Burkapal (Sukma)/New Delhi: Monday’s deadly Naxal attack in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district that claimed the lives of 25 CRPF personnel has forced the Centre to review its anti-Naxal strategy, with home minister Rajnath Singh convening a high-level meeting of all Maoist-infested states on May 8.
Sources said the attack by around 300 Naxals has rattled the government and the meeting was likely to discuss a tactical shift in future anti-Naxal operations, with a focus on greater involvement by state police forces.
Expressing concern over the role of the local police in tackling Naxal activities, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who visited Chhattisgarh on Tuesday, said the government has taken the incident as a “challenge” and “the sacrifice of the jawans will not go in vain”.
Sources claimed that in the Burkapal incident, there was “no intelligence or assistance from the local police” to the CRPF and no information was given to the force on the massive mobilisation of Naxal cadre in the region.
A senior security official said: “One needs to look at the role of the local police as they are totally dependent on the CRPF without providing any support or backup to them. What states need to realise is that Central police forces are deployed from outside and have no knowledge or information about the local networks of informers or terrain which makes the task for them more difficult. This makes the role of the state police in providing local intelligence more important, which is not happening. In the Burkapal incident, the local police didn’t accompany the CRPF team.” As many as 99 jawans of the CRPF’s 74th battalion had left the Burkapal camp around 6 am Monday to sanitise the construction site. The Naxal attack came at about 12.55 pm, when the jawans were preparing for lunch.
“The ambush site chosen was a very small area surrounded by dense forests from where Maoists launched the attack. The small open area did not give enough scope to the jawans to manoeuvre to undertake retaliation,” said IGP (Bastar Range) Vivekanand Sinha, who visited the ambush site for the second day Tuesday. The ambush site had shoes and torn clothes of slain jawans scattered around, water bottles hit by bullets, unused arrow bombs, empty cartridges of automatic weapons and mortars.
