowed about a dozen villages to trade in bamboo and another one-and-half dozen in tendu. No such report has come from the rest of 8 states having scheduled V areas. The SDP has no component dealing with FRA or ownership of MFPs.
The implementation of the Forest Rights Act is poor too. All claims should have been settled by December 2010, as per the central government’s directive. Here are a few examples about the status of its implementation. Jharkhand has received only 42,003 claims and granted 15,296 rights (the state has provided no details of the individual and community right claims or settlement). Maharashtra has given 101,356 individual rights (out of 340, 927 claims) and 1,869 community rights (out of 5,048 claims). Odisha has given 314,420 individual (out of 518,075 claims) and 1,046 community rights (out of 4,605 claims). (All figures valid as on May 31, 2013 and sourced from the union tribal welfare ministry website.)
Chhattisgarh declared a 100% claim settlement in early 2010. Later in the year, a joint committee was set up by the tribal welfare and environment and forests ministries (headed by retired bureaucrat NC Saxena). The committed submitted a report saying that there was large scale “wrongful rejections” and “blatant irregularities”. It also said that in large parts of the Maoist-hit Bastar region the process of settlement had not even begun. The tribal welfare ministry data shows, as on May 2013, Chhattisgarh has granted 214,668 individual (of 487,332 claims) and 775 (of 4,736 claims) forest rights.
A noticeable feature of the FRA implementation is a re3latively smaller number community right claims and settlements. My own visits to the tribal areas of Ganjam district (Maoist-hit) in Odisha in October 2012 showed why. One the one hand the villagers didn’t know about this right and on the other, the administration had not even initiated a drive to collect and grant such claims. Same was the case in Rayagada district (where Vedanta is trying to mine the Niyamgiri hills for bauxite) two years earlier.
Imagine, how dramatically the lives of tribals will transform if they get their forest rights and ownership over MFPs.
Now, Abujhmad. This region, spreading over Bijapur and Narayanpur district of Chhattisgarh and Gadchiroli of Maharashtra (nearly 4,000 sq km in area), has long been held to be the Maoists’ main base, where its military headquarters is located and from where they run their “Jantana sarkar”. But when the security forces entered the Chhattisgarh part of the region in March 2012 for the first time, they were shocked at what they found. Tusha Mittal of Tehelka magazine, who entered the region two months later, described her experience in these words:
“It is a measure of both the complexity and the pathos of the Maoist-tribal crisis in India – and the inadequate narrative that has built up around it – that when Operation Hakka actually got off the ground, and the troops entered the great unknown, what they found in Abujhmad was not the military HQ of a deadly and well-organised insurgency but scraggly villages and forlorn clusters of leaf and bamboo huts. Their biggest recovery seems to have been an inkjet printer….” (Tehelka, May 2012)
It is a sad comment indeed on the state of governance that Abujhmad has had no land or revenue survey, no policing and little presence of government for more than six decades after independence. In fact, it was opened to the outsiders only in mid-2009, having been shut for nearly 30 years and required a special permission of the collector to enter the area.
A planning commission report of 2000 identified 5 major problems of tribal belt –(a) land alienation, (b) indebtedness, (c) relation with forests, government monopoly over MFPs, and non-implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, (d) ineffective implementation of Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996 (PESA, 1996) for Schedule V areas and (e) involuntary displacement due to development projects and lack of proper rehabilitation. These issues continue to be grossly neglected even today.
None of these issues have been addressed meaningfully.
Security approach: As far as the security aspect goes, the May 25 incident is evidence enough of an ad hoc approach, complacency and a clear disconnect among various forces battling the Maoists. It was a huge security failure – the basic drill of avoiding movement in a large convoy in a conflict zone, with so many high-value individuals, taking the same route twice; sanitization the route by checking for mines and making physical deployment of force, police escorts etc were all violated – as well as an intelligence failure (a significant Maoists movement, consisting of about 200, went unnoticed and unchallenged). There are police stations about 10 km apart on either side of the ambush site, along with a company of CRPF each (at Tongpal and Darbha) and yet, the security forces reached the site only the next day. Though the exact number of personal security guards travelling with the convoy is not known, their number is reported to be close to 30 (Mahendra Karma, one of the Congress leaders killed in the incident, had Z-category security). These security men were no match even in terms of arms and ammunitions. Though the ambush continued for two hours, no help came their way.
The CRPF has now submitted its own inquiry report to the union home ministry (National Investigation Agency is conducting a full-fledged inquiry, whose report is awaited), giving itself a clean chit even while admitting that a good 12 km between Tongpal and Darbha (a 23 km stretch) had not been sanitized at all. The ambush site falls in this stretch. The report says only 5 km each from Tongpal and Darbha was sanitized by the road opening parties. It passed the blame on to the state police saying that it does only what it is asked to by the police. (Indian Express, June 28, 2013) Surely, the CRPF is not supposed to act dumb.
In the given scenario, pumping more paramilitary forces in, who are ill-trained (CRPF started training in jungle warfare only after losing 76 personnel in 2010 Maoist ambush) and ill-equipped, both physically and mentally, is no answer. There may be comfort in number, but that hardly pays. This is reflected in the way the forces are getting killed by the Maoists and also, in the way the security forces are killing innocent villagers (CRPF killed villagers for two successive years in Bijapur, in 2012, 2013, during the ‘beej’ festival) and burning their huts (in Dantewada and Abujhmad) in the name of anti-Maoist operations.
More than 100,000 central forces are now deployed in anti-Maoist operations (CRPF alone has sent 85 battalions, that is 85,000 personnel) in the central India, supported by UAVs, helicopters and the states’ security paraphernalia. But they have no intelligence wing worth talking about or a good coordination with the local police force. Often the security forces got into trouble by launching operations with vague intelligence inputs. The condition of policing is appalling. Soon after May 25 incident, Chhattisgarh chief minister told an English news channel that the difference between two police stations in Bastar was 100 km. Needless to say, inducting more force and adopting a hot-pursuit policy is plain foolishness in such circumstances. The ground needs to be prepared first, with better policing and credible intelligence. Also needed is training for the paramilitary forces in the nature of their engagement with the civilians. They need to know that they are essentially “protectors” of people, not an assaulting army.
Ajai Sahni, executive director of Institute of Conflict Management, has this to say about the over-all security approach: “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been repeating, incessantly and vacuously, since the early months of his first tenure commencing May 2004, that the Maoists constitute the greatest internal security challenge to the country. And yet, nearly a decade later, there is no evidence of any coherence of assessment, let alone strategy, within the national and state security establishments; no recognition of the most fundamental reality that, unless the intelligence and policing apparatus throughout the country is enormously strengthened, professionalised, modernized, and made autonomous of the corrupt and perverse control of political parties and personalities, no crime – leave alone a significant and widespread insurgency – can be brought under control. As has been emphasised again and again, unless the crisis of capacities and capabilities is addressed, Darbha will only be a momentary link in a long and interminable chain of insurgent excesses. (South Asia Intelligence Review, May 27)
There is little to argue against this. But shockingly, very little attention has been paid towards these matters. After the 2012 Sarakiguda fake encounter, the union home ministry attempted to rewrite the standard operating procedure (SoP) for the security forces but it had no component on educating and sensitizing the security forces towards their primary duty as protectors of the people.
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