Sometime in late February this year, the Maoist leadership convened a secret meeting in their redoubt deep inside the forests of Chhattisgarh. This meeting was attended by key leadership figures of the far-right CPI(Maoist) movement for one important reason. They green-lit a massive military strike against the state. On May 2, Intelligence Bureau (IB) alerted the Chhattisgarh government that Maoists in the Bastar area had regrouped and rearmed, and were ready for a major attack. But it did not say where in a district the size of Tripura.
The answer came on May 25 on a narrow winding path bordering Sukma, nearly 350 km south of the state capital Raipur. The Maoists launched one of their bloodiest attacks on a 25-vehicle convoy, killing 27 people including senior Congress leader Mahendra Karma, who founded the controversial civilian vigilante force Salwa Judum, Chhattisgarh Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel, his son Dinesh and former MLA Uday Mudliyar. Former Union minister Vidya Charan Shukla was seriously injured. Surprisingly, the Maoists allowed many of the security personnel-their usual targets-to escape. They knew they had made a bigger impact by killing prominent politicians.
The attack was coordinated with military precision by over 200 cadres, including several women armed with automatic rifles who radioed instructions over walkie-talkies. The Maoist equivalent of an army battalion ambushed the lightly guarded convoy. They remained there for over two hours, picking and choosing key leaders, inflicting medieval brutality on them. Karma was reportedly stabbed 78 times in the face as Maoists danced on his body. Patel and his son were led away, clubbed and shot to death, their brains spilling on the forest floor. It was India's first physical elimination of virtually the entire state opposition leadership.
This was not the first spectacular strike by the Maoists since they declared war on the Indian state in 2004. They massacred 76 CRPF troopers in Chintalnar, Chhattisgarh, in 2009 and grievously wounded then Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu in a October 2003 ambush on his convoy. But this was the first large-scale targeting of political leadership, whom Maoist spokesperson Gudsa Usendi called "enemies of the people" in a May 26 press release. In the four-page press release, Usendi signed off with nine names on the Maoist hit list that included Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, Governor Shekhar Dutt, Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil and senior Chhattisgarh police brass, with a mafia-style chilling line: 'They're not safe.'
The Elusive Mastermind
Police officials in Chhattisgarh say the orders for this targeted killing of politicians almost certainly flowed down from the top of the Maoist pyramidical structure: The politburo. Muppala Lakshman Rao, 63, as general secretary heading the Maoists' 14-member central committee, was personally seen supervising the training of the cadres in Bastar. Also known as Ganapathy ('leader of the forces'), he has been responsible for the resurgence of the Maoists after a two-year lull. Under him, specialists from Andhra Pradesh had started training cadre formations of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army in the recesses of Bijapur and Sukma districts.
The swarthy, soft-spoken and bespectacled Ganapathy is an unlikely leader of one of Asia's largest guerrilla armies. The former schoolteacher from Karimnagar, Andhra Pradesh, commands 10,000 armed cadres who operate in a 40,000 km swathe across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Bihar. Yet he remains a shadowy figure who was sighted last in Rourkela and Behrampur in 2002 and 2003. He carries a reward of Rs.24 lakh on his head but all intelligence agencies have is a grainy picture from 1977 when he was arrested for violence and arson in Jagtial, Karimnagar. The Chhattisgarh police want him on 44 counts of murder, attempt to murder and waging war against the state.
Ganapathy jumped bail in 1979 and has never been seen in public since. Cast in the mould of a publicity-shy Maoist leader, he operates from the backwoods of Bastar ringed by a group of 25 militants and rarely leaves the area because of the fear of capture. Hailing from an upper caste Velama farmer's family in Beerpur, Andhra Pradesh, Ganapathy joined the Naxalite movement in 1979 and swiftly rose through the ranks, rising to the all-important Central Organising Committee of the People's War Group in 1990. By 2004, Ganapathy had welded all the disparate Naxalite groups into CPI(Maoist) and emerged as the unchallenged leader of a formidable force which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005 called "the single biggest threat to internal security".
Intelligence sources say the Maoist supremo fine-tuned his strategy of expanding Maoist reach and exhausting security forces by dispersing them over a wider area, at the post-election review of the CPI(Maoist) politburo meeting in June 2009. He also called for stepping up tactical counter-offensives (or TCOCS, like the May 25 strike) "and expand to new areas to divert a section of the enemy forces from attacking our guerrilla bases and organs of political power". The ultimate aim of the Maoist insurgency is the overthrow of the Indian state by 2050.
Losing the Plot
Yet, the Government response to the Bastar bloodbath was knee-jerk. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi flew into Raipur within hours of the strike. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh dubbed the Maoists "terrorists" and Minister of State for Home RPN Singh, standing in for a holidaying Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, vowed a tough response. Raman Singh announced a three-day state mourning, and a probe by the National Investigating Agency. "The next few months will see a step-up in violence by the Maoists because of the spate of state elections culminating in the General Elections next year," predicts P.V. Ramana of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses.
While the Maoists have been constantly updating their deadly strategy, the Government has no strategy at all. Home ministry assessments have careened from the wooly-headed to the wildly optimistic. In 2004, then home minister Shivraj Patil called them "misguided children". At the India Today Conclave in 2010, then home minister P. Chidambaram said: "I am confident that before UPA's second term ends, we will be able to get rid of the Maoist menace."
The facts on the ground prove otherwise. In just five years, the Maoists have killed six times the cadres they have lost in five years: 1,325 security personnel versus 905 Maoists; 2,031 civilians have been killed in this period. In Chhattisgarh, 46 security personnel were killed in 2012, the lowest in five years. But former state DGP Vishwaranjan says this is because the number of operations against Maoists has actually gone down significantly in the past two years. The Salwa Judum militia was also outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2008.
"There is utter confusion in the Government as to how to deal with the problem-as a law and order problem or a socio-economic problem," says a senior security official. "When this confusion translates on the ground, there is complete chaos." The home ministry's strategy to 'clear-hold-build' is suffering because it lacks adequate numbers to either clear areas of Maoists or hold onto the areas and allow for building roads, schools and hospitals in Maoist-held regions. The home ministry has deployed only 22,000 paramilitary personnel against a requirement of 125,000 security personnel in Chhattisgarh. The Counter Terrorism & Jungle Warfare College at Kanker, Chhattisgarh, has trained over 22,000 personnel but only 3,000 are deputed in Naxal areas, most wriggling out of difficult postings for safer places.
The only option for the Government, say intelligence officials, is to target the Maoist leadership in precise intelligence-based operations. This strategy has been successfully employed by the Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh, whose inputs led to the arrests of key Maoist leaders such as Kobad Ghandy in 2009 and the 'encounter' killing of Cherukuri Raj Kumar aka Azad in 2010. Chhattisgarh Police does not even have a dossier on Ganapathy.
The answer came on May 25 on a narrow winding path bordering Sukma, nearly 350 km south of the state capital Raipur. The Maoists launched one of their bloodiest attacks on a 25-vehicle convoy, killing 27 people including senior Congress leader Mahendra Karma, who founded the controversial civilian vigilante force Salwa Judum, Chhattisgarh Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel, his son Dinesh and former MLA Uday Mudliyar. Former Union minister Vidya Charan Shukla was seriously injured. Surprisingly, the Maoists allowed many of the security personnel-their usual targets-to escape. They knew they had made a bigger impact by killing prominent politicians.
The attack was coordinated with military precision by over 200 cadres, including several women armed with automatic rifles who radioed instructions over walkie-talkies. The Maoist equivalent of an army battalion ambushed the lightly guarded convoy. They remained there for over two hours, picking and choosing key leaders, inflicting medieval brutality on them. Karma was reportedly stabbed 78 times in the face as Maoists danced on his body. Patel and his son were led away, clubbed and shot to death, their brains spilling on the forest floor. It was India's first physical elimination of virtually the entire state opposition leadership.
This was not the first spectacular strike by the Maoists since they declared war on the Indian state in 2004. They massacred 76 CRPF troopers in Chintalnar, Chhattisgarh, in 2009 and grievously wounded then Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu in a October 2003 ambush on his convoy. But this was the first large-scale targeting of political leadership, whom Maoist spokesperson Gudsa Usendi called "enemies of the people" in a May 26 press release. In the four-page press release, Usendi signed off with nine names on the Maoist hit list that included Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, Governor Shekhar Dutt, Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil and senior Chhattisgarh police brass, with a mafia-style chilling line: 'They're not safe.'
The Elusive Mastermind
The swarthy, soft-spoken and bespectacled Ganapathy is an unlikely leader of one of Asia's largest guerrilla armies. The former schoolteacher from Karimnagar, Andhra Pradesh, commands 10,000 armed cadres who operate in a 40,000 km swathe across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Bihar. Yet he remains a shadowy figure who was sighted last in Rourkela and Behrampur in 2002 and 2003. He carries a reward of Rs.24 lakh on his head but all intelligence agencies have is a grainy picture from 1977 when he was arrested for violence and arson in Jagtial, Karimnagar. The Chhattisgarh police want him on 44 counts of murder, attempt to murder and waging war against the state.
Ganapathy jumped bail in 1979 and has never been seen in public since. Cast in the mould of a publicity-shy Maoist leader, he operates from the backwoods of Bastar ringed by a group of 25 militants and rarely leaves the area because of the fear of capture. Hailing from an upper caste Velama farmer's family in Beerpur, Andhra Pradesh, Ganapathy joined the Naxalite movement in 1979 and swiftly rose through the ranks, rising to the all-important Central Organising Committee of the People's War Group in 1990. By 2004, Ganapathy had welded all the disparate Naxalite groups into CPI(Maoist) and emerged as the unchallenged leader of a formidable force which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005 called "the single biggest threat to internal security".
Intelligence sources say the Maoist supremo fine-tuned his strategy of expanding Maoist reach and exhausting security forces by dispersing them over a wider area, at the post-election review of the CPI(Maoist) politburo meeting in June 2009. He also called for stepping up tactical counter-offensives (or TCOCS, like the May 25 strike) "and expand to new areas to divert a section of the enemy forces from attacking our guerrilla bases and organs of political power". The ultimate aim of the Maoist insurgency is the overthrow of the Indian state by 2050.
Losing the Plot
While the Maoists have been constantly updating their deadly strategy, the Government has no strategy at all. Home ministry assessments have careened from the wooly-headed to the wildly optimistic. In 2004, then home minister Shivraj Patil called them "misguided children". At the India Today Conclave in 2010, then home minister P. Chidambaram said: "I am confident that before UPA's second term ends, we will be able to get rid of the Maoist menace."
The facts on the ground prove otherwise. In just five years, the Maoists have killed six times the cadres they have lost in five years: 1,325 security personnel versus 905 Maoists; 2,031 civilians have been killed in this period. In Chhattisgarh, 46 security personnel were killed in 2012, the lowest in five years. But former state DGP Vishwaranjan says this is because the number of operations against Maoists has actually gone down significantly in the past two years. The Salwa Judum militia was also outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2008.
"There is utter confusion in the Government as to how to deal with the problem-as a law and order problem or a socio-economic problem," says a senior security official. "When this confusion translates on the ground, there is complete chaos." The home ministry's strategy to 'clear-hold-build' is suffering because it lacks adequate numbers to either clear areas of Maoists or hold onto the areas and allow for building roads, schools and hospitals in Maoist-held regions. The home ministry has deployed only 22,000 paramilitary personnel against a requirement of 125,000 security personnel in Chhattisgarh. The Counter Terrorism & Jungle Warfare College at Kanker, Chhattisgarh, has trained over 22,000 personnel but only 3,000 are deputed in Naxal areas, most wriggling out of difficult postings for safer places.
The only option for the Government, say intelligence officials, is to target the Maoist leadership in precise intelligence-based operations. This strategy has been successfully employed by the Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh, whose inputs led to the arrests of key Maoist leaders such as Kobad Ghandy in 2009 and the 'encounter' killing of Cherukuri Raj Kumar aka Azad in 2010. Chhattisgarh Police does not even have a dossier on Ganapathy.
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