As the West Bengal police camp in Silda, 170 km from Kolkata, came under attack from Maoists on February 15, among their last frantic phone calls was an SOS sent out to a CRPF camp some 14 km away.
Over the next three hours, as Maoist insurgents killed two dozen of the Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR) constables, the CRPF men were still walking towards the attack site, fearful of mines and snipers.
A bizarre combination of such fears and a standing operating procedure that prohibits security men from taking vehicles prevented the CRPF men from rushing to save the lives of the ill-prepared Bengal policemen.
According to a fact-finding team from the Centre, having taken three hours to trek through difficult terrain, there was very little that the 140 CRPF men who “rushed” to the attack site could do. The result: Maoists swept through the EFR camp, facing almost no resistance.
“We were requested around 5.30pm by the state police to rush to the camp in Silda. Our team reached the place at 8.30pm. Since the road to Silda is mined, there was no other option but to walk,” said a senior official.
Caught unawares by the sudden attack, two companies of the 165 battalion of the CRPF had been asked to reach the spot and provide back up. The paramilitary men were the first ones to reach the police camp, but they arrived a few hours after the entire massacre had taken place and the Maoists had vanished with arms and ammunition looted from the state police.
Sources in the paramilitary said that the men could not reach the police camp immediately because they could not have boarded a bus or a truck for quicker movement, given that the road to Silda camp was heavily mined, making it impossible to drive a heavy vehicle in the area.
“If our men had chosen to rush to the camp in a heavy vehicle, casualties would have been more. Our job was not only to protect the men at Silda camp but also to guard against any attack on us. It is also a possibility that our men could have been ambushed if they had not taken any precautions and tried to rush in,” added the officer.
Sources in the home ministry also said that the state police had been provided specific inputs about a possible Maoist attack at the Silda camp but no steps were taken by them. “There were major faults in the camp. Every force has to follow standard operating procedures (SOPs) but the EFR men didn’t follow it,” the officer added.
The government has already admitted that the situation in West Bengal was worrisome as estimates suggests that there could be more than 2,000 over and underground Maoists in the state. In the course of a year-long campaign, the West Bengal government has arrested over 600 Maoists, around 270 of them from Lalgarh itself.
