Naxal dominance in states like Jharkhand and Odisha may have waned but they continue to hold considerable sway in the jungles of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh and can pull off a surprise big attack during the summer months as on Wednesday.
The Aranpur attack that has claimed 11 lives is the seventh such big attack in Dantewada by the Naxals in the last 13 years and all of them came during the TCOC campaign launched every summer by the CPI (Maoist) from March to May. “The security forces are also on high alert during this period and we get considerable success too but the Naxals have to be lucky just one time to execute a big attack and register their presence,” a senior government official has told News18.
The violation of laid-down Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), that were formed as lessons from earlier such attacks, and complacency in local ranks also contribute to this, he said.
Sample this: The biggest Naxal attack in Dantewada that killed 76 CRPF jawans was in April in 2010. Naxals struck big again three years later in May 2013 when the senior leadership of the Congress was wiped out in an attack in the Jheeram Valley in Dantewada. There was a lull till April in 2017 when Naxals struck again in Sukma, killing over two dozen security men. This led to the central government under Narendra Modi and state government of Raman Singh launch an offensive in Dantewada. But in March 2020, soon after the Bhupesh Baghel government came to power, Naxals again executed a big attack in Sukma killing 17 security men in a IED blast like the one in Aranpur on April 26.
In 2021, two more big attacks were seen in Dantewada with five killed after a bus being blown up in March and a big attack in April that year in which 22 security men were killed in Sukma. The last attack saw a strong focus again on the SOPs like prior sanitisation of routes taken by forces, alternative routes for return from an operation and maximum foot patrols as possible, but the Aranpur attack has again shown violations of the SOPs. “We will again be telling Chhattisgarh Police that any violation of the SOP is a recipe for disaster as in Aranpur,” an official said.
News18 had earlier reported in April how the CRPF’s elite anti-Naxal unit, CoBRA, was moved from Jharkhand to Chhattisgarh as the security assessment showed that Jharkhand had been freed from Naxal dominance and the forces had released the Buddha Pahad in Jharkhand from the domination of Naxals after almost three decades.
Dantewada in Chhattisgarh remains the final frontier for the battle against the Naxals and the central assessment is that Naxals are resorting to big attacks sensing they are on the back-foot elsewhere. In their strongest fortress of the jungles of Dantewada, Naxals continue to hold the capacity to engineer big attacks amidst offensive by forces.
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