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A terrible security lapse

The manner in which almost 300 people detained in a Chhattisgarh prison escaped points to an enormous security lapse — one caused by a dangerous mix of negligence and incompetence. It is shocking that so many detenus — about 100 of them either naxalites or their sympathisers — could have fled in an ‘operation’ that lasted just 15 minutes. It is especially outrageous that such an incident could have occurred in a maximum-security prison such as Dantewada, that it was pulled off without any apparent help from the outside, and that it took nothing more than the snatching of a rifle from a guard to lay the ground for the breakout. The magisterial inquiry ordered by the State government should expose the lapses in security, which reportedly was partly a result of the lack of the prescribed number of guards at the prison. But the embarrassment of Dantewada must also serve as a reason to rethink the security procedures in prisons where naxalites are detained.

Dantewada is not the first incident in which naxalites have broken out of jail. Two years ago, about 1,000 Maoist insurgents laid siege to Jehanabad jail in south Bihar, resulting in the escape of 341 prisoners, more than a third of them naxalites. The coordinated attack showed the level of militarisation that the insurgents had achieved and their ability to mobilise large numbers in stealth. While exposing the failure of the State’s intelligence network to detect such a mammoth operation, an official report also criticised the lax security at the prison and the shortage of paramilitary personnel at the time of the attack. Last year, extreme left-wing insurgents freed 40 prisoners in Udayagiri in Orissa in an operation in which three people were killed. The Maoist strategy of attacking prisons goes back to at least 2004, when hundreds of insurgents made an abortive attempt to storm the Koraput jail in Orissa. What distinguishes the Dantewada incident is that the jailbreak was plotted and executed from the inside. The escape of so many naxalites will create further challenges in the State, which has lost more security personnel to Maoist attacks in recent years than other naxalite-prone ones such as Bihar, Jharkhand, and Orissa. The spate of jailbreaks calls for at least two immediate measures. First, a regimen under which there is absolutely no deviation from the security procedures or measures prescribed by the prison manual. Second, provision of additional paramilitary personnel to ward off the kind of devastating attacks launched on prisons in recent years.

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