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Lessons from the Chhattisgarh tragedy

“Force alone cannot be a solution,” the former Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, said in the wake of the killing of 24 police personnel in the Elampatti-Regadgatta forests of Dantewada district of Bastar division in Chhattisgarh on July 9, 2007.

Mr. Patil’s remarks were not intended as a critique of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) violence. They were directed, instead, at critics who were calling for massive investments in improving police counter-insurgency capabilities.

Early this month, the new Home Minister, P Chidambaram laid out a very different road map for action. In a July 7 speech to the Lok Sabha, he said “clearing out” Maoist-held areas was a precondition for initiating development work — a sharp break with conventional wisdom on the subject.

Mr. Chidambaram’s speech came just days before the slaughter of 36 police personnel at Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh. Preceded by the large-scale assault on West Medinipur district in West Bengal and the killings of 16 police personnel in Gadchiroli in February, the Rajnandgaon killings exposed the appallingly deficient capabilities of police personnel in Maoist-hit areas.

Fatalities in the Maoist insurgency, Union Home Ministry data shows, now exceed those claimed by Islamist violence in Jammu and Kashmir. Figures compiled by the Ministry show a steady escalation in fatalities in the grinding Maoist insurgency in central India, from 482 in 2002 to 837 in 2007, the last year for which figures have been published. Estimates by the independent South Asia Terrorism Portal, based on media reports on Maoist violence, show that fatalities by the end of June 2009 already exceeded two-thirds of all killings in 2008.

Part of the problem is well known: like most States, Chhattisgarh just doesn’t have enough police personnel even to administer routine law-and-order tasks, let alone fight an insurgency.

United Nations estimates suggest that countries ought to have a minimum of 222 police personnel for every 1,00,000 residents; many advanced countries maintain twice this level. India, figures published by the South Asia Terrorism Portal show, has a police-population ratio of 122:1,00,000. Chhattisgarh has a sanctioned strength of just 103 per 1,00,000.

Matters are made worse by large-scale vacancies, particularly at cutting-edge, mid-level officer posts. National Crime Records Bureau data shows that Chhattisgarh has in service only two-thirds of the 318 Deputy Superintendents of Police and SPs who should be on its rolls; the State had only 1,392 sub-inspectors and assistant sub-inspectors instead of the 2,194 who ought be in service. In 2006, as the Maoist insurgency in Chhattisgarh was gathering momentum, the Bastar division was assigned just 8 of 38 sub-inspectors who are sanctioned to guard the area. Even now, Bastar is chronically short-staffed

But hiring more policemen won’t solve the problem. There is a larger, unaddressed problem: police forces are not being trained or equipped to cope with the challenge.

In Rajnandgaon, the Maoists used time-tested tactics that a well-trained and led police force ought to have defeated. Early in the morning, the Maoists executed two policemen at Madanwada, who had been compelled to leave their outpost — an outpost that was fortified but lacked toilets. Knowing reinforcements would be called in, they then waited in ambush.

SP Vinod Kumar Choubey and 30 other police personnel were killed driving towards Madanwada. Dozens of police personnel have died in similar ambushes — for example, the July 2007 attack, which claimed the lives of 17 policemen near Motu, in Orissa, or last August’s attack in Jharkhand which killed 12. Police have been instructed to travel on foot or motorcycle — but prudence is not always possible in the face of the need for a rapid response to crisis.

Poor training was also responsible for the February killings of Maharashtra police personnel in Gadchiroli, just across the State border from Rajnandgaon. Hundreds of Maoist militia members surrounded a police patrol which had been despatched to Markegaon. Maoist guerrillas fired at the police from a distance — reportedly drawing over 1,000 rounds of ineffective and un-aimed fire in return. When the police ran out of ammunition, the Maoist militia swarmed the police positions, hacking off the limbs and gouging out the eyes of their adversaries.

None of these, is, of course, exceptional to Maoist-hit States. Just how poor the training of India’s police personnel was graphically illustrated in June, when dacoit Ghanshyam Kewat engaged over 400 policemen for nearly 50 hours — killing four and securing his escape before finally dying in chance engagement with a separate police patrol.

Chhattisgarh has sought to compensate for these weaknesses with two sets of measures, elements of which other States are seeking to emulate, perhaps unwisely.

First, Chhattisgarh has set up elite counter-insurgency units modelled on the Andhra Pradesh Police’s Greyhounds, who are trained at a combat school run along the lines of the Indian Army’s famed School of Jungle Warfare in Vairangte. Despite this, police fatalities have risen year on year since 2005. The Greyhounds succeeded in the context of the development of overall police infrastructure and training. Chhattisgarh has, by contrast, done little to improve the training, equipment and infrastructure of its force as a whole.

Second, the State has relied on New Delhi to pump in central forces to hold the ground, as well as the controversial Salwa Judum militia — a quasi-volunteer force set up against the advice of expert counter-insurgency practitioners like the former Punjab Director-General of Police K.P.S. Gill. Neither undisciplined and untrained irregulars nor the injection of outside forces unfamiliar with the terrain helped stem the Maoist tide.

Paid salaries on a par with unskilled labour, recruited on the basis of minimal educational qualifications, obliged to work without overtime for 18 hours a day or longer and provided no regular on-job training, the police forces in States like Chhattisgarh are reaching breaking point.

Last year, during Supreme Court hearings, Solicitor-General Gopal Subramaniam candidly admitted that the Chhattisgarh government was finding it difficult to find recruits to the police. “Policemen”, he said, “are not ready to step into the forests.” Fifteen people, including a Central Reserve Police Force officer, were arrested in November for having faked elections from the Gogunda booth in the Konta Assembly constituency for fear of entering the Dantewada forests.

Unlike the Indian state, the Maoists have worked to a long-term plan. Back in December 1999, the People’s War Group — which in September, 2004 merged with the Maoist Communist Centre to form the CPI(Maoist) — decided to create a core operational zone out of reach of the state forces.

Key party functionaries and resources were relocated in what the CPI(Maoist) calls the Dandarakanya Special Zone, centred around the dense, un-surveyed forests of Abujhmadh in the Bastar division. Abujhmadh was later declared the Maoists’ Central Guerrilla Base Area; the party’s central committee and significant leaders like Muppala Laxmana Rao also began functioning out of the forests.

Chhattisgarh police officials estimate that the CPI(Maoist) built an armed force of over 5,000, equipped with assault rifles, mortar, and a range of improvised explosive devices. In addition, there are an estimated 20,000 volunteers, equipped with everything from rifles to bolt-action rifles.

In 2002, according to figures published by the Union Home Ministry, Chhattisgarh recorded 55 fatalities related to Maoist violence, compared to 117 in Bihar and 157 in Jharkhand. By 2007, the last year for which the Ministry has published data, the killings increased almost nine-fold. Chhattisgarh that year recorded 435 insurgency-related fatalities. Of these, 198 were of security force personnel and 171 of civilians. Jharkhand, which suffered 170 fatalities and Bihar, with 69, registered levels of violence not dissimilar to those seen five years earlier.

Earlier this month, Shivdhar Reddy, a highly respected counter-insurgency expert who serves as Deputy Inspector-General of Police at the Andhra Pradesh Police’s Special Intelligence Bureau, provided a bleak assessment of what could lie ahead.

“The intensified Maoist activity in Koraput and Malkangiri districts in Orissa,” Mr. Reddy noted, “indicates that they are going beyond the control of the administration. The situation is the same in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada, which is a hotbed of Maoists.” He said it would take at least two years of concerted action to stem the tide.

Mr. Chidambaram’s speech suggests that New Delhi is at last listening to voices like these. It now needs to frame a long-term programme for action. Funds for police modernisation — better weapons, better communications and better mobility — are part of the answer. But India desperately needs a national weapons and tactics institution to produce the instructors who can train state forces to use these assets intelligently.

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