In Maoist-hit Bastar, an upsurge in aggression from both sides

The police arrived quickly — there is a police station in Basaguda, one of Bijapur district’s most sensitive zones. “The three victims were civilians and not informers. They had nothing to do with Maoists or security forces. Hacking them in broad daylight was done to spread fear. They (Maoists) wanted to scare villagers from offering the security forces any help,” a senior police officer said.

A day later, the state security forces received intelligence information that a team of Maoists, comprising rebels from platoon numbers 9 and 10, and the small strike team that executed the March 25 attack, were in the forests near Pusbaka along the Talperu river, 9km away. A joint team of the Chhattisgarh Police, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and their elite Cobra (Commando Battalion for Reserve Action) unit set off on Tuesday night. By 8am on Wednesday, there was a gunbattle that lasted for an hour. When the smoke cleared, six Maoists were dead, the most significant such exchange of fire since July 2019 when seven Maoists were killed in Nagarnar.

In many ways, the two incidents are symptomatic of a larger pattern playing out in south Bastar in the first three months of 2024 — a clear upsurge in aggression from both the security forces and the Maoists, in what state agencies call a decisive phase of the battle against left wing extremism that has roiled the area for four decades.

A clear increase in numbers

Government data accessed by HT shows that across every indicator, numbers for the first three months of 2024 show a sharp increase from 2022 and 2023. For instance, the three months of 2024 have seen police claim that 37 Maoists have been killed by security forces. This number is already higher than the 22 Maoists killed in all of 2023 and 30 Maoists killed in 2022. To be sure, six of these deaths were in the encounter on the banks of the Talperu on Wednesday.

“We believe that the number of Maoists that have been killed is even higher. Thirty-seven is the number of bodies we have been able to recover after encounters. There will be more because in many cases, Maoists take the bodies of their comrades back into the forests with them. There have already been close to 50 exchanges of fire this year. All of last year there were 75. Action has intensified on the ground,” said the senior police officer cited above.

But there have been repercussions of the new aggression on the ground. Across Chhattisgarh, 19 civilians have been killed by Maoists already in 2024, just less than half of the 2023 tally of 41 killed, with only a quarter of the year past. Three of the civilians killed this year have been politicians associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Senior CRPF officers said that the aggression by the security forces has been aided by an infrastructure push with the creation of 17 new forward camps since December 2023. Camps that have between 250 and 600 personnel depending on their size are important because they establish a presence in hostile areas, and normalcy in civilian outreach. But most importantly, they cut down the time needed to operate on intelligence inputs, reduce the preparations that a force must do before they step out of their security cocoon, and give Maoists little warning that a team is coming.

“All these years, whenever we wanted to reach where the Maoists were hiding, we would come under fire along the way. Maoists would be alerted and would place IEDs or lay an ambush. This is how we have lost so many personnel over the years. But for the past few months, the focus has been to establish new camps in forward areas. What this means is that points that we once struggled to reach are now our launch pads, and we can now confront the Maoists with much more regularity,” a CRPF officer said. One such camp was set up in Puvarti on February 16, infamous for being the village of Madvi Hidma and Barse Sukka, two of the most infamous Maoist commanders of the past decade and both on the National Investigation Agency’slist of India’s most wanted criminals.

A similar camp was set up in Teklagudem on January 30, 5km from Puvarti. “In April 2021, 22 police personnel were killed in an ambush by over 300 Maoists in Teklagudem. The area was a Maoist stronghold, and we now have a camp there. This was unthinkable some years ago,” the CRPF officer added.

The new camps have also seen a push back from the Maoists, with at least four attacks on camps in the past three months that have left three police personnel dead. On February 13, for instance, a day after security forces set up the Gudem camp in Bijapur, it came under attack. According to the FIR registered by the Chhattisgarh Police, the forces had to fire at least 152 rounds of AK-47 rifle burst fire, five rounds from a sniper rifle, 20 rounds from an INSAS rifle, 26 rounds from a Light Machine Gun (LMG), 13 mortar shells, at least three grenade launchers and 59 rounds of Medium Machine Gun (MMG) to repel the Maoists in a gunbattle that lasted close to two hours.

“The battle is not won yet. Like the three civilians that have been killed, there is more danger ahead. There will be incidents when civilians will be killed to scare civilians, and prevent people from helping us. We also anticipate that they will attack public installations like cell phone towers and security camps. But this is a war they are losing. We are gaining new ground and winning over villagers each day,” the police officer cited in the first instance said.

“As part of our counter offensive against the banned Maoists, we have intensified specific intelligence based operations in the last few months. Opening up of the new camps is playing a dual role—facilitating development and blocking Maoist corridors. Their strength is depleting fast,” Sunderaj P, inspector general of police (Bastar), said.

Fake encounter allegations

Almost inevitably, as the heat of battle has risen in Bastar’s theatre of conflict, allegations of police excesses have followed. On February 27, two days after police in Kanker claimed that they had killed three Maoists in an encounter in Bomara Hutarai village, family members of the deceased alleged that the dead were not Maoists at all. Police dismissed the claims and said that they had found three muzzle loading guns from the spot of the encounter. The same month, Maoists issued a press release that an encounter in Bijapur, where the police had said four Maoists were killed in Jangla, was a “fake encounter”.

In January 2024, the state police admitted that a six-month-old girl was killed in “crossfire” in an exchange with Maoists that also left her mother with bullet injuries on her hand. Separately, the police have also admitted that another tribal woman was injured in “crossfire” in Bijapur in March.

Lawyer and human rights activist Bela Bhatia said that the period after January 2024 has marked a new chapter in counter-insurgency operations, with an increased frequence of “fake encounters involving shoot-outs at civilians including children”.

“In Bijapur district alone, six people from four villages in four separate instances have lost their lives. Three of them were minor girls; Mangli was only six months old,” Bhatia said.

He added that in each case that the police have claimed “crossfire”, family members have come forward to file complaints describing the circumstances of these incidents.

“Mangli’s mother says that she was holding her in her lap while she stood in a friend’s court yard when a bullet hit her. The two teen-aged girls killed were going to a dharna with five others from their village when a police party targeted them; one 19 year-old was going to the river to have a bath with another relative when a bullet hit his head. The frequency of young people being picked up has also increased. They are kept for questioning for days; nobody seems to know where. Often, even the civil police are in the dark. The paramilitary seems to have an upper hand in this phase of counter-insurgency. We are living in dangerous times,” Bhatia said.

Senior officers of the Chhattisgarh Police dismissed these concerns as an “old part of Maoist tactics”. “Like they have always done, Maoists are targeting innocent civilians and public infrastructure. Moreover, through their support systems that exist overground, they are levelling false allegations against security forces. These are signs of weakness and frustration. We are prepared to handle these situations,” Sunderaj said.

Senior BJP leaders said that it was no coincidence that a concerted attempt to be aggressive towards Maoists in Bastar has coincided with a change of government in the state — a reference of the BJP returning to power in December 2023 after five years of a Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress government. “We are aggressive towards the Maoists. We have always said that the Congress backed Maoism and never really tried to counter them. Since the BJP government has come, the Maoists are now frustrated and their territory has shrunk,” said Sacchidanand Upasne, senior BJP leader and spokesperson.

The Congress said that it was clear that the BJP had no clear plan to tackle Maoism, and civilians are caught in the middle of an escalating conflict. “It is good that encounters are taking place, but if you look at it, villagers have been raising questions on most of these encounters. There is no real policy of the government to concertedly tackle the problem,” said Congress spokesperson Sushil Anand Shukla. “The entire objective is to protect the lives of tribals and residents, but we have seen that in the recent past civilian deaths have increased as well. What are the attempts to contain such violence?”