Paaji, there are points to which i do not agree on.
1 you do not want a near one third of the country under armed forces special act, possibly the territory covered will be more when NE, and J&K are added upto the naxal infested areas.
Admittedly it would be a daunting task but lets see the problems-solutions and positives of the same.
Problem: Armed Forces are inapt at policing and maintaining good civil relationships. They are not trained for law and order. Armed forces would be given excessive sweeping powers, state government would be reduced to a puppet and growing disaffection will sweep in.
Solution: Let Armed Forces be given a specific short time frame. Say 3-6 months. A Maj General would directly report to the EGOM chaired by the PM. Since Army is not prone to meddling and with a clear mandate given to them they can concentrate on the job on hand whole heartedly.
Problem: Armed Forces are not good at holding territories indefinitely, they have lower psychological threshold for casualities.
Solution: Our armed forces have vast experience in successful COIN ops, in similar territories as such their personnel our best suited for tackling Maoist insurgencies. Comparatively the Paramilitary services staffed with personnel with IPS training are not as efficient at COIN. So there can be a few mixed brigades where Paramilitary men participate with the army and gain valuable combat experience and hasten their learning curve.
Armed Forces are also the only ones with huge budgets and high levels of equipment. Equipping state government would be a long arduous task. Armed forces can rush in tanks, APCs, use Napalm bombs to clear wooded areas etc. They can break the maoist ranks even before the fighting begins.
2 Armed forces do not look keen and the primary reason is the complexity that pak army faced when they took on the ttp. You saw desertions, the lower ranks objected to take on their own people, at a time of conflict the army suspects this could mean people not voluntarily willing to join the armed forces, and possibly with the naxals up the ante against the state if India were to get involved in a conflict with pakistan.
Don’t forget Taliban have fought side by side Pak soldiers in Astan.
Indian Army has been involved in COIN earlier and it has been successful at it too. Indian Govt for the sake of integrity of the republic has never hesitated to (kill or) “be killed”. This is the difference b/w Pak and India.
The Government of India’s threshold to suffer causalities is inordinately high, the civilians not so much. A look at the statistics of the lives lost in insurgencies will confirm this.
The Army is however incapable of providing a “government”. It can make matters worse if it stays for long. They need to be replaced with Paramilitary and Reserve Police as soon as they have liberated the territory. By providing a short term deployment of the Armed Forces we can test out our real world multi-front approach too.
Pak army could turn the tide by putting in the Indian angle where they started painting the ttp as a India backed militia force, we cant do the same because of the likes of arundhati roy’s and the human right activists who have a strangle hold on media is bound to create a backlash from the people who help create a public opinion and put the government in a dock and as a suspect. We also don’t want to stretch the army when they already have been big time.
One just had to watch ndtv late at night when 6/4 happened, timing I think was around 2-3 am and they did a hour long report absolutely similar to the essay arundhati roy did for outlook, painting the security forces as the real culprits, in the process portraying naxals as the innocents and this when 76 of our men had been massacred and the time gone by was not even 24hours.
Thakur sahib, the killing of 76 soldiers has turned the tide against Maoists. For a long time they have stayed under the radar. By committing small acts they were treated as a nuisance as their escapades rarely made it to the news. This news has been a wake up call for the slumbering India and also “internationalised” the issue.
Civil Society has made it clear before that Maoists need to be routed and after this incident is clear that they need to be routed “yesterday”. Government is a better judge of people’s mood.
3 i have possibly not read about the naxal movement as much as i have in the past one week and seriously the more i read and the more I hear of the experts the more convinced I get this is a state subject to be fully supported by the center and which can be easily quashed by the state police. At least sarabjit sen, ex dgp Andhra, under whom the naxal movement was wiped off, though not completely since these naxals are now suspected to be behind the tenangana movement, but still right from 2006 onwards up till 2009 they did away with this nuisance. And they did it without any outside support, be it the army or the para military. It all boils down to political will, which sadly is missing, and leadership by the cops.
Agree but then again a problem comes. Maoists easily slip into neighbouring states. Either all states come onboard which is tough because of the dominance of regional, ethnic, caste parties in these states.
Yes, we have all been shaken and taken over by the sheer enormity of this massacre but the thing is the security personnel are certainly not on the back foot and things have changed to what they were when shivraj patil was around, though initially chidu was focused on the terrorism directed from Pakistan but he has got his act together on the naxal menace. For the first time these naxals are surrendering in other states, so it is not only that one kills them but there remain other ways as well to get over them. things are not as bad as have been portrayed, its just that media is talking about it for the first time at such a level (media coverage equated to 26/11....??) so we get a feel as if the earth has shaken.
Absolutely. I mean stories of Yuvraj Singh’s nightly escapades used to get more coverage than Naxal movement till before this ghastly incident.
4, 5, 6 yes this is something I completely agree with and two states where this needs to be done is jharkhand where 20 of the 24 districts are infested and that idiot cm is not even ready to acknowledge this menace, the second one bihar, nitish is acting too pricy because the state elections are round the corner. But for presidents rule you need the support in the parliament which will be hard to come by because if this is done in these two states then that will make the left jittery and that will cast a doubt in the minds of the left in WB and they might suspect that they will be the next to go, so they will not support and with bjp in the government in both bihar and jh, they are sure to create a ruckus and not let this happen.
no state government will give up the power, they are all too greedy, and all the infested states are ones governed by non-congress political outfits.
Yes this is a major problem. Chidambaram is a capable fellow but unfortunately as I had pointed out that he is powerless to do anything. He can only provide security he can’t direct them. All the states have to be brought onboard but how ? And Congress lacks the numbers at the centre to do anything to radical too. But this is the same govt which risked all for the nuclear deal, can this govt risk itself for fighting the Red Menace?