New Delhi, June 01: The question is no longer ‘ whether’ the army will be deployed in the Maoist- dominated Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, the buzz in the South Block is ‘ when’. While army sources confirm that the force is involved in ‘ contingency planning’ as “ it does in all cases of potential crisis”, they are not willing to divulge details about the nature of such planning.
During the recent Army Commanders’ Conference — the first by General V. K. Singh since taking over two months ago — the central command was given a responsibility to do a ‘ presentation’ on the Maoist situation in its zone of operations.
Following that, the director general of military operations, in his update, is also believed to have described the country’s security conditions with respect to the Maoist situation.
In army circles, serious talks have begun about the kind of forces to be deployed in the troubled areas and what would be their role.
Sources said that the current thinking is to deploy battalions of Rashtriya Rifles withdrawn from Kashmir and the North- East.
The role being envisaged could match the task the army performed during the Naxalite movement in West Bengal in the late 1960s and mid- 1970s.
At that time, the army held route marches as a show of strength, undertook road opening tasks, facilitated the operations of police and central paramilitary forces like the CRPF, BSF and the Eastern Frontier Rifles, and also “ generally raise the level of confidence of the people”. All this while, the army had been underpinning its role in anti- Maoist operation in terms of the training it was providing to the paramilitary forces.
To date, it has trained about 47,000 personnel and is willing to expand the activity to raise the number.
But it is becoming clear to the army that this level of involvement needs to be enlarged. One of the key worries of the force is in terms of resources that would be needed to quell the Maoist uprising.
—Agencies