Gunning For Maoists

Maharashtra police inflict huge losses on insurgents in their erstwhile stronghold of Gadchiroli. But it’s the development war that needs winning

- Kiran D. Tare in Gadchiroli

ON THE NIGHT OF APRIL 23, TWO parties of around 50 police personnel in combat fatigues converged on an isolated riverine island in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district. The intelligence was precise—a large group of Maoists had gathered for a meeting. The C-60, the district’s counter-Maoist force, opened fire with their AK-47s on the cornered Maoists. When the shooting stopped, 22 Maoists lay dead on the island. The bodies of another 10 Maoists would be fished out of the Indravati river. A day later, another C-60 party killed eight Maoists in the Rajaram Khandla forests. Setting up the sort of trap the Maoists usually do for the police, the C-60 troopers, most of them from local tribes and with an innate sense of the terrain and trained to fight like the guerrillas, had turned the hunters into the hunted.

The C-60’s first major zero-casualty operation since it was raised in 1990 marked its coming of age. Among the dead were Shrinivas and Sainath, both key members of the CPI (Maoist) south Gadchiroli division, a sub-grouping of the Maoist regional wings that ‘administers’ a district-sized division.

CPI (M) politburo member Brinda Karat questioned the police version of the encounter. She said that not all the dead Maoists were armed and hinted that at least eight missing villagers could be among the dead. “The official version raises many questions. If there was a fierce encounter, how is it that the casualties are all on one side?” she asked in a May 3 article. District superintendent of police Abhinav Deshmukh refuted the allegations. “We have preserved viscera of all the dead. It will establish the cause of their death. The DNA tests will confirm whether the missing people have died in our operation.”