The response to Monday’s carnage in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district, where Maoists killed at least 25 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force, has been predictable. The government has condemned the violence and promised that the “sacrifice of the martyrs will not go in vain”. The media has feigned outrage and condemned both the Maoists and the government.

The know-all experts, the usual gaggle of retired Army, police and Intelligence Bureau officials, have once again reminded the gullible masses that had they been in charge of the nation’s affairs, they would have purged India clean of its malcontent from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Violence

At a more substantive level, Union home minister Rajnath Singh has called a meeting of the chief ministers of states affected by Maoist violence on May 8. But it won’t be a first-of-its-kind deliberation on how to deal with the murderous menace. If meetings could solve seemingly intractable problems, then India would not have been in such a mess on the internal security front.

There has been a resurgence of separatism in the Kashmir Valley. While it is not unusual for separatists to make a return after hibernating during winter, there is something particularly sinister about the recrudescence of violence this time. The fig leaf of "azadi" has been dropped and naked, aggressive Islamism is on display. It’s no longer about "disaffection" with the Indian state, it is now about rejecting the secular Indian state, or what passes for it.

Meanwhile in the forests of central India, after taking some hits from the security forces, the Maoists have begun to strike back with increasing ferocity. On March 11, they killed 12 CRPF personnel in Chhattisgarh.

On Monday (April 24), it was a bloodbath with CRPF personnel besieged from all sides and virtually rendered sitting ducks.

Worse attacks have happened in the past.

Maoists killed 75 CRPF personnel in Chhattisgarh in April 2010. Earlier that year they ran through an Eastern Frontier Rifles camp in West Bengal, killing 24 personnel in their sleep. In May 2013 almost the entire top leadership of the Congress in Chhattisgarh was wiped out in a Maoist attack. Among the dead was Mahendra Karma who had heroically stood up to Red Terror and launched the Salwa Judum movement.

There have been several other attacks in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand, the hotbed of Maoist insurgency. Between 2005 and 2017, at least 2,010 security forces personnel have been killed by Maoists who, despite losing a large number of cadre, continue to strike fear among tribals. Available data suggests Maoist and civilian deaths have been equally high in these 12 years. At least 2,571 Maoists have been killed in counter-operations; 2,994 civilians have died at their hands.

Menace

Arguably the NDA government can claim to have been more firm in dealing with the menace. There has been a steady and perceptible decline in Maoist attacks since 2014. In its reply to a question in Parliament, the government gloatingly pointed out that the “number of Left Wing extremists killed in 2016 as compared to 2015 has increased by 150 per cent from 89 in 2015 to 222 in 2016. The number is the highest in the last six years.”

It is also true that there has been a stream of desertions from the Maoist ranks, especially by women who have fled horrific sexual exploitation in the name of revolution. Others have laid down arms to seek normal lives under the protective watch of the police. Taking roads and infrastructure deep into the Maoist heartland has helped counter their propaganda that tribals are a neglected lot and excluded from tasting the fruits India’s development.

Yet all this does not mean that the Maoist insurgency is either hobbled or debilitated.

Monday’s attack underscores this point. How much of the success of the previous three years is by design and how much by coincidence is yet to be figured out. In counter-insurgency operations, essentially fighting an asymmetrical war by another name, there are ebbs and flows.

To read too much into a period of success in curbing an insurgency can prove to be costly. Multiple attacks on security forces by Maoists (and Islamists in the Kashmir Valley) this year serve to highlight this fact.

Insurgencies

Offering vacuous condolences to the families of security personnel killed by insurgents is, frankly, meaningless. So are mawkish statements and maudlin sentiments. They do not take us anywhere near a resolution. To the contrary, such expressions run the danger of portraying the Indian state as helpless and sapped of determination.

There is no single weapon to fight Maoist terrorism. Deploying additional troops may at best have a temporary deterrent effect. Nor can the Indian state be seen as blowing both hot and cold, bravely talking all-out war one day and limply offering talks the next day. There has to be a steely consistency.

The enemy is identified, what remains to be done is identifying the best means of neutralising the enemy. To win this war the state needs both moral and ideological clarity. Sadly, both have been lacking. Also lacking is the third crucial requirement: Political determination.

Until and unless the state is clear of its objective and determined to achieve it, irrespective of the price to be paid, India’s internal security situation will continue to worsen, eating away at the innards of the nation even as on the surface the country’s economy makes huge strides.

There is no percentage in pretending that all is fine and insurgencies are under control, almost defeated. It does not work that way. Insurgencies need to be crushed ruthlessly without any concern for the criticism that is bound to follow.

The state is responsible to a billion-plus Indians for their safety and security, not a handful of useful idiots who believe, and want us to believe, that Maoists are "Gandhians with guns".

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Also read: Sukma massacre has exposed the nationalists and pseudo-Naxalites

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