Jailhouse Rocked

The Orissa government has long claimed that the Maoistproblem in the state is only a ‘spill over’ from neighbouring states, withno significant roots among the local communities, but this has, once again, beendemonstrably proven wrong. In a surprise attack reminiscent of the February 2004attack at Koraput in Orissa, and the more recent overrunning of the JehanabadDistrict sub-jail in Bihar in November 2005, an estimated 200 armedcadres of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist), including women andsome sympathisers, attacked the sub-jail in the Ramagiri Udayagiri town of theGajapati district in southern Orissa on March 24, 2006, and freed 40 prisoners,including Ghirsinga Majhi, a senior Maoist leader. 

The Maoists who laid siege to the town from two directionssimultaneously attacked the Police Station, the Camp of the 3rd Battalion of theOrissa state Armed Police (OSAP), the treasury, the Tehsildar’s (juniorrevenue officer) office and a telecom tower. The Maoists "pulled down" thejail gates to help the 40 prisoners, including four hardcore Maoists, to escape.Three Police personnel were killed and three others injured during the exchangeof fire, which lasted three entire hours, at the end of which they simplyescaped unimpeded. The Maoists also abducted the Officer-in-Charge of the policestation, Ranjan Kumar Mallick, and the jailor Rabinarayan Sethi. There was noinformation on their whereabouts till the time of writing.

In a face-saving statement, Director-General of PoliceSuchit Das stated that, in the exchange of fire at the Police camp, at leastthree Maoists, including a woman, were killed, but that their bodies were‘taken away’. According to District Collector Binod Bihari Mohanty, whoescaped with his life by taking refuge inside a guard’s house, the Maoistslooted 25 self-loading rifles, a pistol, a light machine gun and an AK-47 rifle,and also burnt stamp papers worth nearly Rupees 40 lakh in the treasury.

The Naxalites approached the town from two directions infive small trucks and a few light vehicles, allegedly hijacked at Nuagada. Theyretreated after the attack via Saralapadar into the deep jungles. Before theattack, the Naxalites had disconnected telephone lines to most of the offices,disrupted power supply in the town and blocked the entry point of the town byfelling trees and pushing boulders on to the road. According to locals, about150 to 200 Maoists had set up camp at the Saralapadara Bridge construction sitesince the night of March 23. Interestingly, the Maoists’ presence in thisarea, only nine kilometers from R. Udayagiri, went undetected by the police.Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik told the Legislative Assembly on March 24 that theMaoists were believed to have come from the Vizianagaram district of AndhraPradesh and conversed in Telugu, Hindi and Soura (a tribal dialect).

The attack was the second time the Maoists had overrun atown in southern Orissa in two years. On February 6, 2004, the Maoists hadoverrun the district headquarters of Koraput and looted arms and ammunition fromthe armory. In the same year, the Maoists also attacked the Malkangiri policestation and the Narayanpur police station in Rayagada district. A year earlier,the Kalimela police station in Malkangiri district had been targeted. In year2002, the Golpadar police station in Rayagada district had been attacked. Thereis a uniformity of pattern in these attacks across different states, reflectinga strategic design that goes well beyond the immediate objectives of freeingMaoist prisoners, looting arms and demoralizing the police and administration.In significant measure, these are ‘blooding’ operations, in which largenumbers of cadres are being exposed to ‘military operations’ that wouldprepare them for a wider and coordinated mobilization across the entire‘Maoist corridor’ along India’s eastern board.

Incidentally, Chief Minister Patnaik had informed theLegislative Assembly on March 17 that, as a preventive measure to counter theMaoists who were operating in parts of 14 districts with an estimated 500 armedcadres, fortification of police stations in Maoist-affected areas had been takenup. "Most of the police stations have already been fortified. The remainingones are likely to be fortified within the next two years," the Chief Ministerdisclosed. He stated further that a ‘multi-pronged strategy’ was beingadopted to deal with the problem by setting up a Special Intelligence Wing andSpecial Operations Group. On modernisation of the police force, the ChiefMinister claimed that the government had performed much better than many statesas it had spent over 90 per cent of the funds provided by the union government.It had received INR 2.69 billion and had spent INR 2.34 billion, and effortswere being made to increase police manpower in the state, which at present is at92 policemen per 100,000 population, well below the national average of 123 per100,000.

In the five years ending 2003-2004, the Orissa governmenthad an allocation of INR 3.05 billion under the modernisation grant from theunion government (the state also bears a matching share), but this does notappear to have improved its muscle to contain the Maoists. Surprisingly, theshare of the Maoist-affected Districts in the entire modernisation grants wasless than five per cent. In fact, the modernisation grants do not have anyspecific head of expenditure for anti-Maoist measures. The state government, inits 2005 budget, did not indicate any allocation for Security RelatedExpenditure. Later, INR 40 million was placed under this head in theSupplementary Budget, which was presented in the last session of the stateAssembly. The lackadaisical approach to the Maoist threat is more than inevidence in the patterns of resource allocation and utilization.

There is, however, nothing lackadaisical about the Maoists,who are now extending their reach much faster than ever before in Orissa. Whilelevels of violence remain low, the pace of Maoist consolidation has acceleratedrapidly in regions where there has been some displacement of people due to megaindustrial, mining and hydroelectric projects. According to the Institute forSocio-Economic Development at least 81,176 families from 1,446 villages havebeen affected by various projects since the early 1950s, as the governmentacquired a total of 622,463.94 hectares of land from them. "People uprootedfrom their old habitat due to the development projects feel that the authoritieshad failed to restructure their livelihood base in accordance with their needsand aspirations. They feel neglected and alienated," the study noted. Institutefor Conflict Management data indicates that at least 28 tribals were killedin police firing during tribal protests at various places, including in Maikanch,Raigarh, Mandrabaju and Kalinga Nagar, over the past five years, including 13 inthe disastrous incident of January 2, 2006, while they were protesting againsttheir ‘ouster’ to accommodate a proposed Tata Steel plant in Kalinga Nagar,Jajpur District. The neglect that the tribal people of the state have faced overthe years makes them particularly vulnerable to Maoist mobilisation.

A white paper on the law and order situation tabled in thestate Assembly on March 17, 2006 stated, "Naxalite activities, which werereported from southern and northern districts of the state, have affected lawand order situation of the state. Of the 30 districts of the state, Naxaliteswere active in 14 districts in 2005." Expressing alarm on the growinginfluence of Maoists, it noted, further: "After spreading their influencein bordering Districts such as Sundargarh, Keonjhar, Sambalpur, Deogarh andMayurbhanj, the Naxalites were trying to establish their foothold in Dhenkanal,Jajpur and other districts."

The latest incident demonstrates the enormous inefficiencyof the state administration in approaching the problem. In February 2006, ahigh-level meeting presided over by the Principal Secretary of Home, SantoshKumar, in Bhubaneswar, had discussed the intelligence inputs on the Maoist plansto attack six jails where some Maoists had been imprisoned. Reports suggest thatmore than 150 CPI-Maoist cadres are lodged in six jails in Rourkela, Baripada,Sambalpur, Koraput, Rayagada and Malkangiri. All District Police chiefs of theMaoist-affected areas had been directed to keep strict vigil on the movement ofMaoist under-trial prisoners. Instructions had also been issued to beef upsecurity in and outside the prisons and strengthen the rooftop guard system.

Further, the Gajapati District – within which R.Udayagiri lies – has officially been identified as a highly Maoist-affectedfor some time now. Yet, the OSAP barrack was not only ill-equipped but wasmanned by just 25 personnel, who lacked adequate ammunition to meet the Maoist'challenge. Nor was the jail adequately protected. While the Maoists use rocketlaunchers to destroy police stations in Gajapati, the District Police sufferfrom serious deficiencies in weapons, communications, infrastructure andmanpower. Of the 70 police vehicles available in the district, 10 are not inoperational condition and, for the remaining 60 vehicles only 20 drivers areavailable. As many as 59 police positions up to the sub-inspector rank arevacant in the district, and the district has only three platoons of Armed Policeand one Grey Hound squad to counter the Maoists.

The Maoists have a strong presence in the Gajapatidistrict, operating through a front organization, the Lok Sangram Manch(People’s Revolutionary Front), as well as their ‘military wing’, thePraja Bimukti Sainya (People’s Liberation Army, now the People’s LiberationGuerilla Army). The primary functions of these organizations at present are toorganize village meetings, campaign against government policies, recruit newcadres, organize training programmes, and, eventually, to engage in ‘armedstruggle’. The Gajapati and Rayagada districts fall under the Andhra-OrissaBorder Regional Committee of the CPI-Maoist and there are two armed squads (Udanamand Kondabaridi) active in the area.

The decision to attack the jail in R. Udayagiri waspossibly taken in November somewhere in the forests of Malkangiri. During theAnnual Day celebration of the 5th PLGA on December 2, 2005, in Rayagada, theCPI-Maoist’s ‘Orissa state Secretary’, Sunil, had declared that the outfitwould intensify the guerilla war and convert it into the ‘mobile warfare’stage in the state.

The R. Udayagiri attack reflects a pattern that willincrease in frequency in the foreseeable future in India’s ill-protected mofussiltowns within the ‘Maoist corridor’, and demonstrates the failure of both thestates and the centre in evolving an effective counter-terrorist strategy in theface of a rising onslaught. The Maoist rampage has intensified under a complexof policy failures, a failure to secure effective policy and operationalcoordination between states as well as with the centre, persistent neglect ofthe fundamentals of policing, and, most significantly, the absence of a coherentperspective on the problem. With little signs of any emerging unity ofperspective within government at various levels, and as the Maoists augmenttheir campaign of militarization across their areas of influence, a necessaryand dramatic escalation in violence becomes inevitable.

Nihar Nayak is Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management.Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia TerrorismPortal