The man behind a force to be reckoned with

Anuj Chopra
Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 03. 2009 11:11PM UAE / November 3. 2009 7:11PM GMT

KANKER, INDIA // On a recent broiling afternoon, Brig Basant Kumar Ponwar stood amid flying grasshoppers, on top of a muddy knoll overlooking a simulated Maoist hideout.

A dozen cadets, wearing commando fatigues, formed a two-tier security cordon around the hideout. They began an ear-shattering assault with AK-47 rifles, some shooting from their shoulders, others firing while crawling on the ground towards the hideout.

“If you run into a Naxal, you have to knock him down,” Brig Ponwar hollered to his cadets. “Don’t let him get away to fight another battle. This is a fake hideout. The real battle begins the day you step out of this college.”

Brig Ponwar, 60, is a man on a mission – to train India’s policemen to “fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla”.

He is the director of the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College in north Bastar, founded in 2005 on the periphery of the Maoist heartland in southern Chhattisgarh. It is India’s only training school for counter-Naxalite operations.

“It’s like I’m raising a new counter-insurgency force,” Brig Ponwar said. “Policemen go through a kind of dialysis here. A new blood passes through their veins.”

Before this, Brig Ponwar, a veteran counter-insurgency expert, who has worked in many strife-ridden areas in India, headed the army’s Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School in Vairangte, Mizoram state.

This is the first time the Indian government has requisitioned an army officer into the police force on such a special mission: to eradicate Naxalism.

Strengthening police forces, Brig Ponwar says, is crucial in order to win India’s war against Naxalites. As India prepares for its biggest ever counter-offensive against the rebels next month, training efforts in anti-rebel operations have also been set up. The country’s home ministry has sanctioned 20 such schools in jungle warfare to be built by 2010.

“The general perception in the government is that if Sri Lanka, a tiny island, can eradicate the LTTE [Tamil Tigers], why can’t we eradicate Naxalites?” said Brig Ponwar.

Since 2005, 11,100 policemen from seven states affected by Naxal violence have trained at the sprawling 120 hectare college, hacked out of a jungle. Brig Ponwar estimates that four times as many are need to eradicate Naxalism.

To fight this rural insurgency requires changing tactics from “conventional policing to unconventional policing”, he said. Over six weeks of training, the cadets are taught intensive close combat techniques along with a number of armament training courses. They learn to slither down ropes out of a helicopter, practise peppering live firing, rock climbing and “jungle cooking”, which involves living off the land and learning to eat forest fruits – and even snakes – to survive.

A message on a graffiti-plastered rock-climbing wall at the college reads: “Our friends: animals, reptiles and insects. Rivers and Gorges. Rain and Thunder. Thick jungles. Difficult terrain.”

“When I arrived here in 2005, my first question to the cadets was: ‘How many of you have spent a full night in the jungle?’ Brig Ponwar said. “Only one policeman lifted his hand.”

Many who come here to train, he said, have never used close-quarter battle weapons such as AK-47s in their life.

“‘Half-trained men fight half battles,’ I tell them,” he said. “That’s why such training schools are necessary.”

In Maoist-prone districts of southern Chhattisgarh, policing is widely regarded as an unattractive, life-threatening career option.

On average, India has 55 policemen for every 100 square kilometres. In Chhattisgarh, there are only 17. And while the UN ideal is 222 policemen for every 100,000 civilians, Chhattisgarh has only 103 for an equal population.

The casualty rate of the police far exceeds that of the rebels, who are adept at guerrilla warfare. Since 2007, for every two policeman, only one Naxal has been killed. And many captured rebels have been freed by their comrades in raids on jails in Naxal areas. Policemen have been abducted. Some have been beheaded.

On July 12 this year, the Chhattisgarh police suffered its worst attack in its three-decade battle with the rebels. Thirty nine policemen, including the superintendent of police, Vinod Kumar Choubey, were killed in a powerful landmine explosion by the Maoists in the Rajnandgaon district.

The Maoist attack shook the morale of the entire police force. “The policemen had walked into a booby trap,” Brig Ponwar said. “They did not follow the basics of jungle warfare – the policemen carried with them into the jungle neither mine detection equipment nor sniffer dogs.”

Those that have undergone training at the jungle warfare college have never suffered casualties. Two weeks after the first course passed out, three Naxals were killed in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district. Some of the cadets have gone on to win gold medals for bravery.

“The training helps build confidence,” said Kuldeep Patle, 28, a police constable in Dantewada district, a Naxal hotbed in southern Chhattisgarh, who recently underwent training at the college. “This is a psychological war.”

But beyond the military training, reforming the police force, often accused of gross human rights violations, remains a major challenge. So a key ingredient of the anti-Naxalite training involves teaching policemen how to interact with ordinary civilians.

“Ask if the widows’ pensions are coming, if the village hand pump is working,” Brig Ponwar said. “You make villagers your friends, and they’ll give you useful information on rebel activities.”

It is a strategy that paid off remarkably in saving Brig Ponwar’s own life recently.

In April, Naxalites dug a trench nearly two metres deep under the main motorway near the college to install an improvised explosive device, with a clear aim to blow up the vehicles of the college’s instructors.

A timely alert from locals at the nearby Parthi village helped prevent the tragedy before the device could be placed.

“One golden rule of warfare is gaining the respect of the population,” said Brig Ponwar. “I tell my cadets: ‘Soldier is the weapon. Population is the centre of gravity. If your bullet might cause collateral damage, hold your fire, even if it means combating the Naxal on another day.’”


foreign.desk@thenational.ae