No seasonality to Maoist campaign
The spate of Maoist attacks on police personnel in Chhattisgarh this April is being explained away as a sort of silly season of combat
The spate of Maoist attacks on police personnel in Chhattisgarh this April is being explained away as a sort of silly season of combat, prime time for the rebels’ so-called tactical counter-offensive campaign that runs from March to June.
Such an interpretation is a misreading of the situation. The Maoist rebellion has morphed—and will continue to morph—beyond copybook reasoning.
There really isn’t any seasonality to the Maoist campaign in India beyond heavy monsoon rain and occasional floods hampering their operations (security forces too must contend with such climatic control). This was experienced first-hand by 14 troopers of Central Reserve Police Force killed in a Maoist attack in Chhattisgarh in December 2014, and a dozen more that were wounded.
A scan of attacks on security personnel over the past three years shows events that stretch across the year; even in areas where monsoon rains had set in. It’s a mix of opportunity, preparedness and state of conflict. Controversial Chhattisgarh-based politician Mahendra Karma and several of his colleagues were killed in an attack by Maoist rebels on 25 May 2013. It wasn’t the first attempt on Karma’s life. Rebels had also attempted to kill him—one of several attempts over the years targeting a person rebels blamed for spawning a brutal vigilante campaign against them—on 8 November 2012.
The only copybook seasonality is perhaps offered by the words of Mao Zedong whose early chutzpah and brilliant generalship the rebels respect—as do establishment forces the world over—and adapt to suit local needs. Take three often-touted precepts of Mao’s guerrilla approach: “The enemy advances we retreat”; “the enemy camps we harass”; “the enemy tires we attack”. These mantras are honed, adapted, applied. The first of the three is perhaps most portentous: it can also mean a time for rebel recruitment and training, and preparing the ground wherever that ground may expeditiously be.
Besides, there is a reason for a concentration of casualties in Chhattisgarh. It contains the greatest number of armed Maoist rebels in the country along with a few contiguous areas of Odisha and Maharashtra—and the greatest number of security forces arrayed against the rebels. Southern Bihar and northern Jharkhand come in second. These two conflict geographies naturally account for the largest number of attacks and counter-attacks.
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have eased off the total combat grid because of the decimation of Maoist rebels there. So has West Bengal. Squeezed elsewhere, the tri-junction area of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu is on the active propaganda and recruitment radar of Maoist rebels on account of the area’s poverty, caste-based ill treatment, issues of tribal dignity—and convenient forest cover. This has triggered increasingly robust security countermeasures. A Maoist weapons and ammunition pipeline via north-east India is under interdiction.
Back to Chhattisgarh. In September 2012, Communist Party of India (Maoist) rebels evidently met in the hamlet of Usabeda near the state’s border with Maharashtra. They discussed the urgent need for creating an alternative sanctuary for its leadership directly to the east in Odisha, and shore up a personnel and materiel pipeline along that state’s border up to Jharkhand.
The meeting appeared to have focused on military aspects of the rebellion. From what I gather, one plan called for rebels to work in groups of not less than hundred cadres for operations. This was almost immediately reflected on 29 September 2012. As I wrote in this column at the time, an estimated 150 rebels attacked about 40 personnel of Chhattisgarh Armed Police Force near Metapara in the state’s southernmost Sukma district. Police were out clearing jungle for a helipad.
Another plan—till a review becomes necessary, of course: massed attacks on camps of security forces were best not attempted. Instead, the use of improvised explosive devices was to be ramped up to target personnel in such clusters, backed by small “action teams” to harass troopers in camps. The meat of the approach was to inflict casualties for the primary reason of gathering weapons and ammunition to augment a squeezed supply line—and, two-birds-with-one-stone: underscore a statement of purpose.
Hours of daylight or dark, foliage and terrain to be leveraged for attack or defence; the strength or weakness of information and misinformation; the strength or weakness of numbers, network, ingenuity and fortitude, will drive such cat and Maoist forays. Troops on the ground, of the rebels and the state alike, know this well.
Sudeep Chakravarti’s latest book is Clear.Hold.Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India. His earlier
books include Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and
Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly
affect business, runs on Fridays.
books include Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and
Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly
affect business, runs on Fridays.
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