The deaths of 22 jawans in an encounter with the Maoists in Bijapur, Chhattisgarh came as a huge shock for India and its security forces. The usual questions of intelligence failures, forces making tactical mistakes, and not following up standard operating procedures have been raised by experts and analysts. These are very pertinent questions given this was a massive combing operation jointly conducted by the elite CoBRA unit of the Central Reserve Police Force, Special Task Force, District Reserve Guard, and District Force of Chhattisgarh Police to attack and capture Hidma, the commander of the lethal Battalion 1 of the Maoists. How did such a planned counterinsurgency operation based on prior intelligence inputs fail to anticipate an ambush by the Maoists? Not strong enough The irony is that a massacre of this scale happened at a juncture when the security forces have acquired better combat experience and are in a dominant position compared to the Maoists. The year 2019 (see below graph) saw one of lowest fatalities among security forces in the last two decades. A coordinated and well-calibrated counterinsurgency operation by the Centre and affected states have helped to bring down Maoist sponsored violence to an all-time low, reducing their dominance to few tri-junction districts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha. Unsurprisingly, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) removed 44 districts from the Naxal-affected list, while the ‘worst-affected category’ was brought down to 30 in 2019. According to ACLED data, Maoist-related incidents in 2020 took even bigger dip (30 per cent less) than 2019 due the Covid-19 pandemic. The national lockdown proved a massive blow for Maoists, as it cut critical supplies for many months and pushed them to desperation. Maoist-related fatalities, Source: Author’s own estimation from multiple sources.
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