THE INDIAN army has been drawn into fighting Maoist rebels responsible for violence across a third of the country because provincial police and federal paramilitaries have not been able to neutralise them.
The army is finalising plans to establish a counter-insurgency warfare school to train paramilitaries in the worst affected Chattisgarh state in central India. It plans to post officers of the rank of colonel and brigadier as military advisers for anti-Maoist operations in several provinces.
Prime minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly declared the Maoist threat to be India’s “gravest internal security challenge” since independence.
The army is also drawing up plans to keep three to five divisions – 30,000 to 50,000 soldiers – ready to help civilian authorities deal with the fast proliferating Maoist threat to 220 of some 620 administrative districts across 20 of India’s 28 provinces.
The training programme to counter the Maoists could potentially be the force’s largest internal security mobilisation, other than in insurgency-ridden Kashmir state and in the northeastern provinces bordering Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh.
Senior military sources said the training schedule was being “reoriented” to enable units to counter a wily enemy that was adroit at blending into civilian populations.
The army had also stepped up its intelligence gathering in rebel areas by employing personnel who speak the languages of various tribes comprising Maoist activists.
The federal government also plans to hire ex-servicemen, particularly former Sappers, on contract for tasks such as de-mining. Maoists use improvised explosive devices frequently.
Meanwhile, the Indian air force is seeking the return of its 15 Russian MI 17 helicopters that serve UN peacekeeping missions in Africa in anticipation of them being deployed for logistical support in anti-Maoist operations.
Since 2005 more than 4,000 people have died in Maoist violence. Last month the rebels derailed a passenger train in eastern India killing 145 people and in April they ambushed and killed 76 paramilitaries and 30 policemen.
The two atrocities shocked the country and panicked the federal government into considering deploying the military.
The rebels, who claim to be inspired by China’s Mao Zedong, have successfully tapped into growing resentment among India’s rural poor and vast tribal population over exploitation by a corrupt, inefficient and uncaring administration.
Claiming to empower India’s vast tribal peoples, the poor and dispossessed, they launched their “People’s War” in 1967 to secure economic, social and environmental justice for them.
With an estimated strength of between 15,000 and 20,000 activists, they operate parallel governments in their areas of dominance, levying taxes, dispensing justice through unofficial courts and determining the educational syllabi and moral behaviour of locals.