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| Govt feels crackdown enough to nail Naxals |
| Gyan Varma / New Delhi Aug 21, 2010, 00:49 IST |
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Despite repeated calls by Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee to start talks with the Naxals, the government and security establishments have not come to the table so far because they feel the ongoing crackdown may just be able to break the backbone of the rebel movement.
Going by the government data, after the huge setback at Dantewada in Chhattisgarh in April, when an entire company of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was ambushed and killed by the ‘red brigade’, security forces had not only managed to hit back hard but also recovered huge cache of arms and explosives from the Naxals.
Sources in CRPF revealed that since May paramilitary personnel had killed at least 24 Naxal commanders and had also arrested 350 armed cadre, especially in West Bengal and Jharkhand, two of the worst-hit states. The security forces have recovered around 432 kilograms of explosives, 135 rifles that were stolen from state police and paramilitary forces, 2,720 rounds of live ammunition and 43 grenades.
“It is true that they (Naxals) were flying high after the Dantewada attack, but we have managed to bring them back on the ground. The killing of Naxal leader Azad last month was the biggest setback for them in recent times since he was involved with the movement from the beginning,” said a senior CRPF officer associated with anti-Naxal operations.
While Azad, a ‘politburo member’ of the banned CPI (Maoist), was gunned down, another naxal ‘commander’ Rajesh Munda, a close ally of Kishenji, was also nabbed by the security forces. During the crackdown on the rebels in July, zonal military commander of Lalgarh, Sidhu Soren, who was in charge of planning and carrying out most of the attacks in West Bengal, was also gunned down.
Senior officials also said that at least six politburo members of the CPI (Maoist) had either been killed or arrested so far by the security forces and any further loss to the party would be a huge dent on its leadership.
“It (CPI-Maoist) is a well-structured party with politburo members, central committee members, zonal commanders, district commanders and dalam commanders. But the new people who are joining the party and promoted up the ladder are not of the same intellectual calibres of those who have been arrested. People like Azad and Pramod Mishra have been involved in the movement for more than three decades,” the officer added.
Meanwhile, the war against the ‘red brigade’ has not progressed without losses suffered by the security forces as well. In the past four months alone, around 42 security personnel had been killed and 16 severely injured in 243 attacks by the rebels or 217 operations by the security forces that were based on specific intelligence inputs.
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