Respond quickly or bleed

Maoists could launch more surprise attacks and inflict heavy casualties in the coming days. According to experts within the government, attacks like the one in Gadchiroli are not isolated, but part of a larger trend that is here to stay.

While the immediate provocation for the Gadchiroli incident is the election in Maharashtra and the arrest of senior leaders of the CPI (Maoist), sources say that left wing extremism today has a massive base of armed, battle-ready men and women to carry out their plans.
Many estimate that Maoists have “more than 20,000” armed cadres, an unprecedented number for an insurgency. Even at its peak, the militancy movement in J&K had 3,000 armed men.

“There is no sign of desperation,” says a senior official in the security establishment. “We have seen large scale recruitments of armed cadres in recent months. Not only are their numbers increasing, their areas of influence are also spreading,” he says.

According to the latest estimates by the Centre, at least 231 of the 626 districts in the country have CPI (Maoist) cadres. That’s a huge rise from 2003, when Maoists were present in 55 districts. Five years ago, they had about 10,000 armed cadres.

Their presence in 37% of districts in the country and their control over several liberated zones could embolden Maoists to step up their attacks, says a senior police source. “It (Gadchiroli) was not about how strong Maoists were but how weak the response is,” says a military official. Such weak responses, he says, would bring about “large scale” casualties in the coming days.

The ones at the receiving end will be the ill-trained police forces of Maharashtra, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar. “Look at the special task force of Chhattisgarh police. They have been responsible for most of their kills in their state, but haven’t lost a single person from their total strength of 1,500,” the military officer said.

The task force is trained at the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College (CTJWC) in Kanker, Chhattisgarh, which is headed by Brigadier BK Ponwar, a counter-insurgency expert from the army. Policemen from other states are also training at the institute.

According to Brigadier Ponwar, security forces need to take a host of steps to avoid mishaps, because “the best kind of guerilla warfare is all about surprises.” Besides, “the enemy is invisible until he opens fire. That is also the time when he is weakest, so quick reaction could minimise casualties,” Ponwar told DNA, without going into the specifics of the Gadchiroli attacks. The army veteran, who once headed a counter insurgency school said the forces will have to “adapt to the asymmetrical warfare” at the earliest or continue to bleed.

Even as more stress is being put on the security aspects of anti-Maoist operations, many within the establishment are calling for a broader response. “We need to orchestrate a political-military-socio-economic response. No one dimensional response will work,” says a senior official.