Union home minister Rajnath Singh’s Wednesday statement in both Houses of Parliament on the Maoist attack in Chhattisgarh that took the lives of more than a dozen CRPF jawans in the Sukma jungles recently was far from enlightening, and seemed not a little opaque. Its most important characteristic was the oft-repeated phrase “multi-pronged strategy” to tackle the Maoist menace but it did not shed any light on just what this means.
Monday’s attack was the first major Maoist strike under the Modi dispensation but was far from being the first in BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh. For all the muscle-flexing the saffronites do on all matters relating to security, the Raman Singh regime has shown itself to be singularly inept in dealing with the Maoists operating the forest areas of the state. Indeed, there is some irony in the fact that days before the desperadoes struck, the CM was boasting that the Maoist problem had been neutralised in his state.
This itself betrays the CM’s innocence as regards the nature of the Maoist threat. In dealing with this brand of violence, no state is an island. Maoists have influence in pockets of several states that are contiguous to one another in the central India region. Their cadres roam freely across states. If Mr Raman Singh appreciated this adequately, he would have taken the trouble to appeal to the states surrounding his own, as well as the Centre, to take a re-look at the anti-Maoist police or military strategies that need frequent revising, as any strategy might in a dynamic situation. Regrettably, the Union home minister’s statement also gave us little inkling of this dimension of the issue.
His stewardship of home affairs has just begun. May be Mr Singh needs more time to settle in. But while approaching Parliament, which has had occasion to discuss Maoist activities several times in recent years, after the massacre, it would have been in the fitness of things for the minister to point to any new features relating to the Maoist attack, and the response from the government side. It seems he just wasn’t briefed adequately. What he came out with in the end was a sanitised statement, ill-fitting the occasion.
While all the facts are not in the public domain, it is hard to get away with the feeling that standard operating procedures are not being fully followed, that there may be deficiencies at the middle level of leadership, and that the training of the young men who are sent as CRPF foot soldiers into the jungle terrain is in need of revision. Perhaps the SOP itself needs a re-look. It is not enough to say that Maoist attacks in the country are down since 2011.
