Combating Maoists

Emphasis on rural policing welcome

By Uttam Sengupta

(August 03 , New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Union Home Minister does appear determined to deal firmly with the Maoists. Unlike his predecessors, P. Chidambaram has not tried to gloss over the issue, admitting candidly that the Home Ministry had under-estimated the strength and sophistication acquired by the rebels.

The Centre’s decision to raise a special force comprising some 26,000 men from the existing para-military forces, set up army cantonments deep in Naxalite territory and to launch a concerted offensive, presumably later this year after the monsoon departs, are also welcome indicators of the government’s seriousness.

But having said that, it does need to be pointed out that most of the measures referred above are old wine in a new bottle. In Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, battalions of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) are already holding on to territories and have set up camps in remote areas and on hill-tops. But that has not prevented the Maoists from striking at will.

There has been no let-up in land-mine explosions and the men in uniform are often turning out to be sitting ducks, getting ambushed time and again.

Setting up new cantonments in remote areas will certainly help sanitise a certain area and give a fillip to the local economy but the government can set up at best one or two additional cantonments in a state.

The Maoists then are likely to simply move to fresh territory, as they have done often in the past. The flexibility of a guerrilla operation is seldom matched by conventional methods.

The idea of having cantonments is a two-edged sword actually. Because the Maoists may well try to provoke the armed forces, target movement of army convoys and raise the level of attrition to a point where the Army may want to intervene.

The Army has been kept out of the anti-Naxalite operations so far despite the pleas by states unable to control the Maoists. By setting up cantonments in Naxalite territory, the government may just play into their hands.

Similarly, the idea of raising a special force to combat the Maoists does not appear to be a particularly novel idea. States have been imparting training to the state armed police and special forces had been raised in the past and trained in jungle warfare.

All of them have suffered, however, from the serious handicap of being largely ‘outsiders’ with little knowledge of the local terrain, languages and dialects spoken locally or even of local customs.

Unaware of local conditions, unfamiliar with local people, they have often been guilty of over-reacting to alleged provocations and of using strong-arm tactics, alienating the local people further.

What is unfolding in Lalgarh in West Bengal is a case in point. Six thousand armed personnel are holding a small area in the backwaters of Bengal for over a month. But while the armed men camp in schools and colleges, Maoists continue to make their presence felt by blasting landmines, abducting policemen, killing so-called political rivals and police informers and hitting at supply lines of the security forces.

Security personnel have added to the confusion by beating up school students demanding they vacate school buildings and allow classes to resume. All able-bodied men are suspects and rather than get detained by security forces, they seem to have fled into the forests.

Both Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have also tried to pit villagers against Maoists by arming vigillante groups. Despite temporary successes when some Maoists were held or killed by the villagers, this has not really worked.

Besides raising the disturbing question of the state abdicating its responsibility and encouraging people to take up arms and defy the law, Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh or Gram Suraksha Dals in Jharkhand have made little impact on the march of Maoists.

Indeed, they have merely ended up providing fire-power to a group of people who have used it to settle personal scores. These armed men have been allowed to kill anyone they suspected of being a Maoist and without any accountability whatsoever. Not surprisingly, some of them have ended up as outlaws themselves.

One sensible move being taken by the Home Ministry is to shift attention to rural policing. As much as 60 per cent of the 14,000 police stations in India are said to be in the rural areas. But most of them function from dilapidated buildings, are staffed by ill-trained, ill-equipped policemen with little motivation.

Not surprisingly, they are known to have fled the posts at the first sign of trouble. A fresh emphasis on rural policing could be useful in providing employment opportunities to rural youth and could turn out to be more effective in combating Maoists.

But the much bigger challenge for the government is to establish and sustain a responsive administration in these areas. In large parts of the Maoist territory, schools, colleges, hospitals and health centres simply do not function. Government grants are siphoned off by middlemen and public servants abdicate their responsibility and have largely abandoned their posts on the plea that they face a threat to their lives.

While the Maoists do have a political agenda and are opposed to development projects, even they will find it difficult to resist rising local aspirations if development schemes are allowed to be implemented by local people and not ‘outsiders’, who are deemed to be exploiters and looked upon with suspicion.

Making the police more responsive to the common man is another area that the government needs to look at. In Maoist strongholds specially, policemen are either pitied, looked upon with contempt or feared.

Petty corruption, the tendency to use strong-arm tactics, the unthinking use of the stick and the power of the police to implicate villagers in false cases are issues which the state governments will have to deal with on a war-footing. Because without meaningful administrative and police reforms, a military response alone may not work against the Maoists.

-Sri Lanka Guardian