The Union home ministry has told the Supreme Court that no state police personnel should be deployed in a Naxal-hit area for more than three years.
Citing stress, threat to life and limb and absence of family life as key factors for this demand, the home ministry in a counter affidavit filed in response to a petition questioning the Centre's counter-Naxal policy, also branded Maoist ideologues as "more dangerous than the cadres of People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA)".
It called upon Naxal-hit states to initiate legal action against them for propagating Maoist ideology in urban centres.
"Ideally, they (the police) should be transferred to peaceful areas after serving for three years in LWE (Left Wing Extremist)-affected areas," said the counter affidavit filed on behalf of the Union of India by a director in the home ministry.
Explaining the dynamics of Maoist insurgency, the counter-affidavit referred to a CPI(Maoist) strategy paper citing its three-pronged strategy to seize political power by overthrowing parliamentary form of democracy.
These prongs, it said, are launching a protracted people's war through the PLGA, formation of alliances with other insurgent groups, and, lastly, mobilization of targeted sections of population, especially the urban segment, through front organizations that, while being linked to CPI(Maoist), maintain separate identities to avoid legal liability.
"These mass organizations are generally manned by ideologues, who include academicians and activists fully committed to the party line....Such organizations ostensibly pursue human rights related issues and are also adept at using the legal processes of the Indian state to undermine and emasculate enforcement action by security forces," it said and called the ideologues feeding Maoist ideology to urban minds deadlier than even the PLGA.
Stating that 106 districts across nine states were hit by LWE, the home ministry recalled that 5,969 civilians and 2,147 security personnel had been killed by Maoists and 3,567 firearms looted since 2001.
The counter-affidavit says that fighting Naxalism through a holistic multi-pronged strategy that covered security-related interventions, development-related interventions, rights and entitlement-related interventions and interventions linked to improvement in governance.
The home ministry said there was a case for the state governments to re-examine a large number of claims rejected earlier, for title deeds under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.
This would be in accordance with the Centre's policy to counter Naxalism with rights and entitlements-related interventions.
