Opinion The Sukma warning

There is no room for carelessness or complacency in the fight against Maoists.

March 13, 2014 03:44 AM IST First published on: Mar 13, 2014 at 12:07 AM IST

There is no room for carelessness or complacency in the fight against Maoists.

Tuesday’s Maoist strike in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district, which led to the deaths of 15 security personnel deployed to protect road construction work, and one civilian, is the biggest attack launched by the leftwing extremists on security forces since 26 CRPF personnel were killed in an ambush in Narayanpur district in June 2010.

It is also the deadliest attack after last May’s ambush of a Congress convoy in the Darbha valley that led to 27 deaths. The attacks could be said to follow a pattern. Tuesday’s attack occurred barely 10 kilometres from the spot where the Congress convoy was attacked last May. Both attacks were timed for elections — Lok Sabha polls are round the corner now, while the Darbha attack took place amid the build-up to last year’s assembly polls.

There are reports that standard operating procedures (SOPs) were violated, again. The CRPF and state police had been forewarned through intelligence inputs about a large Naxal assembly in the area. Both on the ground and at the higher administrative and political levels, lessons have obviously not been learnt from the attacks and the patterns to which they apparently hew.
The Centre and the state must not only investigate the outrage on Tuesday, they must also deploy adequate force s

rength to ensure a secure environment for the upcoming general elections. The Sukma attack comes as a wake-up call at a time when the intensity of Maoist violence had appeared to be steadily declining. That decline — arguably in the face of the twin strategy of wide-ranging joint security operations begun in 2009 by Central paramilitary and state police forces and developmental outreach — had been confirmed by an internal document of the CPI(Maoist) last year that acknowledged an erosion of manpower and munitions as well as ideological reach.

For the state, as was underlined on Tuesday, there can be no room for complacency. There must be an urgent reassessment of the practices of security personnel on the ground and they must be educated anew about the inviolability of SOPs. At the same time, despite the temptations of the election season, political point-scoring must be avoided.

The Maoists will continue their guerrilla war as long as the state’s writ is not firmly re-established in the affected districts. They will not bid for peace until they find themselves completely outmanoeuvred and unable to sustain their fight. There can be no relenting in the project of reclaiming the physical space from the Maoists and restoring normalcy to people’s everyday lives.