{"id":33470,"date":"2010-04-17T11:48:33","date_gmt":"2010-04-17T11:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.tehelka.com\/?p=33470"},"modified":"2010-04-17T11:48:33","modified_gmt":"2010-04-17T11:48:33","slug":"war-games-people-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/war-games-people-play\/","title":{"rendered":"War Games People Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026Something has gone drastically wrong. [The CRPF men] seem to have walked into a trap set by the Naxalites.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>\u2014 <\/em>Home Minister P Chidambaram, on the Maoists\u2019 killing of 75 paramilitary men and a policeman in Chhattisgarh on April 6
\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Last Nail?<\/strong>\u00a0Plywood coffins being readied to carry the casualties of an uncivil war.\u00a0Photographs by: Shailendra Pandey<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nIT LITERALLY<\/strong> is the dead of the night. \u201cBastards,\u201d spits the lowly officer, his vest soaked with sweat, the surgical mask now lowered to his chin, tired eyes bloodshot with rage, the furious voice a whisper, for who wants to talk around sixty-one coffins being filled with dead men so many of who you knew by nicknames? Laced with chemicals, wrapped as mummies, the bodies brought from their mass autopsy are lowered into the plywood caskets that were banged together all evening. Silent young men nail the lids shut and load them onto trucks.
\nSurprisingly, or perhaps not, the officer\u2019s vitriol is flung not at the Maoists who had hours earlier inflicted the biggest casualty on the uniformed men in their four-decade-long insurgency. Instead, the officer is beyond mad with the government \u201cbecause it knows nothing here and will get us all killed\u201d. What he doesn\u2019t say, because he doesn\u2019t know, is that the government doesn\u2019t care either.
\nYou would imagine a government that proclaims the slain men as martyrs and tops their coffins with the Indian tricolor for Chidambaram\u2019s photo-op a few hours later would be moved to a nightlong wake for the dead; that its politicians and officers \u2014 both uniformed and civilian \u2014 would lead from the front to recoup from this terrible tragedy and rebuild the morale of their foot soldiers; that, grieving and in solidarity, they would swarm the makeshift mortuary, that at least some would go sit beside the hospital beds of three heroic survivors.
\nAfter all, the dead gave their lives so that, to borrow from Chidambaram\u2019s rhetoric, \u201cthe writ of the State\u201d could run in the forests of Chhattisgarh. But at 2 am on April 7, hours before Chidambaram\u2019s farewell to the dead and barely 18 hours after the CRPF combatants were gunned down, it is only the angry lowly officer, a sub-inspector, representing the State at this government hospital at Jagdalpur town, 150 km north of the site of the deadly Maoist attack. It must be said that he is here on his own and not detailed for the job.
\nNo chief minister, no state home minister, no other minister, no member of Parliament, no MLA, no director-general of police (Vishwa Ranjan, a man popular with journalists in all seasons), no chief secretary, no home secretary, no inspector-general (TJ Longkumer, who Chidambaram later told journalists had planned the dead men\u2019s fatal foray into the forests), no district magistrate (frenzied a few hours later as reporters surged at Chidambaram\u2019s press conference because he didn\u2019t want anyone to throw a shoe at the Union home minister), no superintendent of police, not one high-ranking officer of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), to which 75 of the dead belonged, were here; just the very angry CRPF sub-inspector. \u201cThey were like my children,\u201d he says.
\nTypically, the survivors mattered less than the dead. Head Constable Raj Bahadur and Constables Pramod Kumar Singh and Baljeet Singh are lucky to survive the carnage, having taken bullets everywhere but in the guts. A hundred paces from the mortuary, they lie writhing in pain on dirty hospital linen stained from previous occupants\u2019 dried blood. Only one has a mosquito net. There are no doctors or nurses. Two constables who\u2019ve come on their own watch over their wounded mates. The ward is a hovel; the toilet is a stinking blocked drain. \u201cOur officers are home sleeping,\u201d an attendant says.
\n[cycloneslider id=”shahid”]
\nFive hours later, just minutes before Chidambaram and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh visit the heroes, bureaucrats and the hospital\u2019s administrators fuss in panic over the non-functioning air-conditioning. \u201cCan\u2019t it run for just 15 minutes?\u201d asks one. Bottles of intravenous fluids now hang from their stands, their needles pushed into the arms of the wounded. These weren\u2019t here six hours earlier. The linen has changed. The hovel is now spic and span. A couple hours later, Chidambaram chokes at a press conference, grieving the dead and expressing his resolve to wipe out the Maoists.
\nDRASTICALLY WRONG<\/span><\/strong>
\nPerhaps bigger than the tragedy that befell the men who died in the Maoist attack is the tragedy of Chidambaram beginning to fall for his own rhetoric. This is the classic case of the emperor that had no clothes but none would tell him the naked truth. Tuesday\u2019s horrific killings should jolt Chidambaram and his government into realising that rhetoric is not the reality, that his paramilitary men are sitting ducks for the Maoists just about anywhere, anytime. Instead, he continues to claim that the security forces would wipe out the Maoists in three years.
\n\u201cWe salute the brave jawans who have laid down their lives in the defence of freedom, liberty and democracy,\u201d a solemn Chidambaram said at the press conference, reading from a text. Then the rhetoric and the hubris surged: \u201cLet us not forget that the goal of the Naxalites is to overthrow the established authority of the government through armed liberation struggle. We cannot, and we shall not, allow them to succeed in that goal\u2026 The State has a legitimate right to deploy its security forces to resist, apprehend and, if necessary, neutralise militants who are determined to strike at the very roots of our nation.\u201d
\nChidambaram also claimed that a fuller account of what happened during the April 6 attack on the CRPF patrol would emerge from the \u201cdebriefing of the injured jawans\u201d, which might happen at a later stage. This reporter already spoke at length with the wounded CRPF men at the hospital on the night of the attack, hours before Chidambaram visited them. Their accounts are a shocking testimony to an utter lack of preparedness to meet the Maoists.
\nTo begin with, at least 48 of the 82 men in the ill-fated CRPF patrol that the Maoists fired upon had zero knowledge about the area they had been patrolling for one day and two nights before the fateful morning. These 48 men belonged to the Alpha Company of the CRPF, which had transferred to the local camp of the paramilitary at a location named Chintalnar only a week before the attack.
\nThat these personnel, unfamiliar with the nearby forests the Maoists heavily dominate, were sent out for a three-day \u201carea domination exercise\u201d can only be described as a suicide mission. \u201cWhen the firing began,\u201d says Constable Pramod Kumar Singh, 28, \u201cwe had no chance.\u201d Pramod and Head Constable Raj Bahadur, both from Alpha Company, did not know east from west at the site. \u201cThe Maoists were everywhere,\u201d says Bahadur. \u201cOn the hill on the left and on the hill on the right, on the trees, and behind us. Everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

18 hours after the CRPF combatants were gunned down, only an angry, lowly sub-inspector represents the state at the makeshift mortuary<\/strong><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, the patrol\u2019s journey over the two nights was a virtual advertisement of their itinerary. The 82-man party had left its camp at Chintalnar on the evening of April 4 and headed for a village 12 km away for a \u201csearch operation\u201d. That is CRPF-speak for banging doors in a village and rounding up folks there for grilling and sometimes worse. By 11 pm, it had retreated close to its camp and halted the night outside another village.
\nThe party slept around midnight and was up at 2 am, and had left in another hour. The next day, too, was spent in \u201csearch\u201d across several villages. The night of April 5, it halted outside another village, sleeping again in the open after the community cooking and dining. Once again, it was up at 2 am and had begun its march an hour later. Around 5.30 am, the Maoists attacked it. It is stunning that the CRPF war room strategists failed to realise that they were making the men vulnerable to Maoist attacks by making them stay out two consecutive nights in a location most men in the patrol did not know.
\nWALKING INTO A TRAP<\/span>
\n<\/strong>Indeed, two things emerged from conversations with CRPF personnel at Jagdalpur. One, such \u201carea domination exercises\u201d cannot possibly be run for three days without a very high risk of being attacked. And two, it is absurd to have only 80-odd men in a three-day patrol that\u2019s entirely on its own, away from the camp. \u201cThere should have been at least 500 men in that party,\u201d said a CRPF constable of the Alpha Company who was not in the party attacked upon on Tuesday but had been involved in an offensive last September. \u201cThis team was outnumbered by at least one to five.\u201d
\nOf course, what is even more embarrassing for the government is that the Maoists attacked barely 4 km from the CRPF camp in south Dantewada district. In fact, this is an area where a 50-km stretch has four CRPF camps as well as numerous government-run refugee camps to which tens of thousands of the tribal people have been forcibly brought since 2005 by the controversial governmentbacked Salwa Judum militia that is drawn from among the tribal people.
\nGiven that the vast southern region of Chhattisgarh where the Maoists have a free run is bigger than Kerala, just what does the State control if the Maoists finish off an entire patrol 4 km from a full-fledged CRPF camp? (In fact, the attack site is only a kilometre from a path much traversed by the CRPF.) Three hours into the Maoist attack, a rescue vehicle \u2014 a modified Tata 407 known as \u2018bunker\u2019 that is supposedly bombproof \u2014 started from the camp to evacuate the holed-out personnel. The Maoists blasted an IED through it, killing its driver \u2014 just 2 km from the camp. Chidambaram acknowledged that the Maoists fired at and stopped rescue parties from reaching the location.<\/p>\n

Survivors remember maoists roaming among the fallen men. The rebels took away their weapons and wireless sets<\/strong><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chillingly, the survivors remember the Maoists roaming among the fallen men after the shooting ended, possibly four hours later. \u201cI heard men, women and even children,\u201d says Raj Bahadur. \u201cI kept my head down and pretended to be dead.\u201d Every man in the CRPF patrol had held a weapon. These included about 60 INSAS rifles, 10 AK-47 assault rifles, 10 SLRs, four SLRs with improvised grenadelaunchers, 40 bombs and four mortar guns. The patrol also had 15 wireless sets. The Maoists took away everything. The rescue parties, including from the Chintalnar camp, began arriving much later.
\nCANNON FODDER<\/span><\/strong>
\nIt is common knowledge that the rebels know the forests like the back of their palms because they were born here, that they most possibly have the backing of an overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of the tribal people living across more than 20,000 sq km. On the other hand, the few thousand CRPF men here hail from all over India, and have lived here only months, if that.
\nOf the 61 coffins laid out for Chidambaram\u2019s send-off (15 other bodies, brought to Jagdalpur on April 7, could not be autopsied before his arrival), 31 men belonged to Uttar Pradesh. Others came afar, from Assam to Kerala. Two officers who perished in the assault \u2014 Deputy Commandant Satyavan Singh and Assistant Commandant Bajrang Lal Meena (who headed the Alpha Company) \u2014 were from Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan. The forests were never theirs. Only two coffins bore names native to Chhattisgarh.
\nIn any case, it is not as if the slain men had been trained in jungle warfare specifically for Chhattisgarh. Surviving Constable Baljeet Singh, 26, who joined the CRPF in 2007 and was among the few men from the Charlie Company in the fated patrol, says he was trained in the forests near Jalandhar in Punjab, and only a month there. The forests of Chhattisgarh, he admits, are way thicker and trickier. The training in Punjab was in \u201chow to load and fire the guns, to take positions under attack\u201d. Why wasn\u2019t this training specific to tackling the Maoists? He thinks and says: \u201cI guess guerilla tactics are the same everywhere, from Kashmir to Chhattisgarh.\u201d After a pause, he adds: \u201cI am only a constable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Survivors say they knew the patrol had a slim chance when maoists attacked. They fought as long as they could<\/strong><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even Raj Bahadur, who at 48 years is a 22- year CRPF veteran and seen action from Kashmir to Tripura, has never witnessed anything like Chhattisgarh. \u201cThis was the worst I was ever in,\u201d he says. It is incredible that the three survivors have never met a surrendered or captured Maoist.
\nOne would imagine that the many captured Maoists, ranging from ideologues such as Kobad Ghandy arrested in New Delhi to the armed insurgents nabbed in the forests, would have proved a goldmine of information for the planners of the security forces\u2019 counter-offensive. But the three survivors \u2014 who are the most crucial foot soldiers the paramilitary has \u2014 cannot recall attending any briefing from the CRPF planners to share Maoist warfare strategies with them. If anything, these men said that constables such as themselves (who numbered around 60 of 82 on Tuesday) are routinely told nothing but \u201conly to go out and search\u201d and, if need be, \u201cshoot\u201d.
\nIt is difficult to put down such obstinacy to anything but the hubris of the officers. In September 2009, a posse of the elite COBRA force struck deep in the Maoist territory and destroyed a factory manufacturing guns locally called bharmar. A surrendered Maoist, a woman, had accompanied and guided that team to the site. The deed done, the woman urged the COBRA team to leave immediately. But they ignored her warning. That proved to be a fatal mistake, as the next morning, the Maoists laid a siege to the entire area.
\nA CRPF team led by Deputy Commandant Meena \u2014 who died in Tuesday\u2019s attack \u2014 had to rush to evacuate the COBRA combatants, but not before the Maoists killed six, including two assistant commandants. \u201cThe Maoists walked parallel to us at some distance for 6 km, firing continuously at us as we carried the dead on our shoulders,\u201d says one CRPF constable, who participated in the rescue. \u201cI fired two mortars so that the helicopter with the injured could fly.\u201d He fired two more after the helicopter took off, just in case.
\nIn Tuesday\u2019s attack, too, the CRPF survivors say they knew right at the start of the attack that the team had a slim chance of surviving. \u201cWe survived because we were too far at the back,\u201d Raj Bahadur says. The survivors held out, firing their guns as long as they could before piercing bullets rendered them unconscious. Deputy Commandant Satyavan Singh, the patrol\u2019s leader, and Assistant Commandant Meena were possibly among the last dozen to be alive. \u201cMeena asked me to take care of myself,\u201d Pramod remembers. \u201cThat\u2019s the last I saw of him.\u201d
\nAs Chidambaram left, so did the doctors and the officers at the ward. On Thursday, the three survivors were restless to leave the hospital. Raj Bahadur hopes that any compensation that may come his way will help pay off the Rs 1.5 lakh of the debt he still owes back in Agra for his daughter\u2019s wedding four years ago, which his meagre take-home pay of Rs 18,000 has failed to pay off. Pramod is worried sick because his father in Aligarh has cancer and has lost all his hair to chemotherapy.
\nBaljeet just wants to go home in Haryana\u2019s Sonepat to his new bride he married on February 16. He spent only 23 days with her before coming back to Chhattisgarh. If he gets leave, he would get only some weeks with her before returning to the forests for months of separation \u2014 a pattern that would recur throughout the years he will spend defending freedom, liberty and democracy.<\/p>\n

WRITER\u2019S EMAIL<\/strong>
\najit@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Survivors of the worst-ever killings by Maoists reveal how the government is virtually sending jawans to their deaths in Chhattisgarh, reports Ajit Sahi. Photographs by Shailendra Pandey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":44362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[8626,8627,1706,1176,8628,8629,8630,5131,8631,8632,1573,8633,4482,8634,8635,6204,8636,8637],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}