The hard lesson of Chintalnar is that the police are simply not investing enough in their frontline leadership and training to tackle the situation. Even when attempts have been made to bring in competence, the efforts to acquire required counterinsurgency skills have been marginal.
Whereas employing Armed Forces may appear to be an attractive idea to control the naxal menace, the adverse effects of their long term commitment, particularly of the Army, need to be understood.
The Maoists have formed a State Committee comprising six members to spearhead the movement in Delhi, and it has been in operation at least for the past four to five years.
It has become almost a cliché to say that the LWE situation is the most serious internal threat facing the country. Naxalism has been operating in several parts of the country. It has been there from the late 60s and 70s and different parts of the country have been affected with different levels of naxal violence. It has been tackled in different ways in West Bengal, in Kerala, in Andhra and so on and so forth, Telangana situation was there earlier. A significant change came about with the merger of the Peoples War Group and the MCC to form the CPI (Maoist) in 2004.
If naxal activities have to be stopped, the government must act firmly even if they have to be neutralized by the selective use of the armed forces including the Indian Air Force.
The Naxal challenge is a wake up call to rejig our internal security instruments and restore their organizational ethos, autonomy and operational credibility.
The Union Government took notice of the current phase of the Naxalite challenge with concern, for the first time, in 1998. Since then, it has been playing a coordinating role among the various affected states to address the challenge. It has also been advising the affected states on ways to deal with the challenge. By 2003, the Union Government had put in place a two-pronged approach to address the Maoist challenge - that of a development response and a security response. However, all along, the Union Government's response has largely been security-centric.
