Why the Maoists are on a roll

The recent Maoist ‘swarm attack' in Chhattisgarh that left 55 policemen dead serves to highlight the fact that our state agencies are not only abjectly understaffed, but also that they are inadequately armed and trained to handle what is clearly a very well-defined insurgency. And media and political commentary on the ‘deplorable' logistics of supplementary police help after the attack are both tragic and uninformed about the ground reality.

By Ajai Sahni

Fifty-five policemen—16 personnel of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) and 39 Special Police Officers (SPOs)—were killed, and another 12 injured, on March 15, 2007, when an estimated 600 Maoists (Naxalites) attacked a 79-strong police post guarding the Rani Bodli village in the densely forested Dantewada district of the tribal dominated Bastar division of Chhattisgarh. The pre-dawn attack, with the Maoist cadres using automatic weapons, grenades, petrol bombs and rocket launchers, lasted over two-and-a-half hours. While no bodies of the attackers have been recovered, an estimated 10-12 Maoist cadres are also believed to have been killed.

Were it not for the tragic nature of the event, the farcical character of media and political commentary on this latest Maoist excess would be laughable. There was, once again, talk of police and intelligence “failures”, including shrill questions about why “reinforcements” could did not reach Rani Bodli for over three hours after the attack commenced, from “nearby” posts eight and 20 km distant.

That connectivity is poor, and a force rushing to the rescue would probably have hit mined areas and merely added to the total fatalities rather than provided relief to the besieged camp if its approach did not adhere to systematic road-opening procedures, has been entirely discarded. There was also an undercurrent of allegations that the CAF men and the SPOs had fled their posts—in which case the number of fatalities and the sheer duration of the engagement would be simply impossible to explain. There was also much surprise about how such an incident could have taken place and why the state was failing to contain the Maoists—exposing the commentators' enormous lack of familiarity with the ground situation in the area where the incident occurred.

The cold and harsh reality is that such incidents will continue to take place with numbing regularity. The principal reason for this is not the failure of particular forces or administrations to deal with the situation, but utterly insupportable deficits in capacities that make a coherent response to the Maoist threat impossible in the near term; and this will take years to address, even if there is a complete consensus (and there is none) across the affected states and the Central leadership on the strategy and course of action to be adopted. These deficits not only afflict Chhattisgarh, but all the states where the Maoists are already a force to reckon with.

The deficits commence at the level of the police leadership itself, with Indian Police Service (IPS) cadres far short of sanctioned strength in every affected state: and on many assessments, sanctioned strengths are themselves deficient in terms of the rising challenges of law and order management, on the one hand, and the mounting insurgency, on the other. According to the Annual Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs, 2005-06, the deficiency in numbers of IPS officers in position, as against sanctioned strength, in the five states worst affected by the Maoist insurgency, was over 20 per cent.

At the level of the general police strength, moreover, capacities are dismal, and any expectation that this force, however well equipped or trained (which is, in most cases, neither), can contain an insurgency of the intensity and spread of the current Maoist movement—even while it continues to discharge its normal law and order management functions—is utterly misconceived.

A quick look at police-population ratios, in this context, is informative. The United Nations recommends a minimum ratio of 1:450, which translates to roughly 222 policemen for a 100,000 population. The all-India average stands at a thoroughly inadequate 122 per 100,000 (the US has 238; the UK, 235; France, 397; Greece, 426; and Portugal, 481).

The Naxalite-affected states are uniformly worse off: Bihar stands at 57 per 100,000; Jharkhand 85; Orissa 90; Andhra Pradesh 98; and Chhattisgarh 103. These figures reflect sanctioned strength, and actual availability in most states is well below this figure. In Chhattisgarh, as against a sanctioned strength of 29,188 in 2006, actual availability was just 23,350—indicating a deficit of 5,838 men, or more than 20 per cent of the sanctioned force.

The ratio of police personnel to the land area of the state is also abysmal. The Indian average stands at an inadequate 42.4 policemen per 100 sq km; Chhattisgarh has just 17.3; Andhra Pradesh 28.5; Jharkhand 30.8; and Orissa 22.4. (Bihar has a healthier 54.2.) Deficiencies in arms, equipment, transport, communications, protection and infrastructure are also endemic.

The situation in the Bastar division —including the districts of Dantewada (where the Rani Bodli incident occurred), Kanker and Bastar —the heart of the violence in Chhattisgarh, is disturbing. For an area of 39,114 sq km, the five police districts of the Bastar division have a total sanctioned strength 2,197 policemen (5.62 policemen per 100 sq km). Actual availability is just 1,389, nearly 37 per cent short of the authorised numbers, yielding a ratio of 3.55 policemen per 100 sq km.

Much of this force, moreover, suffers an acute lack of leadership. Thus, in the Bijapur Police District, as against a sanctioned strength of 38 sub-inspectors (SIs), only eight were at their posts in 2006. For the state at large, of the 2,900 SI strength sanctioned, vacancies stand at 45 per cent. For deputy superintendents of police, vacancies are 50 per cent of the sanctioned strength.

The solution to this deficiency is widely thought to be the massive deployment of Central Paramilitary Forces (CPMFs). The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was inducted into counterinsurgency (CI) duties in Chhattisgarh in 2003, when three battalions were sent in. A force of 35 companies (including these three battalions), or roughly 4,600 men, was subsequently deployed across the Bastar region. As a matter of policy, the CRPF only deploys in company strength, thus creating, at best, 35 pinpoints across 39,114 sq km. After the mass killings of end 2005 and early 2006 in the wake of the Salwa Judum resistance against the Maoists, the CPMF strength was augmented to 85 companies (11,220 men). However, more than 80 per cent of this augmented force is deployed for passive defence, protecting Salwa Judum camps, important government installations and projects, including road-building and the railways, and VIPs or others under threat. The CPMF-army deployment in the northeastern state of Manipur offers an interesting contrast. With a total area of 22,327 sq km (a little over half the Bastar region), Manipur has a deployment of as much as 350 companies of central Forces, including the army.

Worse, the areas in which the Maoists have found sanctuary in Chhattisgarh and in which they operate is ideal guerrilla terrain. Over 75 per cent of the Bastar region is forested. Dantewada district has a total area of 10,239 sq km, of which 8,362 sq km (82 per cent) is forested. Chhattisgarh also shares 970 km of interstate borders with Maoist afflicted areas of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa—most of it in totally inhospitable terrain, and with Maoists quickly crossing state boundaries in the wake of operations against them.

Despite these tremendous handicaps, Chhattisgarh is one of the few Maoist-affected states in India where the battle against the Maoists has been truly joined, and this, indeed, is the principal reason why Maoist violence has escalated sharply in this state. Chhattisgarh—particularly the Bastar region, and prominently including the 4,000 km of the unadministered (indeed, unsurveyed) Abujhmadh forest—is now the epicentre of the Maoist strategy of protracted war. It is here that the Maoists have established their command centres, and it is here that they propose to create their first “liberated areas”. If they have failed in the latter objective, it is because of the extraordinary resistance that they have met from the state's political leadership, ill-equipped security establishment and, crucially, the people themselves.

What has largely (perhaps completely) been missed by the flood of commentary in the media on the latest attack is the fact that Rani Bodli is the precise location where the popular tribal resistance against the Maoists—which was subsequently organised by the state leadership under the banner of the now much-denigrated Salwa Judum—began. It was here that, on June 16, 2005, an estimated 8,000 tribals from 10 surrounding villages assembled and swore to deny Maoists sanctuary, food and support, and to expel all Maoist cadres and sympathisers from their villages. Their ire had been roused by years of Maoist extortion and tyranny and, in the immediate past, Maoist diktats demanding a boycott of tendu leaf collection (a primary source of income for the tribals), of the weekly haats (tribal markets), and enforced ‘reforms' of local practices that displayed extraordinary contempt for tribal belief systems and ways of life and worship.

The attack on Rani Bodli goes beyond the symbolism of a Maoist retaliation against this fountainhead of popular resistance. It is, indeed, a question of the very survival of the movement. With the tremendous pressure that has been exerted against the Naxalites in Andhra Pradesh—particularly their traditional heartland areas in the North Telangana region—the entire top leadership has relocated to the Bastar region, particularly Abujhmadh. If this epicentre of control is lost to the Maoists, the very sustainability of the movement across other areas of the country would come into question. It is for this reason that a continuous escalation of violence is inevitable in Chhattisgarh, particularly in the Bastar division.

Indeed, those who have taken comfort from the fact that the latter half of 2006 witnessed declining trends in violence in Chhattisgarh are utterly mistaken, even as are the elements in the national leadership who are flaunting a "6.15 per cent decline" in incidents of Maoist violence as a measure of their achievement. The South Asia Intelligence Review has consistently argued that these trends reflect no concrete gains on the part of the state—other than in Andhra Pradesh, where the Maoists have been forced into retreat by aggressive counterinsurgency measures—but are rather a reflection of a deliberate Maoist decision to temporarily de-escalate violent activity, secure greater political consolidation, and a consolidation of military capacities.

That this period of consolidation is over, and the Maoists have now embarked on a new stage of their “strategic counteroffensive” is evident not only in the declarations of their 9th Congress in end-January– February 1, 2007, but also in the spate of incidents that have already occurred across the country in the first three months of the current year.

Over the past year, Chhattisgarh has made some efforts to rationalise the use of its forces and resources, as well as to augment them. Sanctioned posts in the state police have gone up to 33,000, and recruitment has taken total numbers up to 30,000 (although much of the additional force is still to complete training for deployment). The state's newly-established Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare College at Kanker has trained 2,590 Chhattisgarh Police personnal, at various levels, between August 2005 and February 2007. Force modernisation has been initiated, and there has been significant improvement in the quality and availability of weapons.

A plan to impose ‘carpet security' in the affected areas—resulting in the creation of 22 new police posts, including Rani Bodli—was devised in early 2006. Regrettably, the deficiency of resources, the sheer dispersal of these posts, the nature of infrastructure available, and their preoccupation with tasks of passive defence rather than active operations to secure contact with, and neutralise the Maoists, limits their utility. Worse, it makes these isolated and ill-protected outposts sitting targets for ‘swarm attacks' by the Maoists—a tactic that CI forces are yet to devise an effective counter to. SF and police camps in Naxalite-affected areas are, at best, of company strength. Many are of platoon strength or less.

Police stations and police posts are often smaller. An effective strategy against the Maoists requires the creation of tremendous capacities for intelligence-based preventive actions; the creation of a network of fortified encampments, with layered defences, that are independent and self-sustaining, and that can tackle envisaged emergencies on their own, without requiring reinforcement from the outside; and large CI Forces that are not tied down to static duties. Eventually, it is only through the establishment of a permanent infrastructure for policing and intelligence gathering—the thana and chowki—not the paramilitary or police camp and column, effectively covering every inch of the State's territory, that successes against the Maoists can be achieved.

The current situation in Chhattisgarh (indeed, across much of the Maoist-dominated eastern region) is not something that has emerged abruptly. It has been decades in the making—and state agencies have slept through them. Chhattisgarh appears to have clearly recognised the magnitude of the Maoist threat, but the creation of CI capacities and responses will clearly take time. Till these capacities have been established and operationalised in adequate measure, however, the Maoists will continue to operate, and to engineer massacres like the Rani Bodli incident, with near-impunity.

(Ajai Sahni is executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management)
(Article courtesy: South Asia Intelligence Review)