Police: Disarming militia will hurt fight against Maoists

The forces fighting Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh — the central Indian state where the conflict is most intense — are dismayed by a Supreme Court ruling that called for the disarming of a controversial tribal militia known as the Salwa Judum, the Times of India reports.

The Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Chhattisgarh's decision to grant the Salwa Judum — which was purportedly a people's movement — official status as "special police officers" and called for the units to be disarmed.

The move will rob the authorities of 4,000-odd soldiers. But more importantly, according to local police, it will eliminate the personnel who know the Maoists best.

"At one go, the best fighter against the Maoists has been reduced to a traffic policeman," the TOI quoted a local policeman as saying.

The category of SPO was created because most of the tribal youth could not meet the minimum education requirements to become full police constables, the paper said. But it's no surprise that the state's willingnessto expose poorly trained, largely uneducated, and underpaid "special" officers to deadly peril attracted the ire of the Supreme Court. Here's TOI:

In Chhattisgarh, the category came handy, in the aftermath of the Salwa Judum, an anti Maoist movement that broke out in 2005. Its supporters claimed it was a spontaneous upsurge by adivasis, who rebelled against the Maoists, and left their villages for the safety of government camps, but its critics alleged it was cynically calibrated program by the state and the local elite, that adopted a scorched earth strategy and forcibly emptied villages to expose rebel hideouts.

The Judum's by-product was the arming of tribal youth by the state, initially as a civilian vigilante army. The government claimed the armed men would protect those who had left their villages, but critics alleged they were used to inflict violence on those who did not.

Faced with questions over the legality of arming civilians, in 2007, the government gave the Judum fighters formal accreditation as 'special police officers' or SPOs. But Judum and SPOs are not co-terminus : while some SPOs emerged from the Judum, others hired subsequently have no links with it; like constables, all SPOs report to the superintendents of police, and not private Judum bosses, although informal ties appear to have endured, something that come to fore during the recent attack on Swami Agnivesh and the media in March.