Lessons from Dantewada

old editorials

Edit, Governance Now, April 16-30

Unless there is clarity on the objective and the way to go about it, anti-Maoist operation will remain a losing battle

When things don’t turn out as planned, what do you do? Obfuscate. That is what our security agencies did after the massacre of 76 CRPF jawans in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada. First, they claimed the Maoists rained bullets from hilltops
after the CRPF contingent was trapped and blasted in a narrow valley. When a TV channel beamed visuals of the massacre site and it turned out to be a plain, they said the insurgents fired from treetops. Similarly, they said at first that the CRPF had rushed to confront the insurgents without informing the local police.
Later, they changed it to suggest that it was a planned exercise and that the local police was very much part of that planning. All this, however, is not to suggest that the security agencies alone are to be blamed for the tragedy. It is merely a symptom of a larger malaise—a systemic failure.

The other day, Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management said when the state does not have a strategy, it goes in for operations. The Dantewada massacre reflects that syndrome. Both the central and the state governments have been fighting the Maoists for years but there is no comprehensive plan, even when it relates to the short point of engaging and neutralising the insurgents. As any layman will point out, any engagement of this nature will call for building necessary capacity first – capacity in terms of understanding the mind of the
insurgents, developing sufficient intelligence about their activities and movement, knowing the territory in which they operate and raising a force that can match the guerrilla tactics and jungle warfare techniques they employ. As the Dantewada incident establishes, not one element was in place. Forget the operational details like the Standard Operations Procedure.

Take a close look. The CRPF contingent rushed in on the basis of a tip-off, not on the basis of intelligence inputs which would have meant the insurgents’ exact location, their numbers, the territory where they had holed up and the nature of weapons and explosives they were carrying etc. That these jawans were not trained in jungle warfare and knew little about the guerrilla tactics is also evident. Accounts of survivors suggest that the injured bled for eight hours before they could get medical help and that the villagers ferried many of the dead and the injured to the nearest police post 5 km away in their own vehicles. This would make it clear that there was absolutely no planning. In short, the CRPF contingent was miserably ill-prepared for the eventuality.

Look at the bigger picture. There is utter confusion. At the political level, some chief ministers, like Nitish Kumar and Shibu Soren, wouldn’t even attend home minister Chidambaram’s meet to work out a coordinated strategy, let alone launch an actual operation in their territories. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee tells Chidambaram to mind his language for saying that the buck stops at the CM’s table. Mamata Banerjee doesn’t know which side she is on.

At the civil society level, an important chunk of academics, intellectuals, writers and social activists doesn’t tire of screaming “genocide”, holding protests and rallies to condemn the anti-Maoist operation day in and day out, not even when the CRPF contingent was being butchered in Dantewada. All this cacophony eventually leads to the same old dilemmas; about who is a Maoist and whether his cause is right. Also, since the “root cause” of insurgency is lack of development, should development activities be carried out in tandem with the security operation? Or before the operation? Or after? It’s all as complicated as a 40-year-old unattended to problem will be. Unless there is clarity and consensus on the objective and approach at all levels – government, political parties and civil society— the anti-Maoist operation will remain a losing battle. The 76 CRPF jawans paid the price of that like hundreds before them.