The smell of flesh and blood is fresh. Unexploded grenades and empty cartridges strewn all over, amid dry leaves, are testimony to a gory battle that took place 24 hours earlier in this remote hamlet in Gadchiroli’s forests.
None of the 15 policemen survived to tell the story. However, an old villager (name withheld) survived the shower of bullets and grenades to reconstruct the two-hour bloody drama.
The septuagenarian, on whose two-acre farm the Maoists ambushed and killed the cops, having surrounded them from all sides, saw the men in khaki fall one by one, responding to the call of duty.
With 100 rounds of cartridges each and few hand grenades, all the policemen killed in Sunday’s attack fought till the last round.
Around 10.15 am, 30-year-old sub-inspector Upendra Guldekar of Gyarpatti police station in the remote Maoist-infested Dhanora sub-division arrived with his armed team from the forest onto the only plains, a farm actually, when bullets knocked off two men on the rear end of the line.
The cops then took positions, as bullets were fired from the opposite direction from behind the bushes, beyond the only standing hut, a few metres away from Markegaon hamlet and 90 km from the district headquarters.
What followed was a battle between 250 heavily armed Maoists, and the policemen, who had been led into a trap.
The Maoists knew a police party would come to the village to conduct a panchanama of a tractor and road-roller they had burnt two days before, about 100 metres from Markegaon.
The Maoists, who had crossed over from Chhattisgarh (the state border is three km away), camped in the village and waited for a kill.
They fought till their last bullet
“Our men seemed to have followed the route through the forests that they wanted them to. They were waiting for our men at the spot,” said one of the commanders, even as the shaken villager tried to recollect what he witnessed.
The Maoists, who made a statement that they were down but not out, did not allow the villagers to move out for three days, so that word about their presence would not spread.
They perhaps planted misinformation about their movements through their local base.
The Maoists, hiding behind trees, allowed the cops to come to the plains so that they could have no cover, and then launched the attack.
The old man, who lay on the mud-littered floor of his hut, said four policemen jumped into his hut’s backyard, despite being hit by bullets. While they retaliated, the other nine took positions in the open.
A commando party leader said one of the cops sent a walkie-talkie message for reinforcements and ammunition, following which more teams left from Gyarpatti police station, 9 km from the spot, only to be ambushed and held midway by another dalam of the Maoists which had anticipated them.
The team from Gadchiroli reached late. “Only a helicopter could have helped us reach reinforcements in time,” said Munna Singh Thakur, a commander of commando party who has spent 21 years fighting the battle with the Maoists in Gadchiroli.
“If we don’t get a chopper, which we have been demanding for more than five years, all policemen in the district will contribute a month’s salary to buy one,” the angry jawans, who have begun a massive search, told DNA.
An SOS was sent to Chhattisgarh, to send a chopper stationed at Raipur. It arrived only in the evening.
The Maoists, the old man recounted, overpowered the cops once they ran out of firepower, but not easily. Four cops engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Maoists hiding in the bushes, in what proved their last battle.
