April.07 : Visiting the Naxal zone of Lalgarh in West Bengal on Sunday, Union home minister P. Chidambaram told journalists that while the performance of the governments of West Bengal, Orissa and Jharkhand did not match the requirement in combating armed Maoists who had set themselves the task of taking on the forces of the State, the situation in Chhatisgarh and Maharashtra was better.
The stunning attack in Chhatisgarh’s Dantewada district on the security forces on Tuesday — the deadliest ever — shows how wrong the home minister was. As he goes about assessing just what went wrong in the Mukram forests where 74 CRPF personnel and a head constable of the Chhatisgarh police were butchered by the Maoists, Mr Chidambaram might do well to evaluate the overall national strategy against the ultra-left extremists. This should include a study of the numbers of security personnel of all description pressed into anti-Maoist operations, the quality of their training for the specific task of anti-guerrilla warfare in forested terrain, the equipment available to them, and the quality of intelligence at their disposal. The time may have come to design a special force to counter the Maoist armed insurgency on the lines of the Rashtriya Rifles that was set up to deal with terrorist violence in Kashmir.
The government has designated the Naxal insurgency as the country’s most serious internal security problem. Anyone can see that armed Maoists coordinate their actions across state boundaries and respond to a single command authority. This justifies the creation of a single national command and communication structure to deal with this menace. Naxalism ought not to be seen as a law and order problem alone. It is supra-state and has to be dealt with as such. With appropriate discussion with all affected parties, the Union government is called upon to bring suitable legislation so that the creation of a new force does not get mired in state-versus-Centre bickering. The Prime Minister, to begin with, called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council on Tuesday with the three service chiefs in attendance. This is necessary routine. But it is time an overall political view was taken. Those who emphasise the root cause thesis in dealing with Naxalism need to understand that at this stage there is no getting away from subduing these elements militarily even as the State goes about the business of delivering development essentials to the needy in the country’s poorest areas. It is not a question of one or the other.
The government has done well to reject the idea of the use of air power in the anti-Naxalite operations. Such a course would be fraught with risks of collateral damage (civilian deaths) as Nato’s indiscriminate use of firepower from the sky has demonstrated so graphically in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. That would mean losing the sympathy of local people, in whose midst the Naxalites operate. A guerrilla war against insurgents who take shelter behind deemed ideology cannot succeed in the absence of help from the residents of a given area. Among the deficiencies on the government side that resulted in the Dantewada tragedy is the abysmal failure of intelligence. A Naxal force almost a thousand strong was involved in trapping a company of the CRPF. That is a very large number of men in the context of forest warfare, and the state government’s intelligence apparatus appears to have had not a clue. “Operation Green Hunt” simply cannot be permitted to proceed on such a basis. It is important to plug the vacuum in intelligence, a crucial component of anti-insurgency. This and other vitally needed measures are unthinkable without creating a unified national command structure to deal with the violence by Maoists, who have come to use some the latest means of destruction, not unlike the Taliban and Al Qaeda.