Addressing a luncheon organised by the Consulate General of India and the
Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) at New York on May 17, 2005,
Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh said: "We are India's youngest,
smartest state without any liability from the past. We intend to become the
country's hottest investment destination." Heading a team of senior
officials, Raman Singh was pitching for foreign investment for his state, which
sits on some of India's richest mineral reserves of coal, iron ore, dolomite,
bauxite and limestone. Returning home after the trip, on May 27, Singh declared
that foreign investors would invest close to INR 56 billion in the coming months
in the state. The Chief Minister's boast may, however, seem somewhat incredible,
considering the security environment prevalent in Chhattisgarh.
On May 7, 2005, Naxalites of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist)
attacked the Samri Aluminum unit of Asia's largest primary producer of aluminum,
the Hindalco Industries Limited (a flagship company of the Aditya Birla Group)
at Saridih in the Surguja District, destroying the company's buildings and
documents. Following the attack, the Balrampur Superintendent of Police, Sitaram
Kaluri, stated that security forces involved in combing operations in the region
had earlier stayed in the company's residential premises, which may have
prompted the attack. However, this was not the first attack on the Hindalco
group by the Naxalites. On April 25, 2002, they had attacked Hindalco's Kutku
Bauxite mines in the Balrampur area, damaging machinery and equipment worth INR
20 million.
The latest assault did not end immediately. On May 8, in an attack reminiscent
of the Koraput incident of February 6, 2004, in Orissa, CPI-Maoist cadres
attacked the Kanker District Headquarters, setting afire buildings belonging to
the revenue and forest departments, as well as a branch of the State Bank of
India. The offensive was meticulous and according to Kanker Superintendent of
Police, Pradeep Gupta, "the attack was unexpected. The armed guerrillas
blocked all the roads leading to the incident site by felling trees on
roads." An interesting aspect in both the attacks - at the Hindalco unit
and in Kanker - was the reported involvement of more than 200 cadres in a
methodical operation, in both cases taking the security, corporate and
bureaucratic machinery by surprise.
With 43.7 per cent of the state under forest cover, and a 31.75 per cent tribal
population, Chhattisgarh has provided fertile ground for the Naxalites to
operate in and dominate. According to a recent state government intelligence
report, the Naxalites have become a "dominant force in nine of the 16
districts and have partial but fast growing impact in four districts".
Among the worst affected districts include Kanker, Dantewada, Bastar, Surguja,
Rajnandgaon, Koriya, Kawardha and Jashpur. The report has also predicted that
the Naxalites could capture nearly 60 percent of the state's land by 2010, if
decisive operations are not carried out by the Union government to dismantle
their bases.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)
Annual Report 2004-2005, "In Chhattisgarh, Naxal violence led by the
CPML-PW (Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist - People's War) sharply
increased during 2004. The increase was primarily on account of coordinated
Naxal attacks on police as a part of the CPML-PW/ MCCI (Maoist Communist Centre
of India)-led poll boycott campaign." The MHA report further stated that,
there were 37 fatalities in Naxalite violence in 2001; 55 in 2002; 74 in 2003;
and 83 in 2004. In 2005, according to the Institute for Conflict Management database,
till May 28, 16 security forces (SF) personnel, 11 civilians, and 3 Naxalites
have been killed in different incidents. The preponderance of SF fatalities in
2005 has been alarming and has been attributed by official sources to increasing
combing operations carried out in the districts of Kanker, Dantewada and Bastar,
in an apparent effort by the government to enter the 'liberated zone' (areas
where Maoist influence and activities are dominant).
In May 2005, a senior CPI-Maoist leader, Ayatu, speaking to the media in the
Bastar forest area had said, "Who said we are running parallel
administration? We have liberated some of our areas through our sustained
people's war in the Abujhmad (Abujhmar) area of Dandakaranya zone (of Bastar
region) where we have established people's governance." The local media has
often substantiated this claim with reports of the Naxalites administering a
'taxation' system in these areas; of police not venturing into the villages
after dark; and of government officials traveling in vehicles that bear a
'Press' sticker to avoid Naxalite attacks. Way back in 2000, (Chhattisgarh was
carved out of Madhya Pradesh in November 2000) the Madhya Pradesh's Commissioner
(Land Records) and Chief Conservator of Forests (Land Management) had admitted
in a report that the Naxalites had forcibly occupied 20,000 hectares of forest
area in the Bastar division and were running a parallel government there by
appointing their own 'rangers' and 'deputy rangers'.
Similarly, in other districts like Surguja, there have been recent reports of
sales tax officials leaving their inter-state check gates on the borders of
Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand well before sunset for fear of the Naxalites. In the
Bastar region, the Indian Army's Border Road Organisation's (BRO) attempt to
construct the 200 kilometer long national highway between Chhattisgarh and
Madhya Pradesh has hit bottlenecks due to Naxalite attacks.
Acknowledging the difficulties faced by the police in entering this 'liberated
zone', the state government had approached the Hyderabad-based National Remote
Sensing Agency (NRSA) in January 2005, to conduct a survey of the Abujhmar
Hills, in order to provide them with the geographical locations of the Naxalite
camps.
The Abujhmar Hills are located in the western part of Bastar District. The
terrain varies from 450 meters to 750 meters above sea level, is densely
forested, and comprises many high ridges and deep valleys created by numerous
streams, which provide an effective natural barrier from all sides, isolating it
from the rest of the region. The Hills are inhabited by the Maria tribes.
The task of recovering control and restoring governance in the Naxalite affected
areas of Chhattisgarh appears far from easy, as evidenced by the May 19, 2005,
incident, when senior police officials, supervising operations to enter the
Abujmarh Hills, came under heavy Naxalite attack at Narayanpur in the Bastar
District. Military helicopters were used to evacuate them.
The capacity to mount affective anti-Naxalite operations in the state is
undermined by low police strength. According to the Crime in India, 2003, report
published by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), for an estimated mid-year
population of 21,721,000 in Chhattisgarh, the police strength (civil and armed)
was 20,472; this yields a police-population ratio of 1:1,061. The all-India
ratio is 1:814, but in Delhi it goes up to 1:269; and in Mizoram: 1:129. [The
worst ratio in the country obtains in Bihar - 1:1,652]. In an attempt to
replenish this deficit, the Chhattisgarh government requested the Gujarat government to send police personnel to help man police stations when the local
police was sent out for combing operations. This request has apparently been
accepted, with Gujarat Director General of Police, A.K. Bhargava stating on May
4, that a battalion comprising six companies of the Special Armed Force would be
sent to Naxalite-affected areas in Chhattisgarh. A similar request has
reportedly been made to the Nagaland Government. Whether this will result in any
dramatic improvement in operational capacities remains to be seen. The presence
of outside troops often adds to disenchantment among the locals, and tends to
yield unreliable human intelligence.
Nevertheless, as the state government fires up its efforts to penetrate Naxalite
dominated areas in Chhattisgarh, the coming months may well see body counts
rising. For the government, the success of these operations is paramount if the
promised foreign investment is actually to materialize; investor confidence can
hardly be expected to improve as long as the Naxalites continue to function as
'a state within the state.'
Saji Cherian is Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management. Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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