Honing Counter-terrorism skills

Kanker (Chhattisgarh), March 13 (Reuters): Shouting “commando”, police in camouflage uniform and black bandanas pour down from the sky on ropes. Others clamber over rocks, shooting from the shoulder as targets pop up all around them.

At a new Counter-Terrorism and Jungle Warfare School in Chhattisgarh, a retired army brigadier is turning ordinary policemen into counter-insurgency troops ? “turning boys into men,” as one of the school’s slogans declares.

For four decades, the Indian government has underestimated the threat posed by Maoist guerrillas lurking in its central, eastern and southern forests, and it still lacks a coherent strategy to combat the menace, analysts say.

But the school opened by Brigadier B.K. Ponwar last August is a sign the country is finally waking up to the threat posed by an insurgency which has spread to 15 of the 29 states, and claimed almost 1,000 lives last year.

“It is by far the most serious problem India is facing today,” said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi think tank. “We are only just beginning to respond and there is no question it will spread significantly before it is contained.”

Decades of neglect have allowed the Maoists, known as Naxalites after the Bengal town of Naxalbari where the movement was launched in 1967, to sink deep roots in central India and form links with powerful Maoist guerrillas in Nepal.

A senior police officer told Reuters there were more than 20,000 armed Maoist rebels in India, backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters, operating in a “Red Corridor” stretching from Andhra Pradesh in the south to the border with Nepal.

Vast parts are virtual “no-go” areas for the ill-trained and ill-equipped police. Ironically, these may include some of the richest areas, home to huge deposits of iron or aluminium ore.

Twin bomb attacks in Varanasi last week made global headlines, and the threat of Islamic terrorism is undoubtedly a “sexier” issue, feeding into its rivalry with Pakistan and the bloody history of Partition, Sahni said.

But while violence wanes in Jammu and Kashmir, it is dramatically increasing in the forests of Chhattisgarh. On February 28, Maoist rebels exploded a landmine under a truck and killed 55 people.

“The present obsession with a single ideological source of terrorism ? Islamist extremism ? is contributing to a dangerous disregard of other and rising dangers,” said Sahni.