In the January shootings, each side has advocates and detractors. The account of Mr. Sharma, the police superintendent, is corroborated by police officers involved in the raid and conservative politicians. Mr. Deva’s account is corroborated by those who escaped with him, by villagers who say they witnessed police officers wearing fatigues and carrying automatic weapons sweeping through their homes that day, and by parents in the village who described their children being led away.

Dr. Ajay Sahni, director of the Institute for Conflict Management, in New Delhi, listens to these testimonials with a skeptical ear. The villagers live in an area almost completely under the Maoists’ thumb, he said, and “no villager in the area will go willingly against” the rebel line. Indeed, villagers familiar with the victims say that at least some had been members of the rebel militia, but were not in the hard-core cadre. They organized meetings, collected protection money and kept track of who was working with the police.

Turning to the police, Dr. Sahni said the Jan. 8 deaths reflected a hard-line approach to counterterrorism that is “neither clear, nor hold, nor build.” The security forces, he said, “are trapped in the ‘Rambo’ model, thinking that well-trained and well-equipped troops will go in and beat up everyone and solve the problem.”

The police and politicians, for their part, begin their discussion with an estimate that Naxalites control up to 90 percent of the area for which Mr. Sharma is responsible. Mr. Sharma says he has lost 60 police officers in the past year fighting Naxalites, and that it is “absolutely a fake allegation” that his officers killed defenseless people.

Mr. Sharma was sent from New Delhi and holds a master’s degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, but he cannot speak the local language and, more important, is not in an agency that can offer development aid. So the challenge for him is to work on security, pure and simple.

“More policemen are dying than Naxalites,” he said, “and that has to reverse. We need to hit them, and hard. The ideal attrition rate is 4 to 1. This is crude, but we are working in a crude situation.” Mr. Sharma says he needs at least 1,000 additional trained police officers and stronger laws.

Police stations here operate as if under siege, behind concentric circles of razor wire. One of the few facts on which the police and villagers agree is that India’s government has virtually no other presence here. “We want development,” says Karam Malla Patel, the chief of Singaram village. “We want electricity but we don’t know what to do about it. The people in this village here have never seen the city.”