INDIA’S FEDERAL home ministry has estimated, in a classified assessment, that it is losing the fight against Maoist rebels who are extending their areas of influence to well beyond 220 of the country’s 620 administrative districts.
The internal report projects that not only are the Maoist recruits rapidly proliferating, but so is the quality of their weaponry and sophistication in executing surprise attacks on government targets, given their advantage of terrain familiarity across some 20 of India’s 28 provinces.
According to the home ministry 1,169 people were killed in Maoist attacks in 2010, the maximum number since they launched their “People’s war” in 1967 to secure economic, social and environmental justice for India’s poor, dispossessed and vast numbers of marginalised tribal people.
These fatalities were more than those recorded last year in northern war-torn Jammu and Kashmir province, where Muslim insurgents have been fighting for an independent homeland since 1989.
Armed Maoists too had multiplied to about 15,000. Their leadership had recently begun forging links with Kashmiri insurgents and numerous other militant groups in several northeastern states bordering Burma and Bangladesh, largely to obtain weapons.
Police and intelligence personnel also indicated embryonic links between Maoists and the Pakistan-based Islamist Lashkar-i-Toiba (LiT or Army of the Pure) group. The LiT, which has been proscribed by the United Nations, was responsible for the November 2008 strike on Mumbai in which nearly 170 people were killed.
Senior police officials from central India’s densely forested Chhattisgarh province, where a large Maoist concentration exists, claim that at least two LiT operatives were present at a Maoist central committee recently.
“We are not aware why they were there,” Chhattisgarh police chief Viswa Ranjan said, “whether they were called only as observers or for some other reason.”
The report also noted that security forces like the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) combating the Maoists were ill-trained and ill-equipped, inadequately led and operated under a nebulous command-and-control structure which had largely proved ineffective, especially in the central Indian jungles.
Pushing the CRPF “into a task it is woefully unprepared for will lead to avoidable loss of life and loss of weapons to the insurgents”.
If the CRPF was to be the lead counter-insurgency force, the report added it would need to be “radically restructured and transformed by reducing its age profile, changing its operating ethos”.
Last April, Maoists ambushed and killed 75 paramilitaries and 30 policemen.
Compared to the CRPF, whose personnel routinely fired no more than 20 rounds during training, the Maoists had conducted 93 training camps in the field, in which they imparted extensive arms explosives instruction.
Meanwhile, in a related development, social activist and public health specialist Dr Binayak Sen, on the Supreme Court’s direction, has been released on bail after being sentenced to life in December 2010 by a Chhattisgarh court for allegedly aiding Maoist rebels.
“We are a democratic country. He may be a sympathiser [of Maoists] but it did not make him guilty of sedition,” the Supreme Court said.
Dr Sen has maintained that he does not support the Maoists.