A clump of long hair glistened in the damp undergrowth of Kohameta hill. Four days after a nine-hour long gunbattle here left 35 dead, rain had swept away the blood and left everything else, including empty bullet shells, looking uncannily fresh.
On the morning of October 4, company number six of the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army, the armed wing of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), was encircled and outnumbered by security forces in this corner deep inside the forests of southern Chhattisgarh that it considers a base area, or safe zone. The battle ended with no losses to the security forces, and 35 insurgent deaths – 13 of them women.
Had the hair of a woman insurgent come unstuck while her corpse was dragged on the forest floor? “We had to drag and collect the bodies at one place before packing them,” said Smruthik Rajanala, a tall, lean Indian Police Service officer who led the operation.
The security forces carried back 31 bodies in plastic bundles strung on bamboo poles, and displayed them for press cameras the next evening on the lawns of a police campus. As the plastic parted from the putrefying faces, one of them looked like a boy not older than 15.
Amid the rising stench, it was a moment of triumph for the state.
For decades, large swathes of southern Chhattisgarh, also known as the Bastar region, have been a stronghold of Maoist guerillas who say they are fighting to protect the local Adivasi population from the depredations of a capitalist state. The jungle war has been a death trap for the security forces.
In 2010, the Maoists had ambushed and killed an entire unit of 76 personnel in the forests of Dantewada in a matter of hours – the largest single-day loss Indian security forces had ever suffered in any war, internal or external.
Fourteen years later, the security forces have struck back. The October 4 operation caps a year-long campaign in which Chhattisgarh police claim to have killed 189 Maoists in Bastar – the highest-ever annual tally notched up by the security forces.
But the simple binary of security forces versus Maoists hides a crucial difference. In 2010, barring a constable of Chhattisgarh police, those killed were central paramilitary men drawn from across India, from states as far apart as Kerala and Uttarakhand. Fifty-six were from the northern plains, 44 from Uttar Pradesh alone. Aliens in the jungle, they were sitting ducks in a guerilla war.
In contrast, the October 4 battle, according to Chhattisgarh police, was fought by the District Reserve Guards, a police unit composed almost entirely of local Adivasi men and women recruited from the same villages from which the Maoists draw their cadres.
Essentially, an Adivasi force of 700 outnumbered another Adivasi force of 70, killing half of them.
The state has projected this year’s operations as an unmitigated success. The reality is more complex. Data collected by Scroll contributor Malini Subramaniam through her first-hand reporting and by collating other reports by journalists and activists shows that in about a quarter of the cases, the families of the dead have disputed the police’s claims that they were armed insurgents.
Nevertheless, it is striking that at least in major security operations, the police have been able to accurately identify the names and designation of dead Maoists, suggesting they now have more precise knowledge of their adversary. Four of those killed are members of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, the second-highest tier of the Maoist party. One of them, Comrade Neeti, or Urmila Pottavi, was killed in the October 4 encounter.
Another striking aspect is that the police have struck deep inside an area considered the safest place for the Maoists – Abujhmaad, an unsurveyed expanse nearly as large as the state of Goa within the larger Bastar region which itself is the size of Kerala. About 100 of the 189 killings this year have taken place in Abujhmaad, said Inspector General of Police in Bastar, Sundarraj Pattilingam. Narayanpur district, most of which falls within Abujhmaad, saw four deaths in the past three years. This year, the number has jumped to 52.
Abujhmaad, also known as Maad, literally means the unknown hills. The hills may be unknown to the state, but not to the people who live there. Chhattisgarh’s success in enlisting some of them to fight on behalf of the state and motivating them through promotions and financial rewards, appears to have given it a decisive edge in the war.
But is this really the beginning of the end of war, as the government claims? And what does it bode for Bastar?
“It was amavasya,” a moonless night, said Dantewada police superintendent Gaurav Rai who planned and supervised the October 4 operation. “The Maoists did not expect we would trek through such difficult terrain, that too in the dark.”
The area they were targeting was the southernmost edge of Abujhmaad, north of Dantewada, across the river Indravati, on the border with Narayanpur and Bijapur. A day before, around 700 personnel of the Special Task Force – a state police unit – had flooded a nearby area. “A diversion was created,” said Rai. “The Naxals thought the force was going that side.”
Utilising this cover, on the night of October 3, Rajanala led hundreds of personnel of the District Reserve Guard from Dantewada, while an equally large contingent came from Narayanpur. Surrendered Maoists, part of the DRG, helped plot a route that avoided villages and locations where the Maoists usually posted sentries to alert them to any intrusion. By morning, the forces had cordoned off a radius of about 5 km-6 km.
Around 7 am, residents of Gawadi, a speck of a village about 2 km from Kohameta hill, saw security forces swarming into their settlement. Often, villagers flee their homes when the security forces approach, fearing repercussions. But the residents of Gawadi decided to stay. “If we were found in the jungle, they would have killed us, thinking we are Maoists,” a resident said.
Four residents of a nearby village, Thulthuli, were less fortunate – they were detained by the security forces, said the village sarpanch. The police have denied this.
Meanwhile, in Gawadi, an hour later, the villagers heard the sound of a drone, followed by the first gunshots around 11 am.
As the day progressed, the cordon tightened – “like a serpent coiling”, said a security staffer. Another called it “a chakravyuh”. The two sides exchanged fire at multiple locations in the area, they said.
Around 4.30 pm, the villagers saw a helicopter land – and take off ten minutes later. “A jawan was hit by a bullet and had to be evacuated immediately,” Rajanala said.
Intermittent firing went on till 8 pm, according to the villagers. Rajanala said it ended a little sooner, once darkness fell. “I couldn’t do more because I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “And being in the area was risky. The Maoists could well have been hiding in the dark.”
Along with the bodies, the forces brought back an Insas light machine gun, AK-47 rifles, self-loading rifles, among other high-calibre weapons. If the Maoists were so heavily armed, why did they fail to inflict any casualties on the forces? “We had a dominating position,” said Rai.
A statement released by the Maoists on October 13 provided a different account of the battle. It said: “The firing began at 11.30 am and continued intermittently in 11 rounds till 9 pm. Fourteen of our comrades were martyred in the firing. Another 17 who were injured were gathered in one place and mercilessly shot dead the next morning at 8 am.”
Although the statement does not say this explicitly, it appears four injured insurgents who escaped the battlefield died subsequently, taking the toll to 35, four more than the police had accounted for.
Chhattisgarh police’s count of Maoist encounters and killings this year does not begin on January 1. Instead, the starting date on its official tally is December 13, 2023 – the day the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in the state.
The BJP government has aggressively projected this year’s operational successes as its own. Union Home Minister Amit Shah, visiting the state twice this year, has declared that Naxalism will be eliminated by March 2026.
Several police officials interviewed for this report appreciated the belligerence. “When political bosses speak like this, we know they have our backs,” said an officer. But they added that this year’s success against the Maoists has been built on the slow accretion of advantages – infrastructure, for one. An increase in the number of security camps, roads, bridges, mobile towers in the region was improving the flow of information and reducing the area the Maoists could move in freely, they said.
Even technologically, compared to 2010, they were now better-equipped for a jungle war – from walkie-talkies that allow teams to communicate silently over text to aerial drones that pick up heat signatures, helping track insurgents as they move through the forest.
Added to this, officers commanding operations listed several strategic shifts made in the field this year. For one, the police from two or more districts were combining forces to conduct operations under a single unified strategy. “We are going everywhere together,” said Narayanpur police superintendent Prabhat Kumar. “Dantewada is coming to my district, I am going there.” His Dantewada counterpart, Gaurav Rai, concurred. He said the Maoists can no longer benefit from the vacuum along district borders.
It helps that Kumar and Rai are from the 2019 batch of the Indian Police Service. Their counterparts in Bijapur and Sukma districts are also either batchmates or co-trainees.
But the officers were unanimous that the real credit for the operations goes to the District Reserve Guards. “Ninety nine per cent – it is all DRG,” said Kumar. Rai called them “the killer force”.
Rajanala said: “They are our guides. They take us inside. They know each and every nook and corner of the jungle.”
Kumar added: “They are highly flexible. I can make 20 teams of 20, or six teams of 70. Guerilla warfare is unconventional. They help us adapt to that.”
The District Reserve Guards came into existence after the Supreme Court in 2011 struck down the induction of Adivasi youth from the anti-Maoist vigilante Salwa Judum movement as Special Police Officers or SPOs. It held that the state’s use of uneducated youth who were “temporarily hired and paid an honorarium”, many of whom harboured “feelings of rage, hatred, and a desire for revenge”, was illegal and unconstitutional.
The state’s response to the verdict was to formally recruit SPOs and other Adivasis as District Reserve Guards and pay them the salaries of constables. Sociologist Nandini Sundar, the petitioner in the Supreme Court case, wrote in 2021 that the state had “merely renamed the SPOs”. A contempt petition is pending in the court.
Nevertheless, if the District Reserve Guards have been around for a while, what changed this year?
The short answer, said officials: the strength of the DRG doubled.
In 2022, the Congress government in the state recruited 2,100 locals as “Bastar Fighters”. Barring the nomenclature, there was no difference between them and the older DRG personnel. Trained and inducted into the force last year, the Bastar Fighters are now part of the DRG teams. Every district has at least 500 Adivasi fighters at their disposal. When two or more districts combine forces for an operation, the numbers are formidable.
As one security official put it: “The more the force we have, the bigger the area we can cordon. Once we have cordoned the area, then we can slowly squeeze in, and then Naxals are getting stuck in the area, and that’s where the exchange is happening.”
From his office in Raipur, 400 km away, Vivekanand Sinha, who was deputy inspector general of anti-Naxal operations in 2010, and is now additional director general in the same unit, summed up what had changed in 14 years. “The only advantage that the Maoists had was that they were sons of the soil,” he said. “Now, our people are also sons of the soil.” He could well have said sons and daughters of the soil – about a quarter of the DRG personnel are women.
Inspector General P Sundarraj, also a veteran of the conflict, agreed. The District Reserve Guards’ knowledge of local terrain, language, customs has proved vital, he said. “When there is a gathering, they can differentiate whether it is a festival gathering or a [Maoist] meeting,” he said in an indirect acknowledgement of the blunders of the past.
In 2012, central paramilitary forces had opened fire on a festival gathering in Sarkeguda village, mistaking it for a Maoist meeting, killing 17 villagers, including seven children.
It is not that there have been no grave mistakes this year. In Pidiya village in Bijapur, an investigation by the activist group, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, found 11 people killed in an encounter in May were civilians, not Maoists as the police had claimed.
While reporting on the October 4 encounter, we met the wives of two men killed in Gomangal village in Narayanpur in February. The police had passed them off as Maoists but the families of Karo Ram Dhruw and Piso Kowachi said they were farmers who had ventured into the forest with plastic buckets to collect sulfi, or palm liquor, when they were hit by bullets. Two fellow villagers accompanying them, Somaro and Raju, showed us the marks left behind by bullet injuries. The families have written a letter to the district magistrate asking for an enquiry into the killings, followed by justice and compensation.
There are countless such examples that Scroll contributor Malini Subramaniam has documented in a three-part series that illuminates the human cost of this year’s security offensive.
For long-time observers of the conflict, however, the mistakes of the security forces are less surprising – they are in keeping with old patterns in the conflict. What is new this year is the precision seen in many encounters.
Before October 4, the Maoists had suffered their biggest blow on April 6 in the Chhote Bethiya encounter in Kanker district, on the northern edge of Abujhmaad. A Maoist statement had acknowledged all 29 killed in the encounter were their cadres. Strikingly, the designations of the dead cadres on the Maoist statement matched those in the press note released by the police a day earlier.
Police officials attributed this accuracy to the fact that one in five DRG personnel are surrendered insurgents, intimately familiar with the life, work and tactics of their former mates. “They even give us information that this is how a particular Maoist leader is likely to react, this is how he or she could escape,” said an officer.
Another officer noted that the 2010 ambush had left a deep-rooted fear of Naxals among the security forces. “That fear can only be beaten by someone who says ‘I have worked with them, I know how to defeat them, I will lead you.’”
Recognising their centrality to the operations, Chhattisgarh Police has aggressively incentivised the District Reserve Guards. “A regular constable takes 15-20 years to climb up the ladder of one rank, but a DRG can rise from constable to inspector in just five-six years,” said Rajanala. “Every year they are getting promoted.”
Promotions are only one part of the incentive system. The other are monetary rewards, running into crores of rupees, as Scroll has reported previously. Families of the dead believe that the prospect of winning bounties has made the police trigger-happy. Some have even alleged torture and mutilation of bodies. Mukke Padda, whose son Baijnath Padda was killed in the April 6 encounter in Kanker, said when she collected her son’s body, she found his right shoulder and left thigh was slit. Many blame the violence on the animus borne by surrendered Maoists towards their former mates.
The police say they would rather have Maoists surrender than be killed. The daughter of Suresh Salaam, a senior Maoist leader killed in the October 4 encounter, said the Narayanpur police superintendent had met the family two weeks ago. “He told us we should ask our father to surrender,” said Somday Salaam, a college student. “But we knew he wouldn’t.”
A Maoist commander interviewed by Scroll earlier this year conceded that former guerillas crossing over to the police constituted a strategic loss for the outfit. “They are highly skilled,” he said, adding that the party had to ask many of them to leave because of corruption charges and “moral lapses”. “Many of them took a second partner despite being married. The women in our party were clear that this should not be tolerated.”
In Narayanpur, we came across such an example. A resident of Kodenar village recounted how his relative, Budru Varta, left behind his wife and child to join the Maoists. A few years later, he returned to the village with a second wife in tow – Seedho, a fellow former insurgent. The village committee, however, insisted that he abandon her. Overnight, Varta and his partner left the village and went to Narayanpur to surrender and join the District Reserve Guards.
This year’s offensive comes against the backdrop of an increasing militarisation of the Bastar region. Just this year, 22 new security camps have been established in the region, most of which are manned by central forces such as the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.
Their role is to hold the space, crucial to establish the state’s dominance, said Inspector General Sundarraj. “The Maoists are unable to hold meetings within a 5-km radius of a camp,” he said. “For a revolutionary party, getting disconnected from their base spells trouble. It is no longer easy for them to move from one area to another. Their corridor is getting locked.”
Sundarraj, however, was quick to add that the larger goal of opening camps was to enable development. “The camp is a precursor,” he said. “It is followed by the road, electricity, mobile tower, ration shop, anganwadi, primary school, and so on.”
But few are convinced the state’s aims are benign.
Bastar holds some of the richest high-quality iron ore deposits in the country. Over the past decade, at least two new iron ore mines have opened up in the region. In 2022, at a conference organised by Chhattisgarh government, it advertised 108 potential mineral blocks in the state. Of the 28 iron ore blocks on the list, 21 lie in Bastar.
Activists point out that several security camps have been established to serve mining interests, not the needs of local people. “The police camps in Bastar serve a dual purpose,” activist and lawyer Bela Bhatia wrote in her recently published book. “On one hand, they help to crush the Maoist movement. On the other, they pave the way for mining operations. Only the first purpose is officially acknowledged, but the second may be more important.”
In Narayanpur’s Orchha block, where the October 4 encounter took place, a private firm Jayaswal Neco has been mining iron ore from the Aamdai hills since 2021. The opening of the mine was preceded by the establishment of a security camp.
In 2020, the residents of nearby villages had blocked the road leading to the mine to protest against the proposed project – to no avail. Now, every few days, they block the road asking for repairs. Barely any passenger buses ply on the route. Instead, mining trucks leave behind a cloud of dust that villages say have reduced the yields from their farms.
These fears of mining causing irreparable damage to Adivasi land, forests and livelihoods now animate a larger protest movement in Narayanpur called the Maad Bachao Manch, or platform to save Maad. According to its organisers, 118 villages from 13 gram panchayats in Orchha are participating in the indefinite protest. The day we visited the protest site – a sprawling cluster of huts built next to a river – over 90 villages were listed in the attendance register.
“We want narrow roads, not wide roads,” said one protestor. “Roads that can let a cycle, a bike, an ambulance, a tractor pass through, not a truck.”
The state’s response to the protest movement has been predictable: the Manch’s coordinator, Lakhma Korram, has been arrested in a case registered under the anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.
Although the police have officially stated that there is no firm evidence linking the Manch to Maoists, the younger members who have taken over the leadership mantle since Korram’s arrest fear they could be next. Chhattisgarh has a long history of using the Maoist conflict to silence critics and civil rights movements.
Despite these fears, the Manch continues to attract more followers. The latest joinees are people from 52 villages who have recently learnt that their lands have been earmarked to be acquired for an army manoeuvre range. Although the proposal dates back to 2017, it has come to light recently after a revenue department letter dated August 7 asked the district administration to furnish details about the land.
The news has left Nanda Dhruw in panic. A graduate from Bhilai, he lives and farms in his native village, Gongla. “If we lose our land, we lose everything,” he said. “We, the people of Maad, cannot survive in the city.”
And yet, he was nervous about protesting – he said he feared being labelled a Maoist.
“The Maoists have done a lot of wrong,” he said. “But, because of them, the jal, jungle, zameen of Maad have remained safe.”
As the state gains the upper hand in the conflict, were the people of Maad worried about losing this protection, we asked a group of villagers gathered in the ghotul, or community centre, at the protest site.
A man scoffed. “The same people who were bullying us as Maoists are now bullying us as DRG,” he said. “Guns won’t protect the land. The people will.”
Malini Subramaniam contributed reporting.
