In Maoist battle, a 6,000-strong force makes the difference

Basant K Ponwar moved from Mizoram to Chhattisgarh. At the time, Maoists had at least 106 districts in central and eastern India in their grip and were steadily expanding their menacing presence, prompting then prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 to call left-wing extremism (LWE) as the country's greatest internal security threat.

- Prawesh Lama

NEW DELHI: In August 2005,

The government's fight against the rebels was flailing, largely because Maoists were trained in jungle warfare and were picking up young boys and girls from villages to train them as child soldiers. In response, the government's bloated forces were unmotivated and unfamiliar with the forested terrain of southern Chhattisgarh. Growing frustration led to misadventures such as the Salwa Judum, a vigilante force that aimed to push back Maoists but ended up pillaging villages and torturing tribespeople, before being disbanded by the Supreme Court in 2011.

The retired brigadier Ponwar, then the head of the army's Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School in Mizoram, took a different approach. The 1971 Indo-Pak war veteran brought his team and set up the elite Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School in Kanker, about 60km from Raipur.

"To fight in the jungle, you must live in the jungle. Make the jungle your friend. Police had to be reoriented in counter-Naxal operations through a rigorous 45-day programme," Ponwar told HT.

From this initiative was born Chhattisgarh's unique District Reserve Guard (DRG) force in 2007-08, that is at the core of the government's aggressive move to wipe out the decades-old insurgency by next spring. Since 2024, the 6,000-strong force, populated largely by tribal people and former Maoists, has pushed deeper into the Maoist heartland and made inroads into territories considered too hostile even five years ago.

"The locals, who knew the jungle, were formally inducted into the system and further trained in counter-insurgency. Over the years, the recruitment among Naxals also decreased because the local tribal youth would rather join the police," added Ponwar.