Around one and half year back Mr. Shivraj Patil-I resigned as HM 'cause of 26/11 and his repetitive statements and expression of sorrow and shit, and the Ministry of Home affairs was handed over to the Shivraj Patil of the Finance Mr. Chidambaram by the PM Manmohan Singh (The Shivraj Patil of the whole government).
May be it's the time for our HM Mr. Chidambaram (or may be could also call him Shivraj Patil Reloaded ) to stop talking and do something if possible. It's been quite noticeable that the loss the nation made in past one year (after HM's new approach to counter left-wing-extremism) in this "people's war" is way too much than what we have lost in last 42 years of naxalism. Naxalism was always here (since 1967) but since the SHIVRAJ PATIL-II took up the issue, he kind of instigated them, and the death toll had shot up like hell. Lately the whole media business is continuously rallying around Naxal attacks on our jawans and HM's humble request to "quit violence and sit and talk" and commitment of "not using the air force". I guess may be this time the HM "Mr. Shivraj Patil Reloaded" could book a conference room and talk the Maoists to death like what they are trying to do with insurgents in J&K.
The annihilation of almost the entire Alpha Company of the Central Reserve Police Force's 62 Battalion, which lost 74 of its 80 personnel in an ambush at Chintalnar, is the largest single loss Indian counter-insurgency forces have ever suffered.
Many in India's police and paramilitary services say that the annihilation of Alpha Company — like the many similar disasters which have scarred New Delhi's ongoing anti-Maoist offensive — is an inexorable consequence of an ill-planned, tactically unsound counter-insurgency mission.
Like most of the estimated 57 battalions of Central police forces pumped into Maoist heartlands over the last year, the 62 Battalion had a simple mandate. It was to clear the Chintalnar area of insurgent groups, hold the territory to ensure that Maoists were unable to re-enter, and, finally, prepare the ground for developmental projects by civilian agencies.
In practice, none of the elements of the United States-inspired “clear, hold and build” doctrine ran according to plan. Much of the battalion's energies was spent on securing the single, ramshackle road that linked their outposts on the southern fringes of Dantewada, bordering Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, to the CRPF's logistics chain. More personnel were tied down to guarding their camps against attack.
For the first several months of its tour of duty in Dantewada, the 62 Battalion was unable to execute meaningful offensive operations. That was supposed to have been the task of the CRPF's CoBRA force, an elite jungle warfare formation recently renamed the Special Action Force. SAF operations, though, were scaled back in response to allegations of human rights violations. For all practical purposes, the 62 Battalion was doing little other than guarding itself.
Pressured by its headquarters, the 62 Battalion ramped up offensive operations. But, untrained in specialist jungle warfare skills and operating in company-sized formations, its personnel had limited success. Notably, the Battalion was unable to prevent the large-scale laying of mines and the massing of the hundreds of guerrillas who were eventually to destroy it.
Late last week, Alpha Company was sent out on another search-and-destroy mission into the forests. When insurgents opened fire on its personnel, they responded in textbook fashion, taking shelter behind rock formations, trees and in ditches. Each of the likely positions was, however, already fitted with pressure-triggered improvised explosive devices. An armoured vehicle sent in to evacuate casualties was destroyed. Alpha Company was, quite literally, blown apart.
Bar its scale, there was nothing new in the Maoist ambush. Police fighting in regions as diverse as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh had often suffered losses in tactically-similar ambushes. Back in 2003, Maoists almost succeeded in assassinating the then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu in a multiple-IED ambush.
The losses, experts say, illustrate that large-scale force deployments can end up creating targets for attack rather than deterring insurgents. Instead of attempting to dominate the ground, they say, strategists ought be focussing on creating elite jungle warfare units such as the Andhra Pradesh Greyhounds, who execute intelligence-led precision strikes before retreating to safe bases.
“There's a simple reason why this effort to saturate the ground with forces will not succeed,” says Ajai Sahni, Director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. “It's called arithmetic.” The battalions pumped by New Delhi into the six worst-affected States, Dr. Sahni notes, have each some 400 operational personal available on the ground. That means fewer than 23,000 men are expected to protect 446 million citizens, living on 1.6 million square kilometres.
“It's just plain silly,” he says.
Failure to learn
Little imagination is needed to see the core irony: anaemic State police forces unable to fight the Maoists have been bolstered by ill-trained Central forces. In part, this was because the Ministry of Home and the Central Reserve Police Force refused to draw on the rich expertise available to them.
Inspector-General of Police Durga Prasad, one of the key figures in shaping Andhra Pradesh's successful counter-Maoist campaign, was given charge of raising CoBRA. Prasad had insisted that the force ought be headquartered in Hyderabad, which would have allowed it to work closely with the Greyhounds. However, New Delhi eventually decided that CoBRA's headquarters would be in the national capital — a decision that led Mr. Prasad to return, disgusted, to Andhra Pradesh.
Little effort was made for the CRPF to have an independent intelligence capability, either. The former Andhra Pradesh intelligence chief, Shiv Shankar, was among a number of officers considered for the formation of a unit — but the plan went nowhere.
Ever since Central forces began to be pushed into the Maoist heartland, these structural weaknesses have manifested themselves in escalating casualties. Instead of looking for dramatic results, New Delhi needs to focus on the slow, unspectacular task of building counter-insurgency capacity.
“We must accept that we're not going to defeat the Maoists in weeks or even months,” says a senior police officer, “and unless we start working to a long-term strategy, we may never defeat them at all.”
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