Jagdalpur (Chhattisgarh) , April 8: The mangled remains of a bullet-proof CRPF vehicle lie scattered on a dirt track not far from the thickly forested spot where a team of security personnel belonging to the 62nd Battalion of the CRPF was ambushed by Naxalites on Tuesday.
Seventy-six valiant CRPF men, including the driver of the armoured vehicle that was blown up by a land mine, were killed in the Maoist guerrilla attack near the paramilitary force’s Chintalnar camp.
When this correspondent visited the spot (178 km from Jagdalpur) where the CRPF team was ambushed, there was an eerie silence in the nearby villages. Sodiadma, a tribal from Burkapal village, which is less than four km from this spot, said he had heard the blasts and gunshots on Tuesday morning but did not venture out to check what had happened. Other villagers appeared too afraid to speak. They gave a clear signal that they were being watched and would be in trouble if they talked to an outsider.
At the camp, all attempts to meet the commanding officer were in vain. The jawans at the entrance said they had standing instructions from him to keep all media out. The jawans refused to speak initially, but when requested repeatedly, they were unanimous in pointing out that the Naxalites can be “crushed” if the government has the will. Asked to elaborate, they said that from the NSG to providing helicopters, everything was done when the terrorists had attacked hotels in Mumbai, but when it came to combating Naxalites, they only send a bullet-proof vehicle for an area threatened by landmines. Reports over the last two days have quoted officers as saying the jawans had not followed standard operating procedures for jungle warfare, but CRPF jawans at the camp reveal they had not been imparted any jungle warfare training before being posted to the Naxalite-affected area. The security personnel who had died were new to the area and had received only the normal CRPF training, they added.
The CRPF jawans said they were extremely annoyed by a section of the media that had gone to the extent of projecting that the “martyrs” had been washing clothes and bathing in the jungle when they were ambushed and killed. They were also critical of the CRPF director-general since he took two days to reach Chintalnar in a helicopter along with other senior officers.
Earlier on Thursday, CRPF DG V. Shrivastava, CRPG special DG Vijay Raman and Chhattisgarh DGP Vishwa Ranjan were busy planning an operation against the Naxalites at the Police Officers’ Mess here. They refused to divulge anything about the operation and left on their mission by helicopter.
Lalit Shastri