Police Force Scared to Enter Jungles, PC Rules out Use of Army
After deadliest Naxal attack on security forces in Dantewada yesterday, hundreds of security personnel, belonging both to paramilitary forces and the state police, who have been assigned to track down the killers, are scared to go into forests of Chhattisgarh lest a repeat of ‘bloody Tuesday’ incident should occur, reported IANS.
Shocked by the massacre of 76 security personnel, police incumbent in Raipur instructed nearly 40,000 policemen deployed in the restive Bastar region to retaliate, report said.
However, officers, who are posted in interior areas, have this to say: “The Tuesday attack has rattled the entire police force engaged in the anti-Maoist operation and they are now reluctant to enter the landmine protected jungle terrain.”
“It’s easy for everyone to dictate to us from New Delhi and Raipur sitting in air-conditioned chambers, but here the situation is completely hostile because Maoists rule the roost in jungles. The forces in Bastar now need urgent motivation,” a police officer based in Dantewada was quoted as saying.
Policemen who are deployed in 40,000 sq km of Bastar region – which is made of five districts of Bijapur, Narayanpur, Bastar, Kanker and Dantewada – policemen suffer high casualty due to a total absence of co-ordination between state forces and para-military men who are put in difficult areas in Chhattisgarh, said report.
Police Force Scared to Enter Jungles, PC Rules out Use of Army
“Despite all efforts at the police headquarters and at the state government level, the CRPF is not taking local police and special police officers (SPOs) along while entering the Maoists’ den and are thus getting killed without a fight,” a senior official was quoted as saying.
He said that all CRPF personnel are outsider and not aware of the difficult jungle terrain and so were many times reminded by officers at the police headquarters to take along at least the SPOs who are locals but they neither followed this suggestion nor did they stick to the 48-point guerilla warfare manuals, report said.
