Remember the IPKF?

In the wake of the widespread carnage in the Dantewada bus bombing and the Gyaneshwari Express derailment near Jhargram in West Bengal, both suspected to be the work of Maoists, an opinion poll by a media organisation found that 67 per cent of people believed that the government had no option but to use the Indian Army to tackle the armed Naxalites. Media reports indicate a buildup of similar opinion within the political hierarchy in the Central government, though their view is often contested by many across the public and political spectrum.
Counter-insurgency and internal security are thankless, immensely frustrating politico-military missions which, given a choice, professional armies would much prefer not to get involved in. The Indian Army has more experience than most of these interminable assignments where the objective is winning the “hearts and minds” of the people, but the desired end-state remains indeterminate with multiplying pitfalls, controversies and contradictions in the process. Also, historical experience from India’s internal conflicts since Independence has shown that military deployment has almost never been backed up by a matching political consensus, and an accompanying “civilian surge”. But professional armies nevertheless do not really have the luxury of choice in their employment, because the ultimate call remains the prerogative of the political hierarchy in office who, in all probability, were responsible for creating the situation in the first place and then allowed it to fester and deteriorate to an extent where military intervention became inevitable. It is therefore entirely understandable that the Indian Army does not look forward to involvement in the Naxalite situation which, like all such problems, has originated in decades of political and administrative mismanagement and neglect.
Let there be no doubt that if left unattended, the Naxalite situation presents a major threat to national security, not because of its ideological content per se, but because it bestrides a critically strategic “golden quadrilateral” in the country’s heartland with enormous possibilities for exploitation by hostile external agencies, on the pattern of Jammu and Kashmir as well as the Northeast. A foretaste of this has already been experienced in the semi-isolation of the country’s eastern region by interdiction of rail and road communications and civil infrastructure which have halted night movement of trains and road transport on the Kolkata-Mumbai and Kolkata-Chennai trunk routes.
The Army is aware of the trends developing towards its involvement, and has been reading the handwriting on the wall. As things stand, the Army is already imparting counter-insurgency training to police and paramilitary forces at its Counterinsurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) at Vairangte, Mizoram, where some 47,000 police and paramilitary personnel have already undergone this programme, besides providing instructors to a similar institution established by the Chhattisgarh government at Kanker at the initiative of a former governor of the state, himself a retired senior Army officer with extensive experience of counter-insurgency as a corps commander in the Northeast. The Kanker institution is headed by a retired brigadier, a former commandant of CIJWS, and has reportedly trained about 7,000 police personnel of various states. In addition, an Army brigadier has been located with the ministry of home affairs to assist in planning anti-Naxalite strategy. A new sub-area level headquarters under a brigadier has been established at Raipur, Chhattisgarh, while there are reports that the Army’s training centre for Special Forces is scheduled to relocate to Chhattisgarh, possibly as the core of a new Counter-insurgency School being planned there.
Counter-insurgency is a numbers game, where “boots on the ground” are the ultimate winning factor. Textbook ratios for winning superiorities are given as 10:1 in favour of the security forces, and it is worthwhile remembering that in Operation Pawan the Indian Army ultimately built up to force levels of four oversize infantry divisions, or about 80,000 troops, covering northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, an area roughly equivalent in size to the Red Corridor region in India where prospective operations against Naxalites can be envisaged.
Each operational situation is undoubtedly unique in its specific environments, yet there are very often many underlying commonalities between them in background circumstances and lessons learnt. It is in this context that the military hierarchy would be well advised to revisit the operations of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) against the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) in Sri Lanka during Operation Pawan, 1987-1990, and revise its lessons often imbibed at great cost, because in many aspects these could be relevant to prospective operations against the Naxalites, who, like the LTTE of that time, are an entirely unknown entity, and about whom intelligence is scanty if not non-existent. A massive military surge in troop deployment is a time tested option which the Army is familiar and to an extent comfortable with, but that need not be the only one. An alternative could be a selective “hunter-killer” strategy based on Special Forces acting on accurate, actionable intelligence to specifically target the insurgent leadership and other critical elements, with police and paramilitary forces providing the bulk manpower for other aspects of counter-insurgency.
The Achilles’ heel here is of course intelligence, a traditional shortcoming from which the Indian Army has repeatedly suffered, whether against the Chinese in 1962, or at Kargil in 1999. The IPKF was in an exactly similar situation at the commencement of Operation Pawan, where the initial estimates to bring the LTTE under control were confidently estimated to be a fortnight at best, while the external intelligence agency RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) was positive that the LTTE were their protégés who would not resist the Indian Army! Intelligence about the Naxalites in the Red Corridor appears to be following the same path, but whatever is the final decision, what the Army must avoid is limited piecemeal deployments in inadequate numbers, often under political pressure to maintain a false front of civil control.
The Army has a reputation for success to live up to, and if it is indeed eventually committed against the Naxalites, commanders at all levels must ensure in the best collective interests of the organisation, that the lessons of Sri Lanka and other past counter-insurgencies are absorbed and disseminated, so that errors and shortcomings of the past are not repeated.

Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of Parliament