6 April 2010: Maoists ambush a CRPF battalion out on an area domination mission near Chintalnar, killing 76 jawans. Union Home minister P Chidambaram described the outlaws as “cowards enacting dramas”.

24 April 2017: Maoists kill 25 CRPF jawans and critically injure 8 others when they were guarding road construction workers near Chintagufa. Prime minister Narendra Modi says attack on CRPF personnel is “cowardly and deplorable”.

It is not for nothing that Warzone Bastar is the most tragic land in the heart of India. A land that is at war with itself. The state is absent, having outsourced itself to the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), whose heavily fortified camps one finds every 5 km along the National Highway. Defensive, pensive, suspicious and scared.

The only time the state emerges out of the woodwork from Raipur and New Delhi is when massacres of this sort shake it up. India parrots the same old “Maoists are cowards” narrative and condemns the act. It is then back to business as usual, till the next bloodbath.

In this particular incident, 99 CRPF jawans of the 74th Battalion were providing security to road construction work when they were spotted by villagers and were subsequently attacked by Maoists. After a three-hour long gunbattle, their weapons also were looted. This is the second incident in Sukma in two months, with the southernmost district of Chhattisgarh emerging as the new Maoist headquarters. In March, 12 CRPF jawans were killed in a Maoist attack in Sukma.

Road construction work in the middle of Maoist territory is fraught with risk. To understand what it is like to enter the lion’s lair, I travelled with about 40 bike-borne members of the 217 Battalion of the CRPF last March while they were on their way beyond Konta to guard road construction work. We were deep inside forest area for close to two hours, extremely vulnerable despite the presence of armed security personnel.

Jana Sundaram, then commandant of the battalion told me that providing security is only part of the work. “We also dominate the villages to ensure no Maoist presence because many a time, they have tried to cut the road and obstruct the road construction work,” said Sundaram.

It is all very well for armchair commentators in Lutyens Delhi to blame the losses on intelligence failure and say that the CRPF had ventured into the danger zone without following Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to verify naxal presence. The fact of the matter is that there can be only one intel deep inside the Red Zone. A date with death.

Chintalnar, the theatre of the deadly ambush seven years ago, is the declared capital of Dandakaranya, a forest tract covering parts of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. They call it the liberated zone, where India’s writ runs only on paper.

Chintagufa also is a no-go patch. It is an area teeming with armed naxal militia in the villages, with landmines enroute. Which is why the aerial route is the preferred mode of transport. To reach Kistaram CRPF camp situated in the middle of nowhere, I flew with CRPF commandants and Chhattisgarh cops from Sukma over the dense Chintagufa forest range. There is no road connectivity to Kistaram unless you take a circuitous route through Telangana. Which is why the emphasis is on taking the fight and the black tops into remote Maoist dens.

“This country finds it cheaper to accept CRPF casualty and invest in coffins,” said a senior CRPF officer, bristling at what had happened to his men. “By making the jawans guard the roads for months at end, you are committing harakiri.”

This officer with vast experience of fighting Red terror points out that men doing the same road construction security work everyday, tend to lower vigil. “You cannot be alert 24×7 over several months,” he said.

The drudgery is what led the jawans to slip up. The forces reportedly took a food break under a tree on their way back, a no-no in the jungle warfare rulebook. With over 300 Maoists on the attack, the jawans were outnumbered 3-1 and proved to be easy meat.

Every time India’s paramilitary might provides security cover for road laying, it concedes that the time and place of when to strike will be of the Maoist’s choosing. By the Chhattisgarh police’s own admission, the parallel Maoist sarkar takes over beyond 10 km either side of the dusty National Highway 30 that starts from Konta on the Andhra-Chhattisgarh border and extends northwards.

There are at least 5,000 armed cadre in the seven districts of south Chhattisgarh with over 20,000 sympathisers, acting as their spies and couriers. The naxals have formed Regional Political Councils for every cluster of 10 villages whose representatives – up to 14 in each village – are armed with country-made weapons.

It is not as if the locals are willingly complicit. They do not have a choice. The Maoists rule this patch and the tribals cannot take on the gun. In contrast, in enemy territory, India does not exist. When it ventures inside, it is outnumbered and in defensive mode.

India rightly wants to get into these villages and ensure this part of the Red corridor that has fallen off the country’s map, does a ghar waapsi. But if the CRPF jawans are not to be made sitting ducks for shooting practice by Maoists, then the government should stop depending on local contractors who take forever to lay the roads. These contractors use outdated technology, their machines get vandalised by Maoists who also scare away their labour. The government has to get big players to lay roads in Bastar and faster.

What is most worrying is that 72 security personnel have been killed in Chhattisgarh since January this year, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of data from South Asian Terrorism Portal. This is double the number of jawans who were martyred in all of 2016 and the highest since 2010. Proof that talk of demonetisation crippling the back of Maoist activity in Chhattisgarh was mere hot air.

If there was a strategic mistake, it was to get caught right in the middle of the Maoist’s Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign (TCOC). This is the military term for the most violent operation time of Maoists and usually is in the summer months between February and June. Security personnel are on vigil during this period, anticipating attacks. The battalion’s urge to take it easy reflects a certain weariness with the task.

In Cobras, the CRPF has one of the best-trained men to fight the guerilla warfare employed by Maoists. The problem is with Chhattisgarh using the CRPF to do routine policing jobs. Sudeep Lakhtakia, the incharge DG of CRPF is an experienced hand who cut his teeth fighting naxalism in Andhra Pradesh. He needs to go back to the drawing board to ensure his men are not led to slaughter.