However, I haven’t been able to give this site sufficient consideration for a while and that will likely remain the case. So it is time to shut the doors. The archive will remain here, but no new content.

That said, I care deeply about the future of India. The country’s current trajectory relies on terrible decision making, gross corruption, and huge systemic flaws to continue. There is an unhappy and unpleasant correction to be had, and the Naxals are a symptom. But there is hope, and more importantly, unprecedented opportunity in an India that embraces a majority of its citizens instead of isolating them. That is something I am thinking about, and will be writing about on a new India-focused site. I don’t know when that will be though. Hopefully soon.

You can still find me at my main site. Please do get in touch, and thanks for your support.

“There has been continuous information of a large numbers of Naxals being sighted. This shows that the Naxals are well-prepared and ready to take on the security forces,” said a senior official.

A ‘reporter’ clearly sat down and transcribed, or was otherwise fed, this? messaging. It is unfortunate that the Times of India chose to run this as either analysis or journalism, it’s hard to tell which. Note that the article is clearly devoid of specifics, but plentiful in government speaking points.

Can this kind of information op work? Sure, but it depends on a level of credibility this clearly lacks.

On top of the list, General Secretary Ganpati alias Laxman Rao, 61, carries a reward of Rs 24 lakh and is the main ideological pillar behind the Naxals. The dossier lists Ganpati’s family members in Hyderabad, Dharmapuri and Karimnagar districts of Andhra Pradesh.

Number two in the Politburo is Nambala Keshav Rao who comes from a family of government officials with a reward Rs 19 lakh on him. Rao’s brothers are Vigilance and CMD level officers in Andhra Pradesh.

Kishanji, the masked darling of the press, is alive and active in the Orissa-Chhattisgarh forests while his younger brother Mallojula Venugopal is also a Politburo member.

Kattam Sudashan, Bureau Secretary of CPI (Maoist), is the alleged mastermind in April 2010 Dantewada massacre in which 76 security personnel were butchered. Kattam is believed to be still influential in the Dantewada region.

Pulluri Prasad Rao alias Chandranna is the secretary of the North Telangana special zonal committee.

Kishan alias Mahesh is the international face of CPI (Maoist) and believed to be the link between Indian and Nepali Maoists. Kishan is the only Bengali amongst the largely Andhra-dominated outfit.

The Israeli drug lord who ran the billion dollar illicit drug trade in Goa (at the behest of Russian, Israeli, and Nigerian cartels) has been captured in Peru and brought to India. He could give up key associates in politics, police, intelligence, military, as well as his cartel contacts.

Since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, moreover, the state police have not significantly improved its preventive CT capabilities. Instead, the focus has, again, been on symbolism such as the setting up of the ‘elite’ Force 1 and the acquisition and positioning of armoured cars at street corners. The crucial imperative of improving general police capabilities has largely been ignored, and the police constable remains essentially what he was ? poorly trained; poorly integrated into the intelligence chain; operating in conditions of extraordinary stress; and held in wide contempt by both the public and his own masters.

Nitin Pai puts it bluntly -

In any case, the dishonest business of going through the motions has to stop.

The 500-member strong alumni association will join hands with IIM-A’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) to lend their support to the startup companies

Is this the optimal approach? No. Is it useful to entrepreneurs in India? Absolutely.

In India the elite National Security Guard was successfully decentralized but the squadron in Mumbai simply stood up on standby, but was not deployed on the scene (again, India’s first responders – fire brigades and ambulance drivers and police, as well as chowkidars, were the primary state response).

Meanwhile, explosives and forensics specialists from the same unit had to be flown in from across the country. Why were they not decentralized as well?

That is, a robust democracy with incredibly informal infrastructure and porous governance can be hit in any number of ways – from the simple (grenades tossed into a cafe), to the complex (planes hijacked and crashed into buildings).

It’s not so much a question of finding a vulnerability, but rather, a matter of selecting which one offers the maximum return – gauged in terms of systemic damage (economic or social). For this is indicative of both: a continued trajectory of targeting Mumbai’s commuters, as well as another attempt by Huji/Indian Mujahideen to seek out the social systempunkt.

Today, they hit the most average of commuters – those taking the bus, as well as those shopping in the diamond district, and general retail. That is, unlike 26/11, which focused on the elite strata (in the Taj hotel for example), today’s attacked targeted the rest of Mumbai.

(Here‘s a real time map.)

History of Mumbai under attack. What the attackers hope to accomplish.

Nice to see the country has the wherewithal and vision to ignore international norms when its in its own benefit. This, applied to its development strategy writ large, would change the world.

SUNY PhD researcher, Juhi Tyagi, who regularly

…visited the area around four to five times, living and mingling freely with the dalits in the hamlet for a period of 15-20 days at a stretch.

She would travel with Dass on his bike to the Maoist-affected villages where she held meetings with civil society activists, NGO workers and local people in pursuit of of her research, especially in areas such as Garhi and Khaira, police sources said.

Set off Naxal alarm bells when…

…they were ?alarmed at finding additional chips? in Juhi?s mobile phone and needed to check if it had any secret information on them.

She’s in Naxal custody, according to the organization’s spokesman. But Bihar’s DGP isn’t so sure, perhaps considering her a sympathizer:

?The so-called kidnapping of research scholar Juhi Tyagi in Jamui…”

Around 1am, nearly 15 to 20 Maoists came to Dhab village and torched the mobile towers of a private telecom operator.

On Wednesday night, the Maoists had damaged railway tracks disrupting the traffic for nearly four hours on Gaya- Palamu section and set afire a generator of a mobile tower.

However, long-distance inter-state buses did not ply from Palamu, Jamshedpur and Ranchi, and people had to opt for trains to avoid inconvenience. Passengers were seen returning from different bus stands and Ranchi railway station remained crowded the whole day.

Mineral transportation was hampered in parts of Lohardaga, Palamu, Hazaribagh, Ranchi, Latehar, Ramgarh, West Singhbhum and other districts as hardly any labourer turned up at the loading sites and dumpers remained off the road.

In all, about 28,000 trees had to be cut down in the area while the rebels had warned not a single labour would be allowed in.??Since it is hard to get labourers, the government is planning to use machines to cut down the trees,? Principal Secretary (Forests) Narayan Singh said.

In Maharashtra:

The report says withdrawal of forestry operations like logging, silviculture, bamboo removal, extraction of minor forest produce (MFP) etc. was causing a loss of revenue annually to the tune of over Rs 90 crore in Gadchiroli district and Rs 15 crore in Gondia district.

The report says the Naxal menace is also causing loss of 35.50 lakh man-days employment in Gadchiroli and 3 lakh man-days in Gondia. The state forest department spends Rs 35 lakh per day towards 20,000 people working daily on 1,200 works like soil and water conservation, afforestation etc. but the naxal-affected belts are an exception.

The company or the agency engineering any work in the restive areas would send a requisition to the state government that would provide personnel subject to availability. In return, the government would charge fee from the company, the official said.

?Workers taken to such sites do not continue with their jobs due to threats from extremists. That?s why we are considering engaging locals and providing only a motorable surface (without bitumen) to ensure faster construction,?

A more nuanced explanation is more useful. That is, violence and the threat thereof only play a small role, corruption, and the accompanying extortion play a much larger role. Similar development efforts have suffered from leakage rates of between 30 and 70%.?Of course, the Naxals underpin a lot of this, but so do police, contractors, etc.

So when Naxals take casualties in combat, they drag the bodies away, and when they can’t (overwhelming fire, unfriendly terrain etc), they take any equipment the fallen comrade may have and disappear.?This way, when the state conducts a standard sweep the following day, no valuable intelligence is revealed.

In Jharkhand, a police patrol was told of a location where they discovered 14 bullet-ridden bodies of Naxals. The question is, did Jharkhand’s residents offer the location of the grave or were they compelled to?

These bases are designed with two purposes in mind:

1. Accelerate attrition. That is, incentivize an elusive enemy to attack a target, and take casualties as a result.
2. Enable police forces to patrol an area more easily. Less travel is required, thus the troops are less vulnerable.

However, when #2 overrides #1, or, more precisely, when risk-averse leadership wants no troops in danger, (no troops died this month!) and treats the forts as an end to themselves, (We built x in y months!) this strategy goes off the rails. Rather than engaging the enemy, they act primarily as targets, or worse, go ignored.

?Mining and transportation activities have been put on a halt since June 1. Around 25 rebels owing allegiance to the CPI(Maoist) burnt down three trucks, an SUV and two earth-moving equipment around 5.30pm and partially destroyed another vehicle. They also fired in the air and beat up the drivers and helpers,? officer in charge of Kisko police station Munu Tudu told?The Telegraph.

?The new strategy focuses on a six-stage approach called Saarrc?survey, awareness, agitation, recruitment, resistance and control. They have completed the first stage of survey, i.e. identifying the target groups, potential areas of discontent and flash points in urban areas. Now they are in the process of implementing the second and third stages of their strategy,? said the SID official who declined to be named.

The classic Maoist approach has always been to encircle the urban areas, then overrun them. I’m skeptical of this goal (Naxals have a poor record when it comes to governance – and that’s saying something in an Indian context).

Of course, this is not a uniform effort. The disruption of rural governance is funded in a certain way, and this has resulted in a particular hierarchy and group of operatives. It is unlikely this existing machinery will be able to transition to one concentrated on urban warfare – not the right assets for that kind of campaign.

But the conditions are in place for cadre who have not yet ‘made their bones’ elsewhere.

According to Yashwant Sumant, head of the department of political science in Pune University, a fairly large section of the urban youth finds the current politico-economic system stifling. It feels alienated from the present power structure as political authority is concentrated in the hands of a few families, he said.

?One segment of such youth came out in support of Anna Hazare?s campaign for the Lokpal Bill and they can be easy targets for Naxalite groups,? he said.

The state’s reaction matters a lot here. Should it apply the Binayak Sen ruleset, it can further alienate these segments (and justify their budgets doing so). Alternatively, it can bring them into the fold, though that’s an approach the government has not really shown an appreciation for.

Nine dogs of the Belgian shepherd breed from National Training Centre for Dogs and Animals (NTCDA) at Bhanu in Panchkula district will be helping paramilitary forces in battling?Naxalites soon.

There’s a better way.

The “city” of Raipur is hardly even a city, it’s more like a set of enclosed/gated colonies for wealthy/connected people, and urban residue. No autorikshaws, no taxis, lots of random, dusty,?unused and?barren land, and clear physical differences between outsiders and locals.

Naxals went on rampage at several places on the first day of the two-day bandh called by them killing two persons, including an abducted Special Police Officer (SPO), set on fire some vehicles and ruptured railway tracks.

Over the next month, I’ll be able to provide some insight from someone on the ground in this area. More on that later.

Deburma, 24, is detained in a high-security prison near Hyderabad which is launching an innovative scheme to turn convicts into “outsourcing providers” for local firms and eventually, it is hoped, international clients.

The scheme is in its early stages, with prisoners being trained in basic data entry skills. Jail authorities hope that inmates will soon be just as likely to tap at a keyboard as dig vegetables, make carpets or stitch uniforms.

One attraction was the pay. For tasks such as weaving traditional rugs or welding bunkbeds for government hostels, prisoners receive only 15 rupees per day. Those working in the outsourcing unit will receive up to 10 times as much.

Prospective clients include the Indian postal service and the group working on a project to issue a personal identity card to all adults.

?All of us learnt to become individual, sovereign republics. We send our children to private schools, get treatment only in private hospitals, have our own security in gated communities, never need to use public transport, even own our own diesel gensets to produce power, and in many parts of the country, arrange our own water supply, either through our own borewells or tankers.?

And the NYT expounds on:

The pursuit of India?s elite is to protect themselves from India ? from its crowds, dust, heat, poverty, politics, governance and everything else that is in plain sight. To achieve this, they embed themselves in their private islands that the forces and the odors of the republic cannot easily penetrate.

The islands that protect Indians from India are simple and material: A luxurious car with an unspeaking driver who works for 12 hours every day at less than $200 a month, or at least an S.U.V. with strong metal fenders that can absorb routine minor accidents. A house in a beautiful residential community that the Other Indians can enter only as maids and drivers. Membership in an exclusive club. Essentially a life in a bubble where there is no sign of the government except for the treachery of the service tax.

This is actually true of the global elite, but India’s attempt to join that strata is interesting given the conditions are fundamentally different.

As many as 30,000 CRPF men at the forefront of the fight against Naxals and insurgents across the country will have their lives in their hands when they face the enemy. They will go to battle without even basic bulletproof (BP) jackets, thanks to the delay in processing the Union home ministry’s order for 59,000 such jackets.

This will mark two years of the paramilitary forces’ wait to equip their men with the basic life- saving shield. After the tender floated for the jackets in July 2009 got embroiled in a scam, the home ministry had placed a Rs 103 crore order, the biggest ever, with a Kanpurbased firm, MKU Limited, on April 27, 2010.

Sources in the MHA say the order was to be completed by January 2011. But till date, only 13,500 jackets have been delivered to the ministry.

The MHA expects the balance of supplies to arrive by the end of June, but sources claim the order will not be completed before the next six months or by the end of the year.

Currently, the seven central paramilitary forces together are short of a total of 80,800 BP jackets. Of these, the CRPF, mostly deployed in Naxal- affected areas, Jammu and Kashmir and the North- East, has the maximum shortfall, a senior officer in the force said.

…a syndicate of Ju?rez businessmen hired a group of former Zetas (a paramilitary narco-trafficking group) to ?protect themselves against kidnappings and extortions.

[This] vigilante paramilitary group, which is funded by wealthy Ju?rez businessmen and has close ties to the Mexican military (the?Zetas were founded by former Mexican special forces operatives), provides us with an important insight into the dynamics of the violence of the drug war in Mexico.

With the Maoists unleashing violence in 17 districts of the state, a standing committee of Orissa Legislative Assembly on home department today recommended creation of a security battalion to guard 16 jails in naxal-affected areas and 8 other highly sensitive prisons.

The committee said that the new battalion for jails could be created by taking tribal youths from among the special police officers (SPOs).

“When my father was alive he took an 8000-rupee ($175) loan from the landowner. Since that time I am having to work day and night for him,” Gagai said, adding that he has never been paid.

“If I don’t work, they will beat me. They will abuse my daughter,” said Lalti, a mother of seven. “If you don’t give in, they will sell your daughter or son.”

Free the Slaves, an NGO that focuses on this problem, estimates that it would cost $250 to secure the release of every bonded family in India.

In this case, Sangam’s police force is offering access to lists of government jobs and the helping teachers coordinate the certifications/classes/tutoring required to gain that employment.

This is precisely the kind of collaborative security that can thrive in uncertain environments given scarce resources. Why? In contrast to the traditional practice of militarization, which operates much like a mousetrap (rapid but rigid), this builds the capacity to respond (fluid).

Some 300 personnel of the Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA), a special anti-Naxal force, have been deployed in Madhya Pradesh?s Balaghat district to combat the growing presence of the leftwing rebels.

COBRA, a unit of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), was set up in 2008 at a cost of Rs1,390 crore, of which Rs899 crore was spent on land and infrastructure. Around Rs492 crore will be used for manpower training over three years.

Our research indicates that deals worth USD 24.66 billion (approximately) have been signed by the Indian Ministry of Defence (MoD) with global integrators in the past 48 months and another USD 41.99 billion (approximately) deals are in the process of getting signed.

Glad to see there’s enough funding for a position to coordinate this:

Area Suraksha Mitra is a programme aimed at training members of the public in aspects of fire fighting, first aid, neighbourhood security, CPR and so on.?Launched in February 2009 by the Directorate of Home Guards & Civil Defence in association with Janaagraha and partners, its goal is to build a prepared citizenry in various areas of the city to strengthen the hands of police and rescue workers in times of emergency.?The program will enable people to actively respond rather than being mere spectators not knowing how to help in times of emergencies.

?Huge vacancies in the administrative set-up and large-scale absenteeism have been reported from the Naxal-affected areas. There are over 94,800 vacancies to be filled up as on December 31, 2010, by these states. These are indicative of poor presence of government machinery in the affected areas. Such trends would further alienate the people and render the entire exercise of countering Naxalism futile.?

?Every house in the hamlet brewed illicit liquor. It is like a cottage industry, women, children of every family assisted the men in brewing,?? said Murthy Jacob (50), pastor of Malayambakkam, who helped police eradicate liquor brewing from the village.

With the tacit approval of the authorities:

At least half of the earnings made by the brewers were pocketed by the cops. ??We used to earn `2,000 per week by selling illicit liquor, but had to pay a minimum of `1,000 as bribe to the prohibition enforcement wing and local police,?? said Kannan.

With the same up the pyramid to the politicians:

There were also occasions when police attempted to come down heavy on the brewers, but the local politicians stopped it. ??Thirty years ago, when inspector Rajendran tried to eradicate illicit liquor, the issue was taken up with the then chief minister MGR. The CM ordered the police not to enter the village,?? he said.

And this seems to have continued for the last 60 years. Of note, the village has an average literacy rate of 82% which is a full 20 points higher than the national average. (Need to find better data on this before drawing a conclusion.)

Power now is co-owned by 100-odd political dynasties and family enterprises. And you could justifiably say political dynasties are most often family owned enterprises.

Look at the marquee of political parties and you realise that each of them is a dynasty, whether it is the Samajwadi Party, the Shiv Sena, the DMK, the RJD, the LJP or the National Conference. Barring the BJP (which harbours minor dynasties within) and the Left almost all parties are run like enterprises with succession plans. Some not unlike family owned businesses even have a professional CEO to administer the interests of the enterprise.

Interestingly, the police are not doing anything to locate or rescue the officer. As expected, they’re overwhelmed in numbers, firepower, and support:

When asked why the collector’s team was not accompanied by security, a district official said, “We are better off without security. In any case, the police here is not effective. They have a post in Badapada village, the location of our outreach camp, but if the Maoists had decided to abduct us from the camp, the police would have done nothing”.

Instead, they’re turning to public goodwill:

Morning in Malkangiri began with school children marching with banners that said “Free our collector”. Through the day, shops, banks, schools remained closed, and the streets empty. By evening, residents had turned up at a public ground, for to organize a show of support.

…and hoping that local leaders can save the officer.

Sources said sarpanches of nearby villages have set off to initiate talks with the Maoists.

An agreement with the Planning Commission of India will tie the measurement of the country?s GDP to losses or gains to natural resources, biodiversity and overall environmental health starting in 2015.

If economic growth is deemed to have risen 9 percent, but loss to biodiversity is factored at three percent, then the overall growth would be adjusted to six percent.

However, if growth in the economy is coupled with growth in biodiversity, then the numbers would be compounded.

• Enforcing a cordon. That is, these hired elements have surrounded the peaceful protestors, gained the high ground and established battle lines. (Note, this applies to a media blackout via concentrated attacks on foreign journalists.)
• Preventing supplies. Food, water, medical care, etc are unavailable. This saps at the will of the protestors, driving many to flee, weakening those who stay.
• Provocation. Violence at the edges, with persistant efforts to push in the borders drives both of the above.

Note that, when applied in concert, these tools extend the timeline of the event (thereby garnering more funding for the participants).

If Yasi does its worst, it could prove devastating to the area, and also to those who rely on that resource to produce their own goods:

?Coking coal accounts for about 45 percent of the raw material costs of non-integrated steel producers in?India,? Mohta said. ?The run in coking coal prices will affect the margins of these producers, who are already vulnerable to an expected increase in iron ore prices over the next quarter.?

And in no small part, those iron ore prices are driven ever higher by the Naxals and the ecosystem they underpin.

“The bandh on Saturday was a state-sponsored bandh. When a ruling party forces a bandh, what should be the remedy for people? In fact, the chief minister had profusely thanked the people on the bandh’s success. The Supreme Court had come down on such bandhs and had prescribed guidelines in the matter,” Raviverma Kumar, senior advocate appearing for the petitioner, said.

The petitioner is seeking Rs 5,000 crore damages to the state exchequer in lieu of the loss incurred on account of the bandh.

Stephen Cohen agrees:

Militants–whether you call them anti-American, anti-liberal, or anti-secular–seem to have a veto over politics in Pakistan, but they can’t govern the state. The parties control the elections but they can prevent others from governing, and they may prevent the military from governing as well.

This is very much in line with what I described two years ago, here. It seems the only vestiges of a functioning Pakistani state are to be found wherever it’s elite are bemoaning its demise.

What does this mean for India? It’s informal connectivity to Pakistan will matter more going forward than its diplomatic links.

To that end, they turned to the hotel’s security force. The assistant chief security officer, one Rajesh Kadam, stepped up and put himself in danger by accompanying the NSG elements as a guide. It’s an amazing story, one I heard that day, but I’m glad to see it’s in the press now.

One of the worst-affected areas is the Naxalite belt in the Gadchiroli?Chandrapur districts that are home to large tracts of protected forest cover. Of the 1.9 lakh trees that were illegally chopped last year, 34,780 were from Chandrapur district. “The cost of trees lost is Rs 2.06 crore,” said a forest official.

“The mafia here is very strong. We have lost several cops in encounters with Naxalites. There is a very real fear especially at night as that`s when the smuggling takes place,” a forest official based in Gadchiroli?Chandrapur told TOI.

“Teak trees are being cut and smuggled to the bordering states. We are unable to stop it as the Naxalites have cut off access and even fortified these areas,” a senior forest official said.”

The 320-cubic metre helium-filled balloon can keep an eye on the happenings below it, remaining stationary at an altitude of 1.5 km. The giant balloon can be tethered to the ground station and also can be flown using remote control.

Three cameras can be mounted on the aerostat each having a range to scan developments in a 30 km radius. It can float in air for six hours to beam pictures.

Update: Here’s video captured by a tourist. Watch the right side at the 32 second mark.

Mobile courts would soon be introduced in Panchayats, specially in Naxalite infested areas, to instill confidence among the people about the availability of justice, Union Minister for Law and Justice M Virappa Moily today said.

The idea is, given the problems with holding a territory – which is to essentially turn an area into a target, the state can instead provide traveling nodes that can be more easily protected and are not dependent on a clear/hold/clear strategy.

Unfortunately as soon as the traveling circus makes its way elsewhere, the land is essentially ceded to the local organizations that constitute governance (Naxals, gangs, aristocracies, etc), the thus plunging the villagers back into hands of two justice systems.

The flaw of this effort is precisely its perceived advantage:?it is transitory.

At the overall market level there is not too much of a meaningful relationship between accounting quality and share price changes. This probably explains why many investors in the Indian market tend not to have accounting quality as a ‘high priority’ item on their radar.

Dawood Ibrahim is believed to be helping in efforts to smuggle a group of terrorists linked to al-Qaeda into Europe for Mumbai-sytle attacks in Germany.

More in the posts listed here.

In a typical scenario, United Nations investigators say, a legitimate pharmaceutical company in India exports cold pills to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where they are falsely labeled as herbal supplements and shipped to Belize, and then to Veracruz [Mexico] by cargo container.

What is interesting here is the tie-in (again) to the decades old Indian illicit goods trade. The smuggling networks built up during the ‘closed’ economy have adapted to global market demand.

India’s underground economy has been estimated to account for 50% of the country’s GDP – $640bn at the end of 2008.

More data on illicit capital?flow:

• India lost a total of $462bn in illegal capital flows between 1948, a year after Independence, and 2008.
• Onset of a predatory economy: Some 68% of India’s capital loss has happened since the economy opened up in 1991.
• The report’s author, Dev Kar, a former International Monetary Fund economist, said that almost three quarters of the illegal money that comprises India’s underground economy ends up outside the country

Also, the Barkha Dutt incident is indicative of the incestuous relationship between India’s elite, regardless of job or function. You can’t gain access to the elite (because transparency isn’t much leverage)?without becoming one of them. And by then, you’ve sold your soul.

The multiplier, of course, was?entrepreneurship?on the part of the recipient, but the incentives were in place and aligned with the goals of the community. IE. You can earn more, but in doing so, you have to hire others/buy stuff and the community experiences sustainable, steady growth – jump started by this growth engine. Given the constraints of a lack of political will and fiscal resources, this engine worked well.

However, that architecture slowly corrupted as new energy flowed into the system (namely, ‘financial talent’ and associated wealth looking for ROI) and it fell victim to forces that experts in development have been writing about for the last decade, namely:

• Microloans run amok at the expense of other tools. (Because, compared to building a cooperative network or a warehouse, a small loan is relatively simple.)
• As a result, individuals became the focus (seen as interest bearing accounts) instead of the community. With this fundamental misalignment, the entrepreneurship incentive was lost.?(For example, they can be used to pay down existing debt which, in all reality, is ideal for a corporation in the business of making loans.)
• The goal became the loan. (Or, more specifically, building a book of loans that could then be sold or used to justify an IPO.)
• Additionally, the distributed nature of these led to the use of affiliates to do the actual day to day lending/management, and moneylenders at the village level are already?notorious?for their brutal tactics.

What’s sad is that economic growth would have ensured that the debts were eventually repaid, but the pressure of quarterly reports forced the corporations to offer more and more loan products (bigger and with higher interest if you could get away with it) and think short run.

In combination, these factors allowed the financiers to pull a magic trick: they actually managed to?invert the growth engine, so much so that it is generating negative growth, directly contributing to tens of thousands of suicides, and getting ready to blow up.

(Note. David is the guy to read on this.)

• Why these links pop up in the media. In part, due to a concentrated effort on the part of the Indian intelligence/military community to justify inaction/budgets etc.
• The core Maoist Cadre doesn’t want to enable that. (They would rather steadily bleed the state than provoke an overwhelming response by associating themselves with what is perceived to be the most important national security matter).

That said, looking for ‘partnerships’ between the Naxals is generally a non-starter. Why? It’s confusing a transaction-based relationship for one that is strategic in nature. A more ?interesting question is – why is that so?

As I’ve described before, Naxals hollow out the state in areas in which they operate. They don’t seek to supplant that governance (they don’t have the people/resources), instead, they underpin “ a bazaar of violence, smuggling, and?decentralized development. In short, they?ve enabled other people to undertake ?black economy? activities, creating essentially an engine for driving the state out of huge swathes of its own land.” (I’m writing a chapter for an upcoming book on this topic.)

Who are the actors on ?the platform provided by Naxals? Smugglers, small gangs, big gangs (D Company), ISI, LeT/LTTE/AQ/IM etc. In short, everyone.?And that’s what matters, not whether a Naxal met a Jihadi in a bar somewhere.

(Thanks to the various people who brought this article to my attention.)

One of Mexico’s major narcotics gangs reportedly offered Wednesday to disband if the government would intensify security in the state of Michoacan, the cradle of its drug empire, and keep rival drug gangs out.

The offer came in a series of cloth banners and printed flyers in Michoacan state early in the day. Their authenticity couldn’t be determined.

The author of the 500-word statement lashed out at the central government, playing off intense regional loyalties that often make Michoacan natives suspicious of federal authority.

Federal agents, it said, are guilty of “numerous abuses” and have “broken into and looted homes, murdered and abused men and women and invented illegal judicial pretexts . . . to fill prisons with innocent people making up charges against them.”

Readers of this blog can see the parallels with Naxal information operations.

Tata is seeking to solve this problem by extracting potash from seawater, but only plans on building a 900 ton/year facility over the next ten years.

• Criticising the government’s lack of “spending on poverty alleviation measures” that could produce “long lasting and tangible” welfare measures that could sustain a people, Ghandy said, instead the spending is on “airports, expressways, internet connectivity,” which he claimed “primarily benefits industry and businessmen.”

• He criticised the government welfare schemes, saying, “the bulk of government schemes are mere doles like the NREGA, SJPSY, AAY, APL, BPL etc. None of such projects are geared to create something tangible that can benefit the country in the long term and also benefit the individual in the form of providing irrigation, employment, health care, etc.”

• NREGA, he explained, involves 36% in Tripura, 14% in UP and MP, 8% in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar. “So where did all the money go?” he asked. He accused the government for not even building proper infrastructure for storing food grains, which are rotting when so many people go hungry.

• Parliamentarians, he pointed out, have given themselves a 300% hike in salary and perks. The approach “requires remedial measures.”

“The oil and the machinery is for logistic support to the NATO forces who killed our innocent sisters and brothers in Afghanistan, which we would never allow,” Tariq said Wednesday.

Given that the DoD consumes fuel as if it were water (and as cheap – 2/3 of total tons moved is fuel), this is important if the Taliban can sustain the momentum of these attacks. Some quick facts from a study by an USAF COL:

1. At 75% fuel availability, a theater commander will have full air mobility and full CAS effectiveness.
2. At 50% fuel availability, commanders will be able to use limited range CAS and medium ground forces.
3. At 25% fuel availability, light infantry forces living off the land will be combat ready.
4. At 0% fuel availability, only self-sufficient special operations forces will be able to maintain combat readiness.

Notes:

• Lt. Gen H.S. Panag (a reader) sees this as as dress rehearsal for an upcoming attack.
• The gunfire targeted Taiwanese tourists. This is a clear message to those hoping to attend the upcoming Common Wealth Games.
• Pressure cooker bombs were used in the Mumbai 2006 train bombings.

While there is some degree of connectivity (terrorism is a surprisingly small world and radical Islam is even smaller?subset), there’s not enough, in this case, to really matter – beyond what links are there between the LeT, ISI, AQ and the constellation of small groups that circle those majors.

More interesting than the social network graph of that relationship (it’s easy and there are plenty of PhD’s on that case), is the environment in which the LeT operates. Here’s an old post (or two) on the topic. (Glancing through the headlines mentioning Pakistan, it still rings true.)

Around 3 feet of railway track has been damaged. On Sunday night, the railway authorities had directed the auto pilots to restrict the maximum speed of trains to 65 kms on Jharkhand tracks

The Maoists had given a call for Jharkhand bandh since Wednesday midnight protesting against the killing of their leaders recently.

Over two dozen mail and express trains, including Rajdhanis have been stopped at different stations between Dhanbad and Mughalsarai stations.

Read more:?Maoists blow up track on Gaya-Dhanbad section, rail traffic disrupted – The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Maoists-blow-up-track-on-Gaya-Dhanbad-section-rail-traffic-disrupted/articleshow/6544300.cms#ixzz0zPzreRKe

Pakistan tried to do the same thing with ISI. (In that instance, however, the spectre was radicalism rather than an allegiance to the drug cartels.) All it managed to do was turn loose a bunch of experienced operatives with the training, inclination, and imperative to take advantage of the opium money in Western Pakistan.

A better option, is to keep those dirty cops on the books, at least that way, you can monitor them to some degree, shape their actions, and use them in disinformation operations. By throwing them out, you lose the entire incentive/disincentive structure altogether, creating a huge void within which these actors thrive.

That’s a rough total of about Rs. 250,000 ($5,355.63) over three years.

Some 61 trucks loaded with over 300 tons of explosives have gone missing in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a senior police official said Friday.

Classic.?Bureaucrat claims its not his fault:

“We hand over the explosives to those who have the license. And they then dispatch it on their truck. Now, whatever happens to that explosive thereafter, we are not responsible for that,” Y.C. Upadhyay of the company said.

300 tons of actual explosives (assuming even a big part of that is usable, and is effectively distributed among component groups) is enough to turn the tide on the conflict. (For a larger, full scale conflict, for example, Iraq’s insurgents probably used something in the range of 200,000 tons.)

(H/T Charles)

“The Bangalore Police received credible inputs to the effect that the ISI had engaged Dawood Ibrahim and through his accomplice, Chotta Shakeel, to engage Maoists, that is Naxalite leaders in India and instigate them to commit terrorist acts,” said Shankar Bidari, the city’s Police Commissioner.

Altaf from Dakshina Kannada district and Vinay Kumar from the Hassan district? were allegedly authorized to? pay the Maoists to commit terrorist acts in India. The police claims that money had been transferred to Hyderabad for this purpose – and that 4 lakhs had already been paid to the Maoists. The police also believes that? visas and tickets to Dubai from Hyderabad had also been arranged for Maoist leaders? from Andhra Pradesh.”

In contrast to legacy terrorism (ideologically motivated, big target focused ), modern warfare is driven in a large part by the global market (much more complex, much less of an academic exercise).

Naxals have traditionally enabled other insurgencies in the country, including terrorists, via keystoning (ensuring it goes untouched by the authorities, facilitating the actions of independent actors) a black market network that spans the country and beyond.

It is no surprise then, to readers of this blog anyway, that the key factor in any linkages between Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company and Naxals is the exchange of cash and benefits.

Students from the Indian Institutes of Technology and Science collaborated on the project, and built an initial prototype at $47. This is in stark contrast to the traditional approach – the IITs and IIS’s generally act as express trains out of the country or as a pipeline for knowledge worker outsourcing.

The next step is to unlock this entrepreneurial capacity throughout the country, as I outlined here.

“Mainly due to frequent bandhs called by naxal organizations and also due to stoppage of work because of threats meted out to the workforce engaged in coal production and transportation.”

?Coal and iron ore are the two key bulk commodities transported via railways. Repeated disruptions in the Naxal-hit areas have affected the traffic of these commodities considerably. Our tonnage target could not be met in the first quarter,? a senior official at the ministry said.”

Of the 226 million tons projected, the Railways were only able to transport 218. A 4% Naxal disruption rate?

Why? Unlike roads and rail transportation platforms (on which billions have been spent with little or no progress), decentralized energy platforms aren’t reliant on a centralized urban hubs.

Nor are they open to disruption. Only hijacking. And that makes all the difference in the world.

• Attacked a Congress leader’s house in Chhatisgarh, in conjunction with a raid on a nearby police station. They killed his brother-in-law and father.
• Blew up a bridge.
• Destroyed a railway line.
• Destroyed a police station, as well as another in Orissa.

Azad Cherukuri alias Rajkumar was a senior most member of the core Naxal hierarchy. He had been in hiding for the last four months. He was taken out in an operation by the Andhra Pradesh intelligence service.

While a counterinsurgency/counterterrorism coup, his death will have very little impact, if any, on the day to day functioning of the ecosystem.

Yesterday the army arrested the Monterrey-area boss of the Zetas, known as El Tory, and, in an effort to free him, his Zeta operatives set up 30 roadblocks all over the city which completely shut it down.

While the operational capabilities of the Zetas to set up thirty roadblocks so quickly is somewhat impressive, to me it only reveals that they have a hidden army of street?rateros (punks) in place all over the city who, at a moment’s notice, can be ordered to hijack city buses and tractor trailers.

Much thanks to Alakananda Mookerjee for reaching out.

In effect, the government has flung the average Indian to the winds of the highly unstable global hydrocarbon market. This is an industry plagued by limited resources (Jeff Rubin) and security threats (John Robb).

The immediate pain will be felt by consumers: effective Friday midnight, you will have to shell out Rs 3.50 a litre more for petrol, Rs 2 for diesel, Rs 3 for kerosene and Rs 35 for each cylinder of cooking gas.

This follows the Centre’s decision to decontrol pricing of motor fuels and prune the dole on kitchen fuels to check losses of state-run oil marketing companies and reduce its subsidy burden.

Energy drives the entirety of the rest of the ecosystem. Cheap, plentiful energy yields growth and prosperity (though societal structure has radically concentrated this process). Unstable, expensive energy halts growth and encourages churn . (Refer to the work of Joseph Tainter for more on this.)

It’s not so much that prices will increase (economies can adapt within a certain envelope), it’s the instability that matters. Unfortunately, the decision seems to have been made without any firm understanding of this fact:

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday said the the hike in prices of petroleum products will have some inflationary impact in the short-term but price pressures will moderate from the middle of July.

Mukherjee’s prediction is predicated on energy prices staying constant. This is simply bizarre given that his decision removed the ability to do exactly that.

Also, since Nepal is totally dependent on India for its energy, the ripples from this decision will cascade across borders.

Naxalite spokesperson Azad said, ?We appeal to all democratic forces to unite, oppose and militantly resist the continuous sell-out of the country?s interests to imperialistsharks. Time is running out. Unless we act collectively against the disastrous policies of the traitorous UPA government and various state governments we cannot prevent the whole of India from becoming a Bhopal.?

I have long argued that the Naxal strategy of milking mining corporations through extortion will reach a tipping point – where the corporations gain enough traction to where the adivasis are connected to the state (or corporation) and associate it with their welfare. At that point, we will see a significant and concentrated effort on disrupting the mine system, rather than just placing a tax on it. A bandh.

Are we there yet? Probably not. This is probably just opportunistic capitalization on the buzz surrounding the Bhopal verdict.? But it is coming.

“CBI has declared a reward of Rs one lakh each for information leading to the arrest of three prominent accused – Umakant Mahto, resident of village Banksole, Manoj alias Bapi Mahto, resident of Rasua village and Asit Mahto, resident of Krishnanagar village,” CBI spokesperson Harsh Bhal said.

(Emphasis mine.)

• 119 Tata light armored troop carriers

• 98 Mahindra Rakshak bullet-proof light vehicles
• night vision devices for rifles
• 146 automatic grenade launchers
• 47,000 grenades from Rosoboron Export of Russia
• laser range finders from Slovenian company Fotono
• 59,000 light-weight, bullet-proof jackets
• 1,000 pistols
• 800 Swiss-made SIG Sauer assault rifles
• 380 automatic grenade launchers and related ammunition

West Bengal, and Jharkhand have built their own units prior to this.

Michael thinks this was not the work of the Naxals:

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the Naxalites were not responsible for the recent train derailment. It contradicts their modus operandi. They do not do terrorism. And they have denied responsibility. Even when they fuck up, they admit responsibility.

I’m not so sure. While I agree that the inadvertently massive body count was not the work of the ‘Naxals proper’ (a hierarchical ideologically-bound organization), I do believe it was conducted under the auspices of the Naxal umbrella. As I’ve described before, the structure of the organization looks like this:

A majority of the activity driving the Naxalite movement forward comes from the black market that the Maoist hierarchy underpins and protects. This is why, despite calls for all out assault on polls to show just how strong the movement is, most profit-motivated participants in this illicit network continued about their daily business ? slowly eroding the ability of the nation-state to conduct any activity in the regions where they generate profit from illicit trade.

This seems to be supported (again) by the facts on the ground:

An intelligence report submitted to West Bengal CM has pointed to the involvement of a renegade faction of the Maoist-backed People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA) in the Gyaneshwari Express sabotage on Friday.

“The Manikpara Lodhasuli unit has turned renegade and does things on its own. Most of the murders and assaults in the last few months were not sanctioned by the Maoist central committee,” said a source. “It’s likely that the top leadership did not know about the derailment plan.”

The Maoist leadership has little control over the group that has turned to extortion.

An inspection engine is believed to have piloted the Ranchi-Hatia Express down the same track at 12.37pm. No damage was reported then.

The derailment occurred at 1:15 am, a full 12 hours after the last check.

REAL TIME INFORMATION

Given how just in time this transportation system is now, with up-to-the-minute computer controlled management of train dispatch and scheduling, it cannot operate without a real-time view of its environment. This disconnect directly contributed to the huge body count in this particular instance (knowing that the Jnaneswari was off the tracks could have halted the goods train – there was a gap of a full five minutes). For example, this hole can be filled through the use of aerial surveillance (faster) or sensors (more real-time and distributed).

As it stands, the Indian Railway has effectively accelerated and increased the load on the system using 21′st century technology while relying on an information process from the 19′th.

• Roads. More resilient given that roads are designed to streamline travel, but not necessarily replace driving on dirt. The exception is unnavigable terrain – such as bodies of water or densely packed forest.? Naxals rely on IEDs (to hit the vehicle, not the road), fallen trees (harder to go over) or blowing up bridges to disrupt this system.

• Trains. In contrast, the railway network is designed to replace navigating the uncertain nature of terrain. While the vehicle is less of the target, the network itself becomes more of one. Unfortunately, this makes it extremely unresilient and prone to even minor tweaks to the system sending it non-linear.

In the case of? the Jnaneswari Express, Naxals removed about 50 feet of pandrol clips (designed to hold the track down, picture below) to achieve a instability at high speeds, and then removed a foot long section of track in order to generate a catastrophic event. This is 51 feet of affected track, on a route spanning hundreds of miles.

The Jnaneswari fishtailed but was able to come to a stop with only a few derailed cars, though they came to rest on opposing tracks. However, the system immediately cascaded, as a high speed goods train was approaching from the other side, did not have time to stop and was not informed of the original incident. It hit the cars from the Jnaneswari that lay in its path. 100 are dead so far.

Note. While the sabotage was designed to derail, it would not have been a mass casualty event. Unfortunately, if not now, this kind of cascading failure would have resulted at some point or the other.

The Delhi Metro, (while breathlessly reported by the New York Times as a testament to India arriving on the international stage) is a convenience (by no means a necessity) for certain tiers of society, but for others is just another effort that has squandered billions on an unsustainable system (which will never have enough carrying capacity, or be accessible to enough people).

Embedding high speed, low capacity, extremely expensive (the Delhi Metro costs $7 billion) transportation systems does not make sense if the architecture of these megacities fundamentally does not match up. (India’s cities are not comprised of business and residential districts the way New York City, for example, is. There is no rush hour in two distinct directions. Rather, the city is comprised of a hodgepodge of zones that intermix if not overlap.)

Rather than trying to connect existing nodes with new infrastructure (again too expensive, for too few people, and doesn’t scale well), a more important goal should be to adapt existing infrastructure to real world needs. In short, paying attention to foot/bike commuters rather than literally and figuratively running over them.

This could be as simple as protected (walled) bike lanes and bus lanes to more complex initiatives such as accelerating and ensuring the safety of short hops from zone to zone via real-time monitoring of traffic cameras or cell phone signals or virtualizing the workplace or any number of things.

This is important, for even as infrastructure must adapt to the city, the city also shapes around its infrastructure going forward. A future Delhi with a NYC style subway system is extremely unlikely given the challenges outlined above. Instead, we’re more likely to see the current mix of zones build up rather cluster. Something a metro system does very little to address.

(This post doesn’t even consider the security dangers of a metro system in India.)

Here we see a fledgling specialized force with more firepower growing organically in response to Naxals, railway platform gangs, and a general lack of effective weaponry/training.

A brainchild of superintendent of railway police (Tatanagar) Jeetendra Prasad Singh, the 12-member team was formed recently. The outfit is headed by a sub-inspector and also comprises assistant sub-inspectors (ASIs) and constables.

?The team is basically a rushing party. It?s primary task is to respond quickly to any crime happening in their areas of our jurisdiction,? J. Kerketta, deputy superintendent of police (Tatanagar), said.

According to him, sub-inspector Vinod Kumar Singh has been appointed head of the team. ?The team also includes ASIs and constables. Havildars have also been included in the party. Four members each comprise the armed and lathi party,? Kerketta said, adding they were confident that crime in railway areas would be controlled with this initiative.

Here’s some thinking on reforming rapid reaction forces.

Tangentally, the Indo-Asian News Service reports that the railways in Chhatisgarh are clamoring for additional security forces. (Another topic covered extensively here.) This is due to the extreme reliance of the industry upon railway systems:

The railway line is critical to the steel industry. The country’s largest iron ore miner in the public sector, NMDC, relies on it to transport iron ore from its Kirandul and Bacheli mines in Dantewada district to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.

The threat:

In the latest incident of damage to tracks on the K-K line on April 20, Maoists had removed clips from the rail tracks that led to derailment of 17 wagons of a goods train loaded with some 4,000 tonnes of NMDC’s iron ore.

“A job with the central government is a huge achievement. It means they don’t just provide for you, but also the family. At least now we will be able to have some savings as well. Plus we will get accommodation for family,” says Nirmala.

As many as 1,473 police personnel would be on duty on May 8, including two deputy superintendents of police (DySPs), seven circle police inspectors, 66 sub-inspectors/assistant sub-inspectors, 165 head constables, 449 constables, 397 Home Guards, 22 armed head constables and 132 armed constables. As many as 995 police personnel would be on duty on May 12, including two DySPs, four circle police inspectors, 50 sub inspectors/assistant sub-inspectors, 91 head constables, 272 constables, 212 Home Guards, 22 armed head constables and 132 armed constables.

Additionally, alcohol sales will be banned the day of.

?The kind of device used by the ultras on Saturday can be triggered at will, years after they are planted. We suspect many such devices have been planted in different states,? said an official.

This kind of has had the added effect of blurring the line between contractor and Naxal, increasing government suspicion of someone who was probably as much of a victim as it was.

The episode also points to Maoists? connivance with road contractors in the exercise, leading the state police to round up many people in the area on Sunday.

“It has come to the notice of the government that some Maoist leaders have been directly contacting certain NGOs and intellectuals to propagate their ideology and persuade them to take steps, which would provide support to the CPI (Maoist) ideology.”

In doing so, the government has created a fault line – a wedge issue along with individuals and groups are forced to choose sides. As it stands, its a very broad statement.

Anyone who critiques the government approach to either the Naxals (increased militarization in the form of Operation Green Hunt) or development (a failure to support the agricultural base) is vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Any groups that are, either appropriate (as defined by this statement) or erroneously prosecuted will end up landing squarely in the Naxal camp, whether they initially supported the insurgency or were simply fighting for adivasi rights.

“We are ready with a blueprint to prevent the Mittals? entry into the region,? newly appointed Maoist spokesman, Rakeshji told Hindustan Times.

Some quotes:

• They said the gram panchayat had not informed them of the welfare programmes meant for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes despite numerous requests.

• A schoolteacher, who did not wish to be named, said that the situation in the village had remained nearly the same for the last seven years. Money released by the Government does not reach the people, he said.

• There is no bridge across the Suvarna. Where has all the money announced as special package to naxal-affected areas gone? I started this chicken centre to add to my family’s income. One cannot depend on agriculture alone, he said.

Between 40 to 60 percent of the water pumped into the distribution networks never reaches the users in most cities of India.

Here’s a guy in Hyderbad who used the Naxal ‘brand’ for years and extorted a “huge amount” of money.

Mallampally Raju, after selecting reputed doctors used to approach them claiming himself as a close associate of People’s War Group (PWG).

Then, he would demand money by threatening to kill their family members, police said.

Mani Ratnam, one of my my favorite directors (Dil Se did an amazing job tackling Kashmiri terrorism dynamics), is tackling Naxalism in his upcoming Raavan (a retelling of the epic Ramayan and Naxal leader Kobad Ghandy’s life story).

Comes out June 18.

“We have lost Rs 500 crore because of Naxal bandhs and obstructions,” she said adding incidents of attacks by Naxals nearly doubled to 58 in 2009 from 30 in the previous year. 56 incidents were reported in 2007, she said.

Click here for more on railway systems disruption.

My work here has been gaining traction in the press and government, military, corporate circles, slowly and steadily, and I always welcome the opportunity to speak to more people (email me!), but this is a labor of love, so my articles and posts are less frequent than I’d like.

When I’m not doing this, or building a company,? I’m writing a book about what the future of India looks and can look like. How failing infrastructure, a precariously positioned economy (built upon pillaging its agricultural plank), a robust black market, all enabled by a long-standing low-intensity Naxal insurgency that has embraced the tactic of systems disruption contributes to an India that looks much more like the red corridor than most are willing to admit.

But all is not without hope. Gandhi outlined how to apply information flows to a decentralized development strategy that can yield long-run sustainable growth. We can bring that into the 21′st century and correct the errant course of current pursuits.

I’m your host, Shlok Vaidya. You can read about my background here.

The real way to do what Mitra’s trying to get at is to take it a step further, and help direct the development of what systems are already in place. Properly managed, the Indian state can dampen the violence, while accelerating the development being led by Naxals.

(Thanks to Mark for the link.)

India has been a independent democracy for more than sixty years and in that period, successive governments have successfully created two very different nations, a minority one in its developed, parasitic, affluent urban areas and the other deprived, undeveloped, poverty stricken and criminally exploited in its villages, populated by its majority poor citizens. An affluent, westernised, high net worth India and a poor, illiterate, undeveloped Bharat.

The war on the Naxalites, Maoists will not be won by police action. If the Maoists, Naxalites are to be defeated, the government will have to work to bring about ?Gram Swaraj? that the Father of the Nation envisaged. An India made up of self sufficient, self reliant, equitably developed villages and villagers.

Tushar is absolutely right.? This is largely the focus of my upcoming book. (For those asking – I’m still moving on that project, albeit slowly.)

SECURITY INCIDENTS:

CASUALTIES:

• Project force to deter Naxal activism.
• Decapitation by elite units.
• Massive deployment of Army troops.
• Continue displacement to cleanse the area of civilians.
• Utilize air power as necessary.

Unfortunately, this won’t work. Why? It is predicated on isolating the civilian population from the Naxals. Accomplishing that task is not a simple matter of carting people out of the area of operations. In fact, it’s a complex approach that cannot be reliant on force in order to be effective. The alternative is uprooting old homes, displacing families etc, all of which actually offer a disincentive to joining the state, not relief. Coupling this with air power is a recipe for disaster.

It was a mistake to have some jawans take the anti-landmine vehicle. “That vehicle was in front. We were walking behind it. Suddenly there was a blast and the vehicle went up in the air. All the jawans inside were killed in an instant. We lost about 15 men in that single explosion. Thereafter, it was mayhem,” he recalled.

The landmines must have been laid during the night, the jawan said. The attack took place around 7am when the CRPF was passing through a dense forest surrounded by hills. The Maoists had arrayed themselves in `V’ formation and awaiting the CRPF contingent in the thick green foliage. They first triggered the landmines and then began firing indiscriminately running down from the hills from all directions.

This, like most attacks on state forces, are designed to:

• Garner weaponry. Indeed, most Naxals weapons are looted from state police forces.

• Establish control of an area. Though it may not be used regularly, this temporary autonomous zone is critical.

• Provoke retaliation. It looks as though this play is working: “”All I can say at this moment is that our resolve is firm and in the coming days and months, we will give a much firmer and fitting reply to the murderers (Maoists),” Pillai said.”

New Delhi?s counter-insurgency strategy is rooted in a flawed assumption?development in the eastern and central tribal heartlands will help eradicate adivasi?poverty and destroy the Naxalite?s support base. Neither is likely to happen. Without a radical overhaul of the area?s governance structure,?development will do little more than accelerate dislocation and deepen alienation. What India needs to do is provide greater autonomy to the?adivasis and improved social infrastructure in the Naxalite heartland. While recent developments such as Forest Rights Act, granting formal land titles to adivasis, are signs that things may be changing, so far it has been?a case of too little too late. The adivasi themselves must be given an increased role and say in both forest management and investment.

To paraphrase, Michael is right when he says, the brutal truth is that this massive, top-down change is simply not going to happen. The solution lays in decentralized development methodologies. A coherent set of practices (many already deeply embedded into the adivasi culture), technologies, and processes that can yield progress by bootstrap (the only sustainable growth trajectory).

I should probably put together an article on my thinking sometime soon.

Attorney General Daniel Garcia Leal said that unknown gunmen who had set up a fake checkpoint on the road shot and even threw grenades at the victims, the state-run Notimex news agency reported.

The victims were in a pickup truck, returning to their homes after having traveled to pick up money to support their school as part of a government social program, Garcia Leal said.

The gunmen motioned the truck to stop but the victims, out of fear of being robbed or assaulted, did not comply, the attorney general said.

The article makes an error, however. The blockade was not a “fake checkpoint.” The insurgency was not trying to pretend to be the state. It set up an a narco-checkpoint, independent of the state. This is a sign of power, not weakness.

Expressing concern over such attacks, Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee had said earlier this month in Parliament that naxal bandhs and strikes have dealt a blow of nearly 40 per cent to the business of the Railways.

More on India’s vulnerability to railway disruption is available here.

The center of the action last week was the bustling commercial city of Monterrey, where the authorities said criminals commandeered dozens of tractor-trailer trucks and other vehicles on Thursday and Friday to block more than 30 streets and highways. The blockades, called narcobloqueos by the Mexican news media, resulted in traffic chaos, with the trucks parked horizontally across highways and vehicles jammed up behind them.

This is an escalation from when the gangs were paying individuals to ‘demonstrate’ (a la a flashmob) , also in Monterrey.

The Yadavs are members of a new economic caste in India: nouveau riche farmers. Land acquisition for expanding cities and industry is one of the most bitterly contentious issues in India, rife with corruption and violent protests. Yet in some areas it has created pockets of overnight wealth, especially in the outlying regions of the capital, New Delhi.

By Western standards, few of these farmers are truly rich. But in India, where the annual per capita income is about $1,000 and where roughly 800 million people live on less than $2 a day, some farmers have gotten windfalls of several million rupees by selling land. Over the years, farmers and others have sold more than 50,000 acres of farmland as Noida has evolved into a suburb of 300,000 people with shopping malls and office parks.

It turns out they’re not talking about farmers, but actually real estate speculators. If anything, this is bubble behavior (resplendent with examples of excess wealth being squandered on helicopters).

Real farmers are actually suffering. An estimated 200,000-500,000 have committed suicide in the last decade due to overwhelming debt, and a reliance on economic hit men (huge corporations exploiting globalization’s false promise of cheap genetically modified seeds and affordable chemicals to increase yield).

As the farming network blinks out of existence, either by selling land for bubble development or by suicide, the results will be felt across the board. The fundamentals are, all too often, dying.

“They were getting instructions from Pakistan to execute their activities here,” Raghuvanshi said.

“Those spies that are currently present in the Gulf must leave the region within one week?if not then we will cross that bridge when we come to it,” Khalfan reportedly said. When asked whether the spies he was talking about were holders of European passports, Tamim said “Europeans and others,” but offered no further detail.

Aside from oil, Dubai’s sole purpose has been to act as a hub of international connectivity. For decades, it has acted as a financial hub for both the white and black economy. Anyone who wanted to ride the globalization boom routed lots and lots of transactions through Dubai. Dawood Ibrahim ran many of his operations from Dubai, but so did countless other bread-and-butter corporations.

However, as the Mabhouh assassination reveals, aware of its dual-role, Dubai is trying to demarcate a line that must not be crossed – no killing on our soil. This attempt to surpress ‘white-black connectivity’ (that is, the underbelly of the white economy – corporate espionage, traditional spying, etc) must be managed very, very carefully if it is to succeed.

Banning all spies is not going to happen. Not without banning all underworld figures. Or terrorist outfits. Or corporations. In effect, by trying to unwind one of the most saturated spy-environments in the world, Dubai seeks to unwind itself- because it’s only purpose was to enable that kind of connectivity.

An officer from Bandra police station said, “We are currently studying the layout of a prominent five-star hotel and the roads around it to identifying spots where we can create a cordon to fight back any possible attack. This exercise will help the combat team to familiarise with the area and deal with any emergency effectively. We are also in the process of sensitising another favourite restaurant frequented by foreign tourists and celebrities.” Once the plan is in place, senior officials plan to conduct random mock drills to improve the response time of the staff of each police station.

This is useful information, but, unfortunately, they seem to think that, with sufficient training, rapid response forces will act quickly and effectively enough to save the day. This is extremely unlikely, given the complexity of the operating environment (lots of avenues of approach, dense population).

What would be a useful exercise is collaboration with the community, to prepare not just private security guards, but also cafe/hotel owners, staff, as well as the general public. Rather than setting in stone specific evacuation routes (which are susceptible to terrorists wielding them as weapons), the correct approach is to embed enough familiarity with security crises that people (rather, leaders) react effectively.

“If we are Maowadis, you are MoUwadis,” he tells me, indicating that displacement due to large scale land acquisitions resulted in the growth of Maoism in the region.

Shafi Rahman of India Today spends some time in the autonomous zone established by the Naxalites. It’s a fantastic article that reflects many of the trends I’ve explored in this weblog since 2007, so I quote liberally:

Local governance, based on local revenue:

• Janathana Sarkars collect “taxes”, decide on local disputes, fix prices of local products, run local amenities and provide basic healthcare.

• “For the first time in ages, we have done collective farming last year. We have stopped approaching police over disputes and the committee decides over the disputes,” says Manji.

• Inspector in-charge at Adhaba police in Gajapati district, Devendra Mahapatra, is well-protected in his station with a cathedral-like gate and a platoon of CRPF stationed in the premises. As Maoists established grip over local dispute handling, the number of criminal cases filed in the station have come down from over 300 five years ago to 48 last year.

Distribution of wealth/land:

• Around 59 work teams with up to 70 members in each were set up last year to prepare land for millet, paddy and dal. In Bastar alone, around 1,436 acres of land were seized from landlords. Of this, 1,057 acres were distributed to 482 families and 310 acres was put under the control of the Janathana Sarkar and 65 acres were given to the militia.

Decentralized development:

• The mode of adivasi agriculture in all these divisions was primitive, rarely using cattle for agriculture. “We are now using cattle to plough the fields. We were used to building tanks in areas were water collected naturally in earlier days and water was carried manually from these tanks. Now we are using canals to take water to these points,” notes Manji

• They launched a campaign against the tribal belief that women shouldn’t be allowed in certain agricultural activities like sowing seeds and reaping the harvest. The tribals are also being introduced to a new script for tribal languages, which has so far been scriptless. Chloroquine, an anti-malaria medicine, is given in packets replete with slogans – Soshiko Athanko, Soshito Shruthi (Terror for the oppressors, dear for the oppressed).

Selective connectivity (essentially, India’s skeleton is being controlled by the Naxals):

The Maoists are allowing signposts of the state to come in, wherever it fits their plans. The NREG roads have been approved selectively, ensuring that they don’t make easy passage for security forces into Maoist hideouts.

Most of the beaten paths are mined. We avoid these roads, move forward using GPS in favour of a tougher journey by setting up new paths. The moment we enter into these forests, the Maoists light up torches and give signals to their counterparts around, making it easy for them to retreat,” says HK Jasoria, Officer Commander at CRPF station in Gajapati district.

The Seema Andhra leaders today are trying to term Telangana people as naxalites, trying to create a fear in the Center and suppress the student movement. This propaganda has moved to the internet, now the Andhra people take pleasure in calling all Pro-Telangana people naxalites. They too show their indifference and apathy when young kids from Telangana die, committing suicides.

I agree with Michael on this one. Rather than revealing an insurgency independent of the Naxals, this movement reveals just how much the Naxals have eroded governance in the region, creating the conditions for a Talangana movement, and underpinning the kind of connectivity that enables this kind of insurgency. In short, the Naxal is the keystone species of the rural Indian ecosystem.

Glad to see I’m not alone in this space anymore. I look forward to collaborating with both of these guys. Lots of work to be done.

• The leaves in the forests are about to shed, and the Naxals would be weak during that time period. The latter sounds too much like a government information operation to be taken seriously. Naxals, who spend their entire lives operating in a particular kind of environment, will not likely be too worried about

• The Naxals are weak, and are looking for three days of peace to recoup, renew, and attack again. There is no evidence of this. If anything, an attack that took place mere hours after the offer of a truce proves that the ability for the Naxals to maintain a normal OPTEMPO is intact. This is also revealing for a different reason – it attests to the operating structure of Naxals. It is not a hierarchy with strong command and control links. Instead, it’s a ecosystem of violence, with disparate parts.

Rather than approaching this with the assumption that the Naxals are engaging from a position of weakness, it’s far more likely for them to be engaging in an information operation.

In publicly expressing the ability to negotiate with the standing government, to the point where Chidambaram, the Minister of Home Affairs, has released his fax number publicly), the Naxals are showing that they are a serious threat.

Longer run: they’re showing that Chidambaram is weak, and that stronger measures must be taken against them. In doing so, they hope to provoke an overreach that alienates more rural Indians and strengthens their numbers even more.

A recent study shows that government spending on education, health, electricity, roads, water and other infrastructure [in Naxal affected areas] is appallingly low, far below the state average. Now, labour ministry data reveals that there are only 196 ITCs and ITIs in the 33 districts reeling under left-wing insurgency, compared to 3110 in non-affected areas in the same states.

(Emphasis mine.)

“The possibility of military confrontation with any country has gone down but the concept of homeland security is expanding,” said an official from Ministry of Defence.

“Currently the products in the defence and security market are being diversified to cater to the need of para-militaries and police forces also. Many systems used by the police and para-militaries and conventional armed forces are similar in nature like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and MPVs,” he added.

“The defence market is no more a defence market; it has become a security market which is providing equipments and services for armed forces and central para military as well as police forces,” said Deba R Mohanty, senior fellow and a prominent defence analyst from Observer Research Foundation (ORF).

My early take on this still-developing situation. This was an attack designed to exploit the ever-present cultural rift between Indian Muslims and Hindus. The hope is to provoke an overreaction by all parties, including fundamentalists from both Hindi and Muslim populations. The historical goal for this kind of activity has been riots led by extremists that kill hundreds.

The conditions may be ripe for this sectarian conflict. Maharashtra has been experiencing significant activity along its cultural fault-lines recently, including:

• Attempts to ban the Shah Rukh Khan movie “My Name is Khan.”
• Standard resistance to Valentines Day by fundamentalists.
• Banning non-local taxi drivers.

Thanks to Richard Bottemley of VJ Movement for passing this along.

After lobbying for 3 decades for its own railway station with no success, the village pooled $45,000 under the control of an ad-hoc corporation (the “gram seva samiti” or service committee) and contacted the railway system for system specifications. They then spent two years building a concrete foundation, adding water and electricity, and erecting a ticket counter.

The Indian Railways approved the node and now has seven trains stopping there on a regular basis.?Great example of how innovation at the local level can yield MAJOR rewards for those in that community. We have seen this kind of thing before, but never at this level.

This is also an example of how treating the railway system as a PLATFORM (something I spent the summer of 2007 working on) can both enable robust growth as embed resiliency into the system.

The education system is a core system, alongside the roads, economic activity, social structure etc. Naxals attack it primarily because of this reason – to destroy legitimacy and limit government influence.?The CRP’s anti-Naxal operatives however, have to use schools because, in many cases, they are the only defensible buildings (because it was built using central government funding) in the village.

In essence, school systems act as the the feeble skeleton of the nation state.

Interesting:

• Sustainable. In addition to the tunnel, the Naxals used on-site materials to set machinery on fire (rather than bringing their own explosives).
• Information operations. Security personnel were overpowered but not injured. Additionally, propaganda left on the scene warned of supplying the industrial centers (seen as evil) with power.

To crash their only tether to the rest of the system is to sever their lifeline to the promise of a new Indian future. Meanwhile, attackers will simply shift online to secure VOIP systems.

However, the Tamil diaspora that provided the seed and growth capital for the insurgency has not been effectively dealt with. We’re witnessing the basis for an insurgency operating without a country. It will be interesting to see how this funding redirects as the diaspora seeks out and seeds alternatives.

Unfortunately, this Lord of the Rings strategy (a major and epic battle to end conflict), does not address the core problems that the Naxals exploit. In fact, the casualties that a military offensive will generate will actually just exacerbate the situation.

The correct way to compete with the keystone Naxal platform (the set of violent services that enable and drive the black market in affected areas) is not escalation but rather to focus on mitigation by participating and shifting the black market.

This is a lose-lose strategy. Look for?Naxals to bait IAF aircraft by peppering them with fire over population centers. Eventually, the IAF will either shift routes ( a win for Naxals) or fire back (also a win for Naxals).

We know that the Taliban are not one monolithic group, but several small groups each with their own goals and area of operations. That is a weakness that begs to be exploited. We know that they have village auxiliaries who support hard corps fighters who travel around in groups from 10 ? 50.

We also know that the Taliban are very good at setting up roadblocks to collect taxes and control the population. Roadblocks, were used effectively to prevent voting materials getting distributed in the 20 Aug elections and also to prevent Afghans from voting.

They are also quite effective at preventing IOs, NGOs and Afghan civil servants from getting out and working with the people.

• The insane acceptance rate ~ .05%. Students focus full time on the entrance exam – which accounts for 100% of the entrance requirements. This is a function of wealth, and has created a tiered, cottage industry of? expensive private ‘tuitions‘ or private tutoring schools. Students skip high school classes and instead spend four years preparing for the IIT/IIM entrance exam.

• Wealth.? Only students with means can game the system in this way. Students who do participate in the traditional K-12 system are unable to play on a competitive field. This has led to a surge in the amount of fly-by-night tier two and three colleges, as well as a major decrease in the quality of graduate.

This, of course, has directly contributed to a major dampening of talent and productivity. In an effort to deal with this perpetual gaming, the government plans to also take into account performance from 9-12 grade. However, this only further minimizes the amount of students the institutions can take in. This is unsustainable, irresponsible, and does not take into account the very technology that graduates of these institutions are building.

If approached correctly, these institutions could be leveraged as a way of furthering the entrepreneurial spirit and economic productivity of the country rather than remaining an impotent institution for the elite.

Properly focused, these institutions could also prove to be a hotbed of innovation that fixes local problems, rather than simply act as a channel by which graduates can enter the factory-model world of outsourced knowledge labor.

The writer has argued that in view of the above, China in its own interest and the progress of Asia, should join forces with different nationalities like the Assamese, Tamils, and Kashmiris and support the latter in establishing independent nation-States of their own, out of India. In particular, the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) in Assam, a territory neighboring China, can be helped by China so that Assam realises its national independence.

-Zhong Guo Zhan Lue Gang

Several readers (and my father) sent me this article today detailing a report by the China International Institute for Strategic Studies. This is hardly an unexpected development for readers of this site (or those of friend Steven Pressfield’s “It’s the Tribes Stupid“). Some quick notes:

• From a global systems perspective. We are seeing this same dynamic emerge in every modern battlefield. The only lasting solution to insurgency is open source counter insurgency – evidenced by the Iraqi Awakening and Salwa Judum.

• This type of fragmentation (chaos) is inevitable (mostly due to technological empowerment and a gutted global economy).

• The question then is what form this chaos takes. (Controlled Chaos.) The alternative is the kind of chaos we now see in Pakistan as a result of an inability to co-opt rather than crash subnational movements. (Unbridled Chaos.)

All is not yet lost, however. Controlled fragmentation (decentralization) to resilient communities is still doable.

• India has an intellectual leg up on this in Gandhi’s Swarj and Swadeshi thinking, a cultural ability to deal with local disconnectedness, and a proven ability to deal with significant levels of controlled chaos (poverty, crime) at the city level.

Note: Unfortunately, my own work on bringing Gandhi’s thinking forward has had to be pushed to the back burner. Very busy on some exciting stuff in order to pay the bills, hence the lack of posts.

This picks up on a meme I’ve been working on for a while. Jug Suraiya discussed the multiple centers of gravity that are emerging at the sub-state level yesterday. Would have been nice to be cited rather than summarized but that’s the nature of providing open-source analysis.

Free of Left shackles, the Centre on Friday finally told West Bengal what security and intelligence agencies had been urging it to do for a long time — ban Maoists in the state.

By further isolating the Naxals, the state will further remove itself from the actual act of governance (as compared to the perception of state legitimacy). This actually helps drive the dynamic that this action is ostensibly supposed to bring to an end.

Lalgarh’s equilibrium has yet to be found.

A Naxal-backed outfit calling itself People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) had set up a semi-permanent road block (effectively turning this major artery into a PCAPA toll road). In response to this road system hijack, the insufficient police force ‘outsourced’ night law enforcement to a legitimized militia (along the lines of Salwa Judum) calling itself the Maoist Resistance Force (MRF).

However, instead of just guarding the sides of the road, the MRF took down the toll booth. Open source intelligence reveals that the Naxals responded by conducting a decapitation attack on the MRF as well as the government currently in place (which runs the police force). Three senior officers were murdered, and several government official homes and businesses were simultaneously looted.

The situation has yet to reach a state of equilibrium.

As I learned during my experience prototyping this type of analysis during the Mumbai attacks – something the legacy think tank world reprimanded me for – tapping into global information flows in this way is an exhausting endeavor. They deserve credit for their efforts. It can save lives.

You can follow them at @ChrisAlbon and @Steve_Schippert .

We will know this transition has taken place once the insurgency absorbs conventional military capability (the conventional arsenal) or starts crashing critical networks. (For much more on this dynamic, consult my colleague John Robb’s Global Guerrillas weblog.)

It’s a good idea, and one I’ve written about pretty extensively (including a chapter aptly titled ‘Reconfiguring the National Security Architecture‘ in a book put together by the first think tank 2.0, email me if you’d like to read it). The trick for properly executing this strategy however, isn’t one of reshuffling bureaucracies and moving personnel around.

Instead, it involves what an Indian Army officer and myself were working on a few months ago – collaborative security. This strategy centers upon effectively managing the appropriate information flows – from chowkidars to rural-stationed policemen to military officers to intelligence officers. Fusion centers need to be opened up to private collaboration, and built on smart strategic technology.

Note: Doing so does not have to involve a large bureaucratic IT department, or a huge budget. It can be done in a way that makes it incredibly cheap (yielding an enormous ROI) while enabling every layer of security within the state. Getting started just requires building the momentum, finding a politician with vision, and getting the right talent in the right place.

The Tamil Tiger is far from dead.

More interesting, however, is this useful visualization by Ushahidi reveals the underbelly of the election process (violence, corruption etc).

Authorities believe 90 percent of human trafficking in India is “intra-country.”

India’s home secretary Madhukar Gupta remarked that at least 100 million people were involved in human trafficking in India.

“However, studies and surveys sponsored by the ministry of women and child development estimate that there are about three million prostitutes in the country, of which an estimated 40 percent are children,” a CBI statement said.

In short, Pakistan needs to coopt the state building capacity of JuD without alienating the hierarchy that provides the social services while at the same time killing their connectivity to other militant groups in the area. Any military attack, of any type – bombing, artillery, raid – results in the strategy collapsing.

Given ongoing fighting in western Pakistan, the madrassa plan will likely accelerate the alienation process (especially if even individual madrassas are shut down instead of co-opted). We saw the same dynamic emerge with JuD (the results are, in part, being played out in the Swat valley).

Moving away from the model of stockpiling explosives (in a target rich environment with little protection) is important. However, this does not address the more pressing problem of the 10% tax placed by Naxals on all corporations. (This has yielded tens of millions in Jharkhand alone.) It also poses the threat of equipment destruction should the tax not be paid.

Because the barriers to entry in biological warfare are much lower than the? overstated case of nuclear war, any such threat (indeed as we saw in the case of H1N1) would be far too swift for a nation-state to respond to. Solutions to such a rapidly changing environment must be absolutely local, based on local variants, conditions, and abilities. However, as with any agile organization, the right systems need to be in place to manage information flows.

Last week, I wrote about the importance of biodefense dashboards at the Center for Threat Awareness. I argued that individuals, communities, and even local governments can utilize to visualize and exchange important data. Startlingly, these systems are not commonplace. They must be built before the fall.

By targeting one of the lowest paid individuals in the security check (the screener) and offering compensation ($200) the network hacker was able to access the aircraft with a forged passport. This is the first case in which an airline employee was charged in regards to human trafficking.

• 1 in 5 candidates for the Parliament have criminal records, including murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, extortion, and assault.
• 1 in 6 candidates for Parliament have a net worth of at least Rs. 10,000,000 – in a country where average income is Rs. 25,000.

India, in response to the potential of a global pandemic, is attempting to place controls on immigration (by scanning travelers from Europe and the United States). How well these measures succeed (as well as controlling internal disconnectedness) will be a very important indicator for resiliency analysts looking to India.

One area that government efforts will, with almost near certainty, fall short is areas where government access is already weak, having been superseded by black globalization. (In short, much of the areas of focus of this weblog.)

Aside: If the nightmare scenario erupts, we may well see entire country-bandhs.

Rather its the distribution of nuclear material that will prove to be the harder problem to tackle due to the potential for dirty bombs. (In a very basic way, a dirty bomb is any type of explosive attached to any type of radioactive material.) If the material is not secured, we are likely to see such devices used in an unbridled chaos environment.

With virtually no vehicles plying, supply of essentials like milk and LPG have been suspended. The railways are running three morning trains from Daltonganj, but there are no passengers. Even banks have downed shutters.

In short, the insurgency has crashed an entire section of Jharkhand while the state attended to its own needs (rather than actually strengthening governance or institutions). Interestingly, the bandh was called to demand restitution for the families of villagers who were caught in the cross-fire between Naxalites and state troops. Thus far, no payment has been made.

What’s more interesting is, thus far, the lack of uniformity in Naxal attacks, bandhs, and other efforts to disrupt ongoing elections. While these attacks do make for good copy (and are great information operations), they are ultimately not indicative of much other than the uneven nature of the Naxal hierarchy (reflective of a market-based structure).

Here?s why: 7 out of South Delhi Lok Sabha seat?s 10 Assembly constituencies do not get piped water supplied by the Delhi Jal Board (DJB). Most areas in South Delhi constituency survive on water tankers, an issue that candidates have utilised in past, too, by bartering water tankers for votes.

Taking this power away from the political class, largely a function of cheap technology, is key to empowering constituents.

Many consider the movement as a hierarchical, measured, with radical leadership that can be decapitated and traditional ends (take over the nation-state in a glorious revolution). However, this component of the movement is much, much smaller than most think. Indeed, even many of the members of this hierarchy misunderstand their impact on the Indian nation-state.

A majority of the activity driving the Naxalite movement forward comes from the black market that the Maoist hierarchy underpins and protects. This is why, despite calls for all out assault on polls to show just how strong the movement is, most profit-motivated participants in this illicit network continued about their daily business – slowly eroding the ability of the nation-state to conduct any activity in the regions where they generate profit from illicit trade. In the long run, this dynamic will have a greater impact than any new elected leadership.

This is why we have yet to see a large scale assault on polling infrastructure. It’s not an imperative for the variety of subgroups operating in the Maoist black market.

The first is to go to war with the various separatist movements (LeT, JuD, Taliban, Balochs etc). This option requires a massive concentration of resources and prolonged conflict (a recipe for disaster for any kind of nation-state). The second, centers on co-opt these factions to maintain stability. The alternative to this ‘controlled chaos’ is unbridled chaos.

This is what we see occurring with the Swat Valley agreement. This is the only way Pakistan retains any semblance of functionality. What should the international community do? Focus its efforts on building resiliency into neighboring states and securing nuclear materials (Pakistan is arguably the only remaining nuclear threat). If it needs more time to do these things, it can extend the timeline by implementing an open source counterinsurgency. (What those with short-run memories call the Awakening strategy.)

• Systems disruption. Armed only with shovels, Naxals have shutdown both major and minor roadways that are, in many ways, the only connectivity rural villages have to the Indian state. The state is now unable to access these areas to gather votes.
• Provoking the overreach. A series of high visibility attacks, including on the largest bauxite mine in Asia, coupled with an ever larger state force body count is designed to turn largely disconnected regions into war zones. (This is noted by the large amounts of federal paramilitary forces and assets being requested at the state level for increased security. To the Naxals, this is simply making the environment more target-rich.)

Also, Naxal threats have been able to force the government to, in effect, disenfranchise 9 constituencies (marked by shorter voting hours) in addition to those that are now disconnected by road.

Update: Naxals reportedly used rocket launchers to target a paramilitary force portecting polls in Sasaram. (Polls were scheduled to open tomorrow.)

Update 2: Naxals were also able to successfully attack a Greyhound (elite paramilitary force) boat, injuring ten commandos.

The attack has also temporarily shut down production at the mine, which is responsible for a large part of extracting the 2.92 billion tons of bauxite (10 % of the world?s supply) that lay under Indian soil.

Those traffickers demonstrated their pull in this neighborhood last month when they paid residents to block Monterrey’s major thoroughfares with hours-long demonstrations, day after day for two weeks.

Protesters included youths with their faces covered to hide their identities, the tapados (covered ones), but also their mothers and grandmothers. Some of the tapados were paid as little as 200 pesos, about $13, plus a cellular telephone; others received 500 pesos, about $33, and the backpacks filled with supplies.

So how are swarms to be countered? The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not ?elite? but rather ?good enough? to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential.

I have the good fortune of working on a project that should help take this stuff off the paper and into the real world.? (Helping out a collection of very smart Indian security officers/thinkers who have pioneered this approach in-country.)

• Dumb Shields. Killing children saps the moral credibility of state forces while offering Naxal operatives some degree of safety.
• Labor. Repetitive but slightly complex tasks can easily be executed by children -the Nike model. Also allows long term pattern detection – better cull candidates for positions of leadership as they grow older.
• Warriors. Firearm and explosives training can allow children to act as force multipliers, spying on the streets (all too common a sight in destitute areas), and be utilized in ways state forces do not expect.

Chhattisgarh’s police force, heavily involved in Salwa Judum, is able to recruit children by deputizing them and paying the family Rs. 1,500 ($30) per month. Naxals offer black economy participation, or promise the family’s safety.

Most of the 18 police personnel come to office only once a week due to their huge jurisdiction. This leaves only a police station officer, who doubles up as a clerk, a wireless operator and a lone police sub-inspector to hold fort at Nara.

Unsurprisingly, no cases were charged in the Nara area:

This is not because Nara is incident-free. The problem is that cops have to take the accused 46 km away to Nakhatrana for court hearings. Moreover, the police station also does not have a lock-up.

“Even for filling diesel in mobikes and jeep, we have to travel all the way to Nakhatrana and if the vehicles break down then we have to go to Bhuj which is 100 km away,” said police sources.

This has in no small way influenced the course of events in Naxal affected areas (on the other side of the country). These police outposts are susceptible to overruns, theft, and general inadequacy.

• 1.5 years is plenty of time to saturate a social network with propoganda and ideology. His arrest could inspire the infected nodes to go viral and transmit Naxal membership.

• Reveals the unsustainable nature of Naxal tactics. Self sacrificing, while useful, is not durable over time.

Instead of attempting to bring individuals into the core Naxalite group, the operative’s time could have been better spent connecting with the black economy and providing economic incentive to participate in this alternative social network. Instead of a year and a half, it could have taken weeks or months with tangible results: a decline in the state’s ability to govern, revenue, and he would still out from behind bars to create the same dynamic elsewhere.

Here’s the video from CNN-IBN, short watch:

Here is some more on the illicit opium nexus.

Mohammad Shakir Afridi, president of the Khyber Transport Association, in the northwestern city of Peshawar said: “We have stopped supplies to foreign forces in Afghanistan from today.

“We have around 3,500 trucks, tankers and other vehicles, we are the major suppliers to Afghanistan, transporting about 60-70 per cent of goods.”

In short, Pakistan needs to coopt the state building capacity of JuD without alienating the hierarchy that provides the social services while at the same time kililng their connectivity to other militant groups in the area. Any military attack, of any type – bombing, artillery, raid – results in the strategy collapsing.? Removing the hierarchy does the same thing, at least until the state has time to coopt the players at the bottom of the LeT pyramid.

Instead, Pakistan is now banning the organization and shutting down it’s offices. In essence, it’s shutting down the state in the region in question.

This will only accomplish to increase the alienation (and depravity) of the groups in the region that were reliant on the social system provided by JuD. This will drive them to the black market. This will drive unbridled chaos in the region rather than controlled chaos.

Nils Gilman has the dynamic:

The majority of people in these locales of course merely become victims of the situation into which they are born. But there are some who refuse to be victims, and follow their entrepreneurial instincts (read: risk-willingness and bloody-mindedness)?to make the best of their?situation, using the channels provided by globalization to free themselves. These are the people who participate in the economy of deviant globalization.

Deviant globalizers know the state is neither going to help them close the gap with the rich world, nor protect them from the buffets of the global market. But for that very same reason, they are also not revolutionaries: they have no?interested in seizing the state to enact development (that’s so twentieth century). Rather, they seek autonomy from the state, so that they can build their economic empires and establish alternative forms of legitimacy.

The price of protecting convoys has increased in step with the threat. Private security contractors now make between $500 and $800 per vehicle, with guards earning about $300 per month. This is interesting because it may have driven the attacks to make their way along the supply chain into the heart of Pakistan. Notably, they’ve moved beyond attacking the network edges (easier but less payoff unless sustained over a long period of time) and instead are focusing on network nodes (high yield but theoretically more dangerous).

Note that the facilities attacked are essentially left hollow (guards are left alive, buildings are left alone) while the supply packages are completely destroyed. It seems the attackers want to sustain this ability in their arsenal.

Pakistan is attempting to pick apart the organization by recognizing LeT’s public divisions as valid. To make this work they will have to effective police JuD – regulating its financing, where the money is spent, and ensuring that the LeT internal divisions (military, social) operate independently of one another.

In short, Pakistan needs to coopt the state building capacity of JuD without alienating the hierarchy that provides the social services while at the same time kililng their connectivity to other militant groups in the area. Any military attack, of any type – bombing, artillery, raid – results in the strategy collapsing.? Removing the hierarchy does the same thing, at least until the state has time to coopt the players at the bottom of the LeT pyramid.

In 1993, in response to the dismantling of a major piece of Muslim religious infrastructure, the Babri Masjid, Muslim and Hindu hardliners sparked riots all over the country, with a strong focus on Bombay. This sectarian violence was facilitated by Dawood’s black market firm, “D Company.”

An army of young, poverty stricken Muslim men, each paid a few thousand rupees were able to kill hundreds, cause massive economic damage, provoke a major Hindu extremist response, and drastically shift the demographics of the city as hundreds of thousands fled to areas of like-minded religious concentration. Acting swiftly to exploit the situation, D Company detonated a series of 13 bombs in Bombay, on what is referred to as “Black Friday.”

Dawood’s army of the young and poor is still in place in the largest slum in the world, which is located in the middle of Mumbai.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan put its forces on high alert after a hoax caller pretending to be India’s foreign minister spoke to President Asif Ali Zardari in a threatening manner on November 28, two days after the militant attacks on Mumbai began, the Dawn newspaper reported on Saturday.

Look, this is an unfortunate initiative. Instead of demanding the private sector meet a minimum standard, security services should?partner and enable these high density locations to connect to one another and tap into core security information services. Information, i.e. keeping track of threats, fire brigades, police officers provide these places, each?with limited means, to connect to one another and build collaborative security rather than simply throwing money away.

Note: in most cases, private security does not refer to private military contractors like Blackwater, but rather to mall/public security. These are not highly trained operatives with years of combat experience. Instead, these are guards who know how to provide medical care and handle a radio, some with weapons experience?- the combination of which is useful in the right circumstances.

?As the guests tried to rush into the kitchen, one terrorist burst into the restaurant and began to shoot anyone that remained in the restaurant. At this point my father was in the kitchen and, along with his two friends, rushed to the fire exit.

?They had barely descended a few steps when they were trapped from both ends by terrorists.

Fear management.

“What’s the point of asking Islamabad to hand over Dawood when we’re not doing anything to destroy his empire in Mumbai and other places in India?” a senior official asked.

While the Naxal insurgency co-opts the most participants in the Indian black economy, Dawood Ibrahim is in himself succinctly described as the number one participant. A scion of the smuggling era, (occurred during India’s buildup to opening up its economy) he now operates with impunity out of Pakistan, parties with Bollywood stars, and is the goto guy for anyone seeking to attack targets in urban India.

Unfortunately, the Pakistani state can’t take him out without incurring the wrath of Dawood’s network, which is extensively linked to every major terror outfit in the region and has played a prominant role in major attacks. In short, Dawood is to black globalization what AQ Khan was to nuclear proliferation (also a Pakistani resident).

This is the same challenge Pakistan faces across the board, especially with regards to LeT- the functioning state has been essentially slaved to its various nonstate elements. This is why Zardari has been forced to act as the mouthpiece for both his functioning state and the nonfunctioning areas that killed his wife – any other action results in his immediate failure. Musharraf faced the same dynamic.

One approach would be to simply recognize the failure of the Pakistani state and ask for support. Unfortunately, India is struggling with its internal security systems while the United States is quickly running into the headwinds of global economic crisis.

Greater public sector expenditure should be undertaken very carefully. Far too many commentators are demanding a surge in defense funding -? they fail to notice that defense systems were totally useless in this attack. Instead of following the American example of hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on the military, India should invest in the best and brightest thinking – lean information systems that take advantage of cheap technology to allow rapid response systems to take advantage of assets in place, advanced communication etc.

Simply put – more better is required, not just more, and not just better.

By contrast, the HuJI/IM/SIMI/LeT nexus is seeking out the social systempunkt, which is designed to explode the state along its primary cultural faultlines and ensnare citizens in a cycle of violence against one another.

Though Naxal efforts may generate the same, this is not their intention. Different threats.

Attempting to dismantle LeT will require a massive concentration of resources. This will be hard to justify for the borderline bankrupt state because the shadow LeT government (a form of controlled chaos), while obviously problematic, is still providing stability. Any attempts to crash the organization will cause fracturing, force evolution, and pose more danger.

Meanwhile, the state is sustaining major losses on its Afghanistan border. Short of localizing the state of Pakistan to functioning urban areas (under constant fire a la Islamabad), its unclear as to what steps can be taken across the multiple dimensions of the crisis.

Operational specifics: Suffice it to say that once the units were activated and on scene, they acted pretty well and appropriately. The real question is why there was a 9 hour boot up time.

One approach, that is being implemented by the government, is to distribute these assets around the country so as to cut down transportation times.

The next appropriate step would be to decentralize these units so as to activate at any sign of an emergency. This goes beyond standard readiness and includes independent movement to the area of operations as necessary.? This bypasses the various steps required to activate these assets, the burden of which wasted hours during this attack. Final GO orders should be reserved for civilian command, but prep orders should be at their discretion. This takes advantage of the previously cut down transportation times.

A secondary critique is that a third of MARCOS (naval special operations forces) is based out of Mumbai, but were not activated or utilized until NSG were on scene. The country requires a very lean apparatus to tie together internal rapid response forces in the event of an emergency. Service-specific units, while useful in warfare, do not function well when tied into a hierarchy. (Think America’s Joint Special Operations Command, which can activate hybrid units as necessary, immediately. ) This takes advantage of distributed and decentralized units.

A lot of this relies on communication and information. Aside from the intelligence failure, NSG commandos lacked rudimentary maps and blueprints of the areas of operation. They went in essentially blind against an unknown number of fortified hostiles in a very densely populated area. Cooperation between police forces, the private sector, and these special operations forces was quickly established, but force multipliers (like maps) were not fully utilized.

Joint operations are absolutely necessary, joint training moreso, and an organizational structure that is able to adapt quickly to rapidly changing situations is vital.

In the short run it is politically unpalatable to focus on that long term strategy. Hence the pending failure of the party that has derived its legitimacy from continued economic growth.

The leaders of the movement have declared their intention to move past the traditional guerrilla model of warfare and instead implement a strategy centered on heavy shock troops conducting fewer but massive attacks. – Shlok Vaidya, Pragati Magazine, November 2007.

Latest operation in India is pivotal because it reveals the complex interconnected nature of the multiple threats the country faces.

• Tactical innovation. As discussed at this site in some depth, is the primary contribution of the Naxals. Additionally, large amounts of RDX are regularly stolen from mines in Naxal infested areas. These explosives traveled through the black market to representatives of the terrorists. It seems the lessons learned by the Naxals are in fact being adopted by other insurgencies operating in the country.

• Training. Several of the operatives (total number ranges from 25-50) were highly trained, and, as evidenced by the recorded phone conversation, werer heavily indocrinated. This implies intensive training in any of the focal points for terror training to varying degrees since the 1980′s – Afghanistan, then Kashmir, then Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Pakistan.

• Strategic innovation. International. Direct linkages with Pakistan are designed to apply international pressure and expectations to that country which are unlikely to be met, thus providing more pressure within the country, thus driving up recruitment and funding for these militant organizations.

• Strategic innovation. Domestic. Classic social systempunkt. Planned just before major national elections with the obvious intent being a move to the right, which increases the chances for government overreach, causing further alienation and a higher propensity for sectarian conflict/riots.

After using the nautical attack vector, the group attacked a series of targets using automatic weapons and grenades before making their way to the hotel in hijacked vehicles. Along the way they managed to murder the head of the Anti Terror Squad, purely by luck, and then split up to the hotel, the hospital, and the Nariman house.? In essence, a well planned coordinated attack that collapsed into a killing spree.

In that case, Mumbai just avoided the nightmare scenario (where this was a smokescreen attack for something worse). This attack ends with the last terrorist of this particular group.

UPDATE: Note the close proximity of Nariman Bhavan to the waterfront. The single group thesis rings even more true if they were routed here to wait for the a nautical exit route, but the Navy acted too quickly for that to occur. (The initial choosing of the nautical attack vector has better logic that way.)

If the intent was to allow the mobile operatives to fan out, we may soon see a series of second order events as daylight breaks.

Aside from initial penetration and equipment acquisition, it seems that highly autonomous units were told to simply create chaos while possible. Some went mobile (stealing police vehicles and opening fire on crowds), destroying petrol pumps, random gunfire at key transportation hubs. Others sought to hunt down and target American and British citizens at key economic targets, and are now holed up fighting for their lives.

UPDATE: Movie theaters, cafes, are under attack. It’s a full scale assault, hit and run, drive by shootings, etc. The Navy is clearing the port after two boats packed with explosives.

Here’s the important notes:

• Unsophisticated equipment. RDX is readily accessible for anyone with access to the black market and sufficient cash. Automatic weapons are harder to come by, but not absurdly so.

• Unsophisticated tactics. OSINT says the assault teams simply walked into the lobby of the hotels and opened fire, then began rounding up white hostages, sorting by US and UK passport holders. No disguises have been reported. Teams on the roof are throwing grenades (likely how Anti Terrorism Squad DIG Karkare – general officer – was killed after responding.)

A sustained hostage situation (a la Tehran ’79) is very unlikely. More later.

Excellent Flickr stream.

UPDATE: Deccan Mujahideen has taken responsibility. It is a front for the Indian Mujahideen, which is deeply connected with SIMI and HUJI – the search for the social systempunkt has reached yet another major data point.

However, it is important to keep in mind that Naxals have a hard limit for development before they crash connectivity. WIth development likely to stagnate in the collapsing global economy, any rollbacks in this progress will result in increased offloading of social power to the Naxals.

This is a dangerous approach given the current declining economy. The districts Naxals operate in will increase in step with the decline of the global economy. As economies fade, insurgencies take off. In all likelihood, Patil’s willing to engage in the same repressive approaches that India used to some degree of success in the mid to late 1980s.

However, the core dynamics of the insurgency have shifted over the last decade. Major decentralization, harnessing of market forces, and international linkages present a threat that “encounter specialists” will not be able to contain.

The same tactics that were used to moderate success (as measured in second order events) in Bangalore, Jaipur, Hydrabad, Delhi are now, instead of targeting the new wealth, are trying to undercut growth by exploding already primed powder kegs.

Indicator: “Angry crowds attacked the police with stones after the blasts in the city.”

The Naxals have pioneered a better approach: simply levying a black economy tax on the firm running the mine and using what is essentially free income to build a black economy ecosystem, which they then leverage to accomplish their goals.

• Several low intensity bombs in rapid succession in seven locations across the city.
• Some degree of network analysis was applied since 2-3 bombs were along the very critical Hosur Road.
• Should the organization’s network analysis ability grow more sophisticated, the yield from such bombings would be exponentially greater.
• No word on who conducted the attacks, but all open-source indicators point to HuJI.
• There is a market difference from earlier attacks: instead of religious infrastructure, economic nodes were hit such as construction sites, stores, and bus stops.

Looking to publish an article on the topic in the next month or so.

Total cost born by the country? Over $1.75 billion.

“The major blows fell on the railways and tourism industry. Also, the disruption of railway freight traffic caused production delays in many parts of the country,” Jindal said.
“The figures do not include the losses of property and damages done to railway tracks,” he added.

?

A battery set, four loudspeakers and a microphone have been installed by local villagers and attached to an electricity pole along the Delhi-Mumbai railway track.

The announcement system which was till now was used to disseminate general information in the area, is now frequently utilised to check the location of security squads, who have been deputed to man all the exit and entry routes to the fields…

Small cheap hacks to infrastructure to coopt it for your own needs is a sign of a very smart movement.

• Hydra like behavior: When train routes are cut off by the emplacement of a tent on the train tracks, security forces respond by tearing down the tent. When they return, hundreds more are placing multiple tents to cut off the railways.
• Slaving state forces to their own ends: Elaborate distractions are set up (such as the tent cut off) while small groups destroy infrastructure elsewhere. Police are now attempting to guard hundreds of miles of railway tracks.
• Small organized groups are charged with rapidly rotating road shutdowns as pioneered in Kolkata .
• Cutting off Dausa’s water pipeline – the first attack on this system. Tens of thousands without water in the summer’s heat for at least two days.

In short, they are very much inside the state’s OODA loop, rapidly out thinking their enemy and costing the state millions of dollars a day.

In response, call centers operating out of the hotzone have begun taking precautions, some more likely to succeed. These are built on the assumption that hyperlocal resources are the only ones able to be leveraged by the firm to build value:

• Putting employees up in hotels near the office.
• Providing bedding for lower echelons to sleep in the office itself.
• Storing food, water, and diesel for power generators in case of disruption.
• Placing redundancy centers on alert in case primary centers go offline.

than others, where the definition of "local" expands to include employee residences:

• Hiring cab companies to use alternate routes and ferry employees when safe.

Cab companies will be likely to avoid major troubled routes – highways, bridges – but will only provide impetus for more distributed action by the Gujjar insurgency. The second day will likely be worse than the first.

At least 20 trains have been canceled so far on that route. Given the tightly coupled nature of and strictly followed timetable, this had lead to a cascading overloads. Neighboring state of MP has 29 trains diverted, another 17 canceled to prevent total overload. Taking note of this development, the Gujjar’s have staged sit-ins on highways (also bridges, to prevent rapid rerouting).

What started in Rajasthan has since spread along highway, railway, and media networks and is now encircling Delhi. The location of this insurgency is critical. Those protesters around the nation’s center of power have not only cut off railway routes, but are also threatening to prevent the passage of critical commodities to the city

Subramaniam said the Centre was in full agreement with Chhattisgarh in countering the naxal menace. All Naxal documents collected from the affected areas suggested that their leadership has exhorted the cadre to annihilate all resistance to their undergound movement, he said.

“Situation is of considerable concern both to the Centre and state. Policemen are not ready to step into the forests. Though 17,000 posts are sanctioned for anti-naxal force, the state government is finding it very difficult to fill them. That is why the self-defence force was organised to save people from becoming sitting ducks for the Naxals,” he said.

Why? This is the cheapest strategy for the central and state government, both of whom are focusing their efforts on development. The larger picture, as the battle rages in the Supreme Court, is that those alienated by the government in Naxal affected areas are rapidly finding out that the justice systems of the Indian government are not concerned with their welfare.

If you are in the area, feel free to email me. Will be in the area from Wednesday to Sunday.

Most of the people in these areas think that opium is a flower, like sunflower or marigold, and is used to extract oil. In fact, the labourers working on the opium fields are also ignorant about the NDPS act.

The opium growers offer good wages to the labourers, land owners and people looking after the cultivation. The lure of money makes it immaterial for the local people to ask the growers about the illegal cultivation.

The description of the problem on target, but he falls prey to the same mistake as the government in that he recommends:

The need of the hour is that the state government should appoint special force to nab the growers and raid the other areas where the cultivation is done.

The problem is, of course, much more complicated than that.? Alienating your greatest assets is problematic.

“It is a question of law and order. You (state government) cannot give arms to somebody (a civilian) and allow him to kill.” - Supreme Court’s Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan.

A key component of nation-state legitimacy is a monopoly on violence. Chhattisgarh’s Salwa Judum militia is a response to an inability of its state forces to maintain such a monopoly. This is an example of? of open-source counterinsurgency strategy.

The Supreme Court is moving towards making decisions on two petitions before it regarding Salwa Judum. To maintain the viability of the Indian nation-state it will have to preserve the (myth of) the monopoly, which means Salwa Judum cannot continue. This leaves Chhattisgarh without any real solutions on the table: traditional counterinsurgency requires wealth, blood, and time. As one of the poorest states in the country, Chhattisgarh has none of these resources.

The critical shift would be designating the CBI as the primary national agency charged with investigation – something that most states oppose. Supporting such a measure would decrease funding and support for already lagging state police forces.

Other proposed reforms:

• Acting as an information cluster center. The CBI would have authority to act on any information routed to them from diverse agency sources.

• Integrating advanced technology. Much along the FBI model, the parliament is advocated the establishment of advanced forensic departments with research and development capabilities.

• Reducing the number of officers deputized to other agencies. A key part of any upward career move is working for several years at another, preferably federal, agency. For example, Indian Police officers often laterally transfer to the National Security Guard or CBI or Border Security Force.

The larger issue, however, is whether it is appropriate for the CBI to move into the FBI structure. Reforming a large bureaucracy like the CBI is a laborious process requiring significant expenditure of fiscal and political resources. And it takes time. The returns on such an investment would likely fall short of the expectations of this commission given the unique challenges of federalism in India.

Which demands the larger question: is it possible for an emerging India to leapfrog over current advanced state models into a configuration more appropriate for the changing face of warfare?

He also describes how:

• Ideology is irrelevant: “The fact both Communism and Socialism failed doesn?t matter to the Naxalite leadership, ideologues and sympathisers: people in remote, backward districts of India don?t know 20th century history.”
• Hollowing out the state instead of offering an existential threat. “So while the Naxalites consolidated into a nation-wide movement a few years ago, the central government continues to claim that this is essentially a matter for the states, and it would only play a co-ordinating role.”
• Fighting on the cheap. “In the absence of a coherent national antiinsurgency strategy states were left to their own devices.”
• Open-source counterinsurgency. “Setting up Salwa Judum, an extraconstitutional counter-insurgency militia, was a big mistake. So is the draconian law which suspends the freedom of the press.”

The real effect of the Naxal operation, however, can be measured by the perception of uncertainty influencing decision making: Rahul Gandhi, being groomed to take over his family’s political party, is being forced to travel the state secretly (or utilizing one of the choppers – expensive and in short supply). The Naxals are still on the run.

The elephant in the room is that any firm operating in an area where Naxals operate has to pay a tax or else face violent consequences. This is the basis for their funding. Going after these firms would decrease incentive to work on these already security bloated development projects. Any decrease in development is a victory for the Naxals.

View Larger Map

The Indian Oil Corporation (OIC) supplies all of Nepal’s oil. For its trucks, there are six highway entry points in Bihar, one in Sikkim, and one in Uttarakhand; only one, Birganj, is directly connected to Kathmandu. As the Nepali government sends out armed escorts for fuel tankers, it will likely station troops at regular intervals along the 70 mile stretch from the Raxaul fuel depot in India to Kathmandu. The tourist hotspot city of Pokhara is 70 miles away from that point and no highway connects it to Raxaul. A pipeline was to be built from the capitol to the fuel depot, but Nepal was unable to bear the financial costs.

Some facts:

• Of the 38 bandhs and blockades in the past month in Nepal, 80% have occurred along the Indian border. Markets, industry, governance offices, are all shutdown in the region.
• Cascading failure: 50% of Kathmandu’s automobiles are not functioning. Private fuel distributors are shutdown while a few public sector nodes continue to provide oil to long lines of people.
• Kathmandu keeps a reserve of approximately three days. Pokhara only keeps enough for one day of disruption.

It is the convergence of many factors that is hitting Nepal hard:

• International uncertainty. Drives oil prices up.
• Heavy subsidization. The state-run Nepal Oil Company (NOC) is required to buy oil from the OIC at international market price sell it at low cost.
• Domestic uncertainty. OIC reducing oil supply in an effort to minimize losses as the political risk increases.
• Institutionalized corruption. 65% of end-user bought oil is a mixture of half-kerosene and water. This requires significant payoff of a large section of the government. This offers little incentive to change the status quo.

The situation is simply untenable and likely to worsen.

Waging a counterinsurgency in any kind of urban setting requires very sophisticated fire control and discipline. There is a direct tradeoff between collateral damage and victory. (Weighted towards the former.)

(Thanks Nam)

To meet this demand, illicit poppy farmers have emerged across the country. Most are concentrated in Naxalite infected areas:

Orissa:

• In November of 2006, authorities crashed a Rs. 1,000,000,000 ($29 million) crop. This was the largest such operation in the country.
• Since then, Orissa’s illicit growers have shifted from massive farms to highly distributed 6,000-10,000 plant small plots. Anything larger than 20 acres has been shutdown.

Jharkhand:

• 300 villages are utilizing 20,000 acres to? grow 100 tons of poppy from October to February each year.
• A per kilogram investment of Rs. 300-400 ($7-$9) yields a return of around 7,000%.
• Naxals offer protection from police and are paid for their service in opium profits. They also offer protection services from smugglers and opium traders for an additional percentage.

In recognition of the fact that none of the opium makes it to the legitimate and lucrative international market, the government of India is conducting a pilot program to test the viability of co-opting this black market. Two firms have been offered contracts to process 100 tons a year to meet a domestic shortage of 20. Export controls are rumored to be lifted as domestic demand is met.

Qamar Qureshi, WII?s chief tiger census investigator, said the tiger reserves in Naxal-affected Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa have fared poorly. ?They are suffering because of Naxalism,? he said.

Why: Tiger preserves can not be developed by force of law, and as such are prime areas for groups seeking to stay off-grid. Forest personnel are rarely, if ever, armed with anything more than a pistol. The bow-and-arrow is standard issue.

• Indravati. Chhattisgarh. From 29 tigers in 2001 to an estimate of somewhere in the single digits by locals. Government officials were unable to gain access to the area due to Naxal activity.

• Palamau. Jharkhand. From 32 to zero. (Data is shaky given no state cooperation.)

• Valmiki. Bihar. From 53 to 10. An 81% decline.

• Simlipal. Orissa. From 99 to 20. An 80% decline.

• 600 paramilitary troops and policemen of Orissa are in hot pursuit.
• 3 platoons of Greyhounds from Andhra Pradesh have been flown in.
• 2 Air Force helicopters are being used for aerial reconnaissance.
• The fleeing Naxals are engaging government troops and leveraging their high tech communications capability to coordinate their escape. They have so far lost two with another two falling into government hands.
• Geography remains the crux of the issue as illustrated on this map. Zoom in on the blue markers to see the largely undeveloped jungle terrain.

View Larger Map

In this case, the Naxalites in Orissa adapted their own tactics to strategy being developed across the globe. Attacks on police systems are particularly effective given the resulting drop in recruitment, confidence in the ability of the state to provide protection, and trust in intelligence.

• The mission was dual purpose: a symbolic attack on critical state governance structure and the acquisition of 1,000 firearms and 200,000 rounds of ammunition.
• After informing local residents of their plans to steal weapons, 400 attackers were able to swarm and overwhelm police stations, an armory, and a training academy.
• These synchronized attacks took place some 30 kilometers apart.

To this end, the BSF has had an “air wing” of five aircraft for some time. This unit has been chronically underfunded, undermanned, and relegated to what an officer I met called “polishing its boots.” Now, the central government is signing on to pay for another six rotary wing aircraft to help evacuate wounded BSF personnel as well as the staff, facilities, and knowledge to maintain the entire wing.

Control of the skies is a key factor in determining primacy of violence. Without extensive jungle warfare training, as another officer put it, “we get down and dirty, but we are blind.” Airborne assets increase the scope of operations, the kind of missions that can be accomplished, and the speed with which the BSF can operate.? The fog of war is cleared to some degree.

The problem thus far has been that this sort of primacy is expensive. Helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, and the associated training and equipment are big-ticket items. And they increase the visibility of the counterinsurgency being fought in the red corridor.

More on military modernization soon.

• An individual or group seeking to meet a black market demand for low-intensity IED’s building prototypes and experience.
• Random attacks by a non state actor. Unlikely given the sparse distribution and frequency of these attacks. To inject total chaos into the system, some degree of synchronization would be required, as would almost-ubiquity.
• Aggressive mischief. Unlikely given the possibilities for high payoff for this knowledge.

As technology is increasingly diffused and the associated barriers to entry into the black market drop, we will see an uptick in protoattacks.

?Our line is armed struggle in Kerala too. We will set up base areas, people?s militia and people?s liberation guerilla army in due course. ” – “Mohan”, number one Naxalite in Kerala.

He goes on to state categorically that his strategy does not center on symbolic agitation or classical hit and run on police targets tactics. He declines to elucidate a strategy, but does comment on building organizational capacity.

As I wrote in November of last year in Pragati Magazine:

The leaders of the movement have declared their intention to move past the traditional guerrilla model of warfare and instead implement a strategy centered on heavy shock troops conducting fewer but massive attacks.

When the lessons learned from this new model are synthesized with the hard-won knowledge of economic systems disruption, the resulting bleeding- edge variant of Maoist insurgency campaign could prove devastating to India?s economic future

One result: A sharp uptick in equipment and weapons purchases at subnational levels of government. The money still comes from the center but decision making will be increasingly distributed. This is a major shift, and will require a rethink of what role each level of government plays.

As security becomes a function of increasingly granular and subnational governments slaved to national interests, the nation-state loses its monopoly on violence. India has to develop frameworks to understand this changing reality.

• Aside from training 14,000 Central Reserve Police Force troops, supporting a jungle warfare school, and providing UAV support, the Indian Army refuses to actively engage the Naxalites.
• In Bangalore, the Karnataka government refuses to allocate funds for hazard pay to members of a new anti-terror commando outfit it approved two years ago.
• Meanwhile, the government of Andhra Pradesh wants to export its model of the highly trained and highly paid Greyhound commando anti-Naxal force throughoutthe? country. The force is currently paid by other states to train their fledging paramilitary units.

“Everybody knows in Chhattisgarh that Maoists annually extort millions of rupees as donations to the Maoist movement and major business players always donate generously to run their businesses. But now youths who are in no way linked to Maoists have also been earning big sums.” – Senior IPS Officer.

Naxalites have effectively created an environment, via threats and targeted executions, where extortion is a standard cost (on average ten percent) of running a business. The returns offered in the illicit economy, in the Naxal model, are greater than that in the white economy. The potential for upward mobility is higher, and this is apparent to the unemployed undereducated youth.

Leveraging the same mechanisms as the Naxals (anonymous letters, rotating drop points, cutouts, etc) this new breed of entrepreneur managed to force businesses, government officials, shop owners, steel conglomerate, vendors, and every facet of the National Mineral Development Corp to pay upwards of Rs. 220 million ($5,500,000) in the last year alone.

Packages of a presiding officer, his signature, his ability to communicate with the government, and official paperwork will be rotated throughout the countryside to arbitrate conflict. He will not be able to preside over cases that involve the state.

However, The central government is looking to shed the costs associated with this effort. It will boot up the system and then pay for half of it for a period of three years. The result will likely become:

• Ad-hoc. The connectivity that underpins a platform will likely decay and fray as funding slows. Breaking connectivity (by routing through tiered governments) results in a tiered justice system that is as problematic as no system.
• Corrupt. Presiding officers will decline in quality as both the central and state governments cut expenditure on the project. Look for tribal, wealth, caste, and other sub-state group influence to take hold.

Simply put, the commitment of resources and personnel doesn’t align with strategy. To make this a workable decentralized solution, the first step would be to effectively connect the dots, which requires interoperability, which (in a government context) is driven by funding.

An ideological change would be marked by a public statement and a concentrated information operation on the part of the government. Instead, Reddy has shied away from the lime light and open-source information source is carrying any mention of any note of regret. Additionally, his wife, also a Naxal, has not surrendered.

This gives some credence to the idea that he was bought, but now the state lacks return on that investment. Purchasing loyalty is one option to combat an insurgency, but price levels fluctuate wildly based on market conditions. Payments have to be adjusted to meet demand but always increase.

• Intelligence fusion cell. The Interior Ministry has appointed the heads of external and internal intelligence agencies to compile and disseminate intelligence collected by various paramilitary, police, and military units operating in Naxalite affected areas.

• ?Focus on inter-insurgency linkage. Worried about Naxalites injecting money, manpower, and knowledge? into various other campaigns in the area, the fusion cell has been asked to zoom in on campaign overlap.

• $100 million for police modernization. Firearms, sophisticated communications technology, and other specialized equipment.

• Delhi is booting up its own anti-Naxal force based on the anti-terror “Special Cell” which recruits top officers and gives them more responsibility than their peers to build intelligence networks and crush terror groups.

Some gaps: the lack of any holistic development strategy or any tie-in with the mining industry that has proven so problematic in the region in question.

Some of this can be attributed to aging railway infrastructure, as can a large portion given low quality control of localized equipment production but two other causes have a greater impact:

• Lack of training. In the face of plummeting spending on signals staff, other organizations within the IR are providing individuals to operate machinery and technology they are simply not prepared for.
• Theft. Accounts for half of the signals equipment that needs to be replaced. Metals and machinery are stolen by individuals lacking other sources of wages. (This has the potential to be insurgency-based as well as driven by the economic imperative.)

Signals are one of two sources of interoperability (the physical tracks are the other) within the railway platform. If they start firing at the wrong time, place, or wrong light, the results could be disastrous.

Something to think about: The governor of Chhattisgarh, ESL Narasimhan, hailed the Salwa Judum as “the second independence movement launched by the tribals of the state to save democracy.”

This may be driven by the fact that the state, along with Jharkhand, is where some 70% of Naxal activities take place. Or, perhaps because Narasimhan was one of the targets of a recently disrupted plot to decapitate the Chhattisgarh leadership.

Update.? Chhattisgarh defends its support of SJ in court as consistent with the will of the people.

Development, of course, is key to solving social system problems of concern to rural villagers: poverty, hunger, and a lack of upward mobility. However, injecting funding and people can have unforeseen negative implications:

• Naxal Taxes. The extortion strategy of Naxals will increase its revenue significantly. If corporations hit a critical threshold in terms of revenue or number of villagers affected, Naxals will crash connectivity rather than leveraging its flows.
• Security. SEZs are still vulnerable to organic reactionary movements like POSCO in Orissa.

Industry may, given the potential of enormous payoff in these areas, accept the taxes and offload security costs onto the government. However, the government should think twice before committing significant time and resources to this strategy:

• Manpower. Significant amounts of forces. This could be the massive counterinsurgency operation that officials know is required but have been hesitant to put in place.
• Costs. To field a force able to patrol and protect enclaves expect lots of expenditure. Given the focus on robust economic growth, this cost cannot be incorporated into a larger tax burden.

Mounting this large-scale operation serves to bring greater media and international exposure to a problem that few politicians are willing to tackle. In classic Maoist insurgencies, this kind of overreach results in victory for the agile guerrillas that provoked it. In modern warfare, the results can be devastating for a rapidly growing economy.

On that note: I am available to consult, speak, or write on a regular or project basis. Contact me if you have a need to know what lays ahead for India, understand the Naxalites in the context of modern warfare, or develop strategies to deal with uncertainty in the Indian market.

• 2005. Four Naxal attacks destroy critical infrastructure.
• 2006. Eight similar attacks (a 100% increase).
• 2007. Seventeen attacks (another 100% increase) with an uptick in overall network noise.

These attacks are only catastrophic node failures – explosions that totally decimated any given railway line, cable, or station/office. Disruptive node failures, marked by rendering infrastructure irrelevant but allowing it to “regenerate”, are tougher to ascertain and generally are left off of government reports. Some of these easy (and cheap) system hacks:

• Track obstructions, switch breaking, removal of track. Easy, but equally easy to fix.
• Distributed signal systems. More sophisticated requiring more complex fixes. Shut downs or communication delays have the same effect: the halting of the train and cascades throughout the rest of the timetable.

In response, the government is planning a 20,000 increase in Railway Protection Force troops for additional force presence and rapid response.

Fear Vikas, Green Tigers, Nalladandu, Red Tigers, Tirumala Tigers, Palnadu Tigers, Kakatiya Cobras, Narsa Cobras, Nallamalla Nallatrachu (Cobras) and Kranthi Sena are some of the gangs. The gangs have fiery logos featuring cobras, tigers and guns.

Hyderabad based journalist Sudhakar Reddy Udumula outlines? the rapid growth of very granular private armies in the troubled area of Telangana in Andhra Pradesh:

If such caste-based private armies are allowed to survive, a majority of attacks would be directed against dalits and the landless poor. Most of the private armies would be operated by rich, upper-caste people. For them, the weaker sections are the target, [the CPI-M leader] said, adding that in addition to organised massacres, private armies use dehumanising programmes to insult the weaker sections. Private armies take the guise of anti-Maoist groups and spring up after a major attack by extremists.

The state, rather than suppressing their growth, relies on these groups to do what they can’t given fiscal constraints:

• “We have no information that the Cobra gangs are caste-based. They are reactionary forces to the Maoists.”

• ?”Where is the need? The police is doing everything as per the law to tackle the Maoist menace. The police is not supporting them.” Mr Sen added, “The police will investigate (the killings) impartially. I feel that this is a natural reaction against the atrocities of the Maoists.”

Udumala has also covered the Naxal cluster of the blogosphere.

Aside from the standard state-level officer call for additional troops from the central government, Ranjan offers the following:

• “Soon Andhra Pradesh will face the same problems we are facing.” The limited success of Andhra Pradesh’s Greyhounds is likely to face significant hurdles as Naxals innovate in response.
• “It is a success on an immediate level and can’t be a sustainable strategy. Do you know there are many unsanctioned Salwa Judum camps?” This gets to the heart of the matter: An open-source counterinsurgency has no top-level control.
• “The Naxals see industry as a source of earning and won’t ruin its work.” The insurgency extorts 10% of any profit earned by mining firms. For the Naxals this strategy is only viable in the short-term. Prolonged development will have negative consequences for its recruitment and public support underpinnings.

”People living in far off corners should know what is happening around them. How fast the world is changing and how the people are benefitting from the initiatives of individual efforts and Government schemes,” the SP said.

This, of course, is only effective if the village has modern grid services: water, electricity, roads.

• January 1. Naxals attacked The attack placed pressure to retreat into existing urban bases.
• January 18. IED’s are placed to target the convoy of a four-star anti-Naxalite operations officer in charge of the new plans.

The development of a network of forest bases presents a challenge to the insurgency. Central forces are generally better equipped and trained than their state peers. The CRPF is planning on eleven bases scattered at the intersection of the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh.

Rather than enjoy the time gap between an attack and the time it takes for a distantly stationed force to deploy, Naxals would find themselves having to respond to rapid feedback loops.

When asked if electronic systems were being used as force multipliers (the RPF is minuscule in comparison to what it must protect) the officer rubbed their eyes, sipped their chai, and then explained how “modernization” is occurring very slowly because the funding for internal security simply is not there.

Mohan leverages the security imperative offered by a recent jailbreak to try and build support for technology to solve the problem. This approach is problematic:

• These technology systems will require a tender/vendor process that can take valuable time and significant effort on the part of centralized governments.
• It calls for the engineering of “brittle” complex security systems. The goal is to basically fortify each prison node. Given limited resources, this effort can not scale evenly. Some nodes will be weaker than others, and open to (Naxal) shocks.

Some viable options:

• Increasing the speed and bandwidth of information to and from these usually remote prison nodes could allow increased coordination.
• Encouraging distributed innovation. Young officers deployed to rural prisons should be incentivized to use local resources to solve the problem of lax security. This is unlikely to happen in an often corrupt hierarchy.

The force will:

• Be raised with 50% central funds and 50% state funds on loan from the central government.
• Take three years to stand up.

This force is in addition to 26 IR battalions, a 26,000 force, already deployed in 10 affected states. Sadly a majority of these troops are ill-equipped and lack training necessary to conduct operations in dense jungles without relying on brute force. In short, this is a heavy new investment in a policy tool that has not been garnering many returns.

Worth noting:

• Using government estimate of 10,000 Naxalites, brings the ratio to seven central personnel for each Naxal. (The actual number of Naxalites is much higher.)

Meanwhile, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal are:

• Routing intelligence directly from police outposts in one state to their peers rather than through their state-specific hierarchies.
• Coordinating near-border counterinsurgency operations via information sharing, and cooperative kinetic operations.

Given that Naxalites thrive on unguarded, undeveloped border areas of failing states, this makes sense. The real question is what toll this internal churning will take upon states as borders blend together and problems percolate.

It is worth noting that the only role the central government played was to host the meeting of states.

As always, feel free to send me an email or comment here.

• Rs. 2,500,000 ($62,000) per acre.
• Land with three room structures complete with electricity, plumbing and gas infrastructure.
• Jobs for all families – continuing on a hereditary basis.
• Free education for their children.

At the same time, however, the villager’s negotiating position is affected by the Supreme Court stating that the permits POSCO received need to be reexamined. POSCO sought to gain separate permits for nondisputed areas, and then add in permits as contentious areas came into the fold. The Court says the entire project must be viewed with one permit in mind.

Deliverables by 2003 included:

• At-risk villages in desert, tribal or hill areas with populations greater than 500 would be connected.
• All villages with populations greater than 1,000 would be connected via road to major arteries.

By 2007:

• Hill, tribal or desert villages with populations between 250 and 500 would be linked.
• All villages with populations greater than 500 would be brought into the fold.

The Naxalite movement has allowed work to continue by private contracted firms provided they receive a fee amounting to 10% of the contract. If this strategy were applied in all areas, this would amount to upwards of $2 billion in Naxal coffers. If only the “red corridor” is targeted, this sum is approaching $1 billion, minus overhead.

When some firms refused to pay, Naxals began attacking day laborers and heavy machinery leading to the shutdown of work in some 10,000 villages.

Note: You can track extensive metrics and the progress of the project, titled “Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana” at this site.

• 2.92 billion tons of bauxite (10 % of the world’s supply)
• 276 billion tonnes of coal
• 23 billion tons of iron ore deposit

But these resources have gone mostly untapped due to Naxal and tribal activism and generally inept economic regulatory practices by the government. As the central government moves to cut its excessive red tape, the states with the most resources, Orissa, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, are clamoring to retain control. They seek:

• Assurances that multinational firms will not control large tracts of land.
• Limit and then phase out resource exports to fuel the development of an organic manufacturing industry.
• Larger funding streams (five percent) into their coffers to be used for development and governance.

Ironically, these states barely have the ability to prospect their land, but are forced to pander towards the lowest economic classes to whom the loss of land is akin to an attack on their way of life. It is no coincidence that the states clamoring for control are also the most affected by Naxalites.

• Naxalites have enormous influence in shaping the future of India’s security environment. “I have said in the past that left-wing extremism is single biggest security challenge to the Indian state,” Singh said. “It continues to be so.”

• The Maoists are early adopters of the systems disruption strategy that has proven devastating in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They are carefully targeting all aspects of economic activity,” he continued. “They are targeting vital economic infrastructure so as to cripple transport and logistic capabilities and also slow down any development activity.”

• The state cannot rely on the controlled chaos approach any longer. The solution, Singh said, is for state police forces, “to establish specialized, dedicated forces to fight left-wing extremism.”

Each of these is covered in-depth my article “The Rising Naxalite Rage“.

• Television. A 30 minute movie to be broadcast on public television channels including jailed Maoist confessions of criminal acts targeting the public.
• Radio and Newspaper. Publishing of the rupee amount of the net damage caused by the Naxalites, including the total state expenditure on counter-Naxal operations, total Naxal wealth accrued through extortion, their treatment of women and, particularly, juxtapose Naxal-leader wealth in comparison to their rhetoric.
• Police engagement. Awareness campaign through townhall meetings, college seminars and increased interviews in the press.

This is in response to the Naxal efforts which have included:

• Television. A short film revealing the harsh reality of what is termed “anti-Maoist operations” and the general corruption of state forces, including execution style killings of suspects and institutional framing efforts and cover ups.
• SMS text messaging. Spreading disinformation by spoofing sender data to senior government officials as well as threats to life and property.
• Extensive leaflet distribution campaign.

While the police campaign is ostensibly targeted towards the rural population that the Maosts rely upon, it is important to note that many of its efforts are designed to shore up support within urban areas. By building threat awareness, the police hope to increase their own funding.

• 560 (30%) of the passengers were unauthorized.
• All three classes – Air Conditioned, Sleeper and General – were taken over.
• A loss of some Rs. 47,961 (approximately $1,000) was incurred.
• The few police on-scene were escorted off the train, as were ticket wielding passengers by the Maoists – who were armed with bottles and rocks.

The forcible acquisition of train berths by political parties is not uncommon, but this particular instance is notable due to sheer size.

The acquisition of 1 firearm resulted in total control of the battlespace. Rarely is the critical threshold so low, and so, prior to leaving, the Naxals made sure to steal six more rifles and one radio handset.

In areas of low governance and high Naxalite activity, public institutions such as:

• petrol pumps
• nationalized banks
• shopping complexes
• open-air markets
• mining infrastructure
• state buildings

are protected by armed guards.

However, to stay below the Naxal radar they are forced to forgo firearms and instead are armed with bows and arrows. The same is true for police forces at the precinct level. To prevent raids by the Maoists, a sign of dominance and the resultant establishment of a critical threshold, state forces are forced to concede the battlespace by giving up arms.

To this end, a pro-POSCO faction, backed by the government, has held the entire village of Dhinki, the hub of the PPSS, under house-arrest, effectively sealing off the centralized command and control of the organization.

With the opposition firewalled off 12 government survey units, previously targeted for kidnapping, are roaming the countryside trying to ascertain what resources will have to be compensated for, including:

• the amount of land to be acquired,
• structures (homes, schools, shops) on the land,
• number of trees,
• bodies of water,
• and betel crops.

Though this approach works in the short term, it can not be sustained. Furthermore, it sets a dangerous precedent in its message: that progress can only be made if protesters are removed from the picture.

The organization will be headed by:

• One Inspector-General of Police.
• One Deputy Inspector-General.
• Two Superintendents .
• 22 Deputy Superintendents? from the State Police, a distinct service from the Indian Police Service.

Given that this 2,000 man strong unit is to be armed with automatic weapons, firepower that is orders of magnitude greater the the average police officer’s armament, the primary mission will be seeking out Maoist strongholds and destroying them.

(For more context on this, read my article The Rising Naxalite Rage.)

To capitalize on the challenges of harsh high peaks and subzero temperatures the tactics of Pakistan’s special forces centered on gaining and holding the ridge overlooking a critical Indian supply highway. Unwilling to risk losing world support by crossing into Pakistani territory and cutting off their supply lines – effectively letting the bunkered down infiltrators “die on the vine” – Indian troops faced the daunting task of scaling 90 degree cliffs (at times 18,000 feet) at high altitude to engage in what often turned into hand-to-hand combat.

Troops conducted these dangerous maneuvers this with little, if any, tactical intelligence. Aerial flyovers and civilian assets were the primary sources, neither in real time. The few unmanned aerial vehicles operated by the military at point performed poorly in the severe conditions of the area.

This resulted in India investing heavily in the development of a fleet of UAVs. Since then the government has has:

• Bought what it could not build. The Indian Army currently utilizes Israeli Searchers and Herons.
• Accelerated an organic UAV development program. The Lakshya, Nishant are the result.
• Conducted extensive unmanned maritime reconnaissance and surveillance. The eastern seaboard of the country is protected by a UAV unit based out of the Andobar islands.

It is now seeking to purchase an additional 150 UAVs and micro-UAVs with the following capabilities:

• All-weather day and night surveillance.
• Minimal thermal signature.
• 18-30km range.
• Direct, evaluate and correct artillery fire.

While the Kargil War was an example of irregular conventional combat, UAV’s are useful assets in combating insurgencies – real time intelligence is critical. UAVs are already operating in Kashmir, and now the states of Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh have voiced interest with a test program taking off in Chhattisgarh to combat the Naxalite threat.

“Bhatke Rahi (Misguided Traveller)”, a 30-minute play written by Superintendent of Police in Ranchi M S Bhatia, is aimed at stopping youths from going of the track. Bhatia said, “the play shows how Naxalites rob happiness and deny development to common people by illusory dreams.”

The play directed by Dilip Palwle, a graduate of Delhi School of Drama, will be performed in Naxalite-hit villages of [Jharkhand] till December 20.

In the absence of the movies, music and other media that the globalizing world takes for granted, this is an example of a simple and cheap counter-propaganda campaign designed to combat a traditional insurgency.

Naxal Watch is the pro-state equivalent.

?Update hil Howison was on this a year ago.

Scared of Naxalite penetration, state law enforcement troops were deployed to ostensibly keep the peace but government leaders make no secret of their support of the violence:

“Thursday’s violence would be the last clash there. Now the anti-POSCO people will not dare to raise their voice. This has proved that they are a minority there and most of the local people want POSCO for their development,” says Orissa’s Commerce and Transport Secretary Priyabrata Patnaik.

This commitment has since been solidified by pro-POSCO villagers even as police were at the scene:

• A delegation of activists were prevented from even approaching the village at the center of the conflict. They were harassed and forced to return.
• Anti-POSCO activists were denied permission to conduct a a hunger strike at the location of the violence of last week then driven out.

The PPSS reacted by arming themselves and conducting a public parade. The organization is armed with:

• 30 firearms.
• 50-60 crude bombs.
• Bows, arrows and knives.

This is the problem with the controlled chaos approach: control over chaos is rarely retained by anyone, much less the government. The result is a protracted, dirty conflict along tribal/ethnic/economic lines. This instability prevents foreign investment and development from taking hold.

The Jharkhand Naxalite operating budget is based on extortion:

• Rs. 70,000 per coal firm per year
• Rs. 25,000 per transportation firms per year

The Rewards of the Shadow Economy?

This money flows in the black market:

• Individuals earn between Rs. 1,000 to 3,000.
• The terms of their employment includes a life insurance payout of Rs. 125,000.

The Naxalite Tax?

The return on the Naxalite investment in the their extortion rackets is an annual budget of Rs. 3.2 billion ($80 million).?

The state of Jharkhand was formed out of the southern part of the northeastern state of Bihar in late 2000. Though the economy is based on its plentiful natural resources: minerals and forestry, its progress has been stubbornly slow.

Troubled History

• It has, since its creation, been victim to some 130 bandhs.
• This is an average of 20 a year, or 2 a month.
• Only 30% are called by and enforced by the Naxalites though the tactic evolved and was streamlined by that insurgency.
• Political parties are the primary culprits.
• Economic collectives and even businessmen protesting the rampant use of the tactic by others have been forced to rely the tactic.

Economic Implications

• The cost of each day of shutdown is estimated at some Rs. 600 million ($15 million).
• This puts the total economic damage figure at Rs. 78 billion ($2 billion) for the past seven years.

The Bandh Tax

Given that Jharkhand’s annual GDP hovers around Rs. 320 billion ($8 billion), 3.5 percent of the state’s economic potential is lost every year. This is the bandh tax.

As previously established, compounding bandhs can result in the collapse of cities. Jharkhand may prove to be a larger scale example of the same phenomenon.

This is the first part of a look at the dynamics at work in Jharkhand.

July 11, 2006

Seven pressure cookers packed with 2.5 kilograms of RDX each are placed in rising middle class compartments of seven outbound Western line trains in Mumbai. Within moments of near-simultaneous explosions realtime global media streams begin transmitting live footage. Rerouting a city with a population of 12 million resulted in cellular grids crashing, road transit overloading and public services going down. 209 died, 700 were injured.

Recent History

The nodes of the urban transit network have been assaulted with the intent to maximize shock value several times:

• When the underworld coordinated thirteen bombings on March 12, 1993, an additional two unexploded car bombs were found days later outside of major railway stations.
• A decade later, a bomb exploded at Ghatkopar railway station on December 2, 2002.
• Four days later, a bomb exploded in an air conditioning duct at Bombay Central Railway Station’s food plaza.
• A bomb-laden bicycle exploded next to the Vile Parle Railway Station on January 27, 2003.

Any network disruption as a result of these attacks was not a mission objective, but rather a byproduct that served as a reminder and a fear-multiplier.

Shifting Tactics

Each attack on the urban railway network increased the number of human fatalities by, on average, 311%, though this differential reached as high as 1096%. This is an unsustainable growth rate and attackers require growth in order to make an impact.

A new trend emerged 2003 in which network edges, or links between nodes, are targeted rather than the nodes themselves.

• A bomb placed in a first class ladies compartment exploded just prior to hurtling into Mulund railway station on March 13, 2003. Mulund is a critical link for trains leaving or entering the city.

The July 11, 2006 bombings approach the critical threshold for symbolic terrorism on Mumbai’s urban transit network. The potential for minor incremental improvement is most likely negligible. Instead of symbolic besting, evidenced by higher and higher bodycounts, the trendline indicates that secondary network effects and cascading failures will increase both in number and in impact and will progressively play a central role in terror mission planning.

Resiliency and Response

While the densely clustered nature of the July 11, 2006 attacks allowed Railway officials to rapidly bring the network back on line that same night, this could not be said of the brittle framework of a modern city – the cellular, road and service networks. Cellular nets may have been brought down by the government so as to prevent the possibility of remotely detonated explosives. If so, given that peer to peer connections are central in disaster response, the results were likely deadly. Secondary network effects, like the decreased margins of the outsourcing industry due to the costs of building resiliency into their systems, are still at play.

Ongoing economic attrition is troubling given that Mumbai plays an important role as India’s financial hub. It contributes 40-60% of tax revenue, routes 40% of India’s foreign trade and Rs.40 billion in corporate taxes.

Into the Future

As metro transit systems are built in major urban areas, like in Delhi, operational resiliency and rapid threat reaction will need to be developed. Senior National Security Guard officers I met with say that they understand and are preparing for the eventual targeting of these new systems. This is a good first step, but a real strategy will have to be utterly localized and implemented in the design process of the new faster systems instead of relying on central units.

This brief collapse was the result of a build-up of the six days of compounding bandh initiated and enforced by various communist groups. These forced banked on the relative inexperience of the opposition farmer groups to achieve the objective of an urban overreach .

This strategy paid off when farmer efforts resulted in large scale visible violence. The sum result of the short lived campaign included hundreds of injured protesters and policemen, dozens of torched vehicles, and the burning of two ruling Communist Party offices.

Some 500 federal troops were deployed throughout the city within an hour of being called into action by the state government to quell the unrest. They were pulled out several days later, after order was restored.

Farmer groups are now facing an imperative to innovate beyond loosely coordinated mob violence. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

These individuals pay as much as $1,500 to earn passage to the Gulf states. More often than not, they are unable to discern the legitimacy of their local immigration service provider and, given the prevalence of illicit human trafficking networks in this part of the world, many find themselves unwitting illegal immigrants. Those who do hold valid visas, upon disembarking, have their passports taken away and are forced to work as pseudo-slaves.

This has resulted in significant worker unrest and more recently, large scale demonstrations – such as in the 4,000 strong demonstration in Dubai – in countries that do not allow workers to unionize or strike, like the UAE. This unrest is likely to expand and intensify, now that the labor market is saturated to a point where the average construction worker earns 600 dirhams a month, but living costs average around 700 dirhams.

This uptick has the potential of destabilizing the booming economy of the Gulf. Especially since Indians make up 50% of the private labor force. Adding in Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers bring that figure up to 75%.

This has not gone unnoticed. Rather than relying solely on its usual tactic of deporting the activist leaders, the UAE recently implemented an amnesty program targeting 341,000 illegal immigrants, of which 70,000 were Indian. 40,000 of the latter participated and have returned to the workforce, but the wage/costs ratio is a critical problem yet to be solved.

This is an important step for the generally underutilized RPF, but, to put it in perspective, there will be, at the end of next year, 55 canine units to cover 7500 stations and 40,000 miles of track.

Current resources are already overburdened. Dogs normally have a 12.5% false positive rate, but when on duty for more than two hours this number jumps to 60%. The RPF’s canine teams often work for eight hours.

To compound, only 14 of the currently approved 23 are being trained due to infrastructure limits. Another 22 are slated for next year, but the spillover from the current training schedule will likely cause more delay.

A better approach: The RPF should be examining alternative low-cost animals – pigs, rats, bees – or technologies – robots or sensor networks. The considerable talents of the state-run globally-acclaimed Indian Institutes of Technology should be incentivized to solve these kinds of problems.

.73% of railway stations will be covered by the superficial canine security measure. It is time to encourage a market ecosystem to meet glaring security demands.

In response to the SEZ-centered violence in nearby Nandigram, some 22 major road arteries in Kolkata were, over the course of an hour and a half, shutdown in rapid succession for 15 minutes each. Each short segment resulted in 60-90 minutes of deadlock, but the combination of arteries resulted in some roads being shut down for as long as six to seven hours.

The shutdown of road traffic prevented most normal economic activity from taking place as well as the surge in Diwali-holiday shoppers. The leftist segmented shutdowns spread to neighboring villages where Naxalite units worked to disrupt national highways and train networks with minor success.

How it begins:

A resurgent Maoist uprising is about to be unleashed on India. Its forces will emerge from the Dandakaranya forest and the ensuing battle will rage for years across hundreds of underdeveloped districts and Special Economic Zones. The viability of the government encouraging economic development in or even maintaining hold of the “Red Corridor” will be drawn into question. Any infrastructure network, be it privately or publicly backed, is marked for disruption. The once suppressed Naxalite insurgency is poised to set ablaze the flows of globalization and destabilize the economic expansion of almost half of the country.

Read the issue and the full article here.

Update: John Robb, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the future of warfare, explains how Naxal-inspired bandhs fit into the larger picture. His book, Brave New War, is a must-read for anyone, particularly those interested in India’s future, seeking to make sense of the emerging patterns of warfare.

In modern warfare,? the goal of dramatic public attacks is to force the nation-state to respond on an equally spectacular scale. A flawed implementation of such an approach creates prime feeding grounds for a subnational group.

Marand’s political party initiated a one day bandh, or economic shutdown, of the state of Jharkhand. Bandhs were banned in 1998 by the Supreme Court. The law was enforced when 100 political enforcers were arrested but they were given tacit state support in the form of breakfast. Roads, railroads and markets were blocked. Coal mining firms were particularly hit given their inability to move any of their product.

The government responded by initiating Operation Vikram. Some 600 soldiers in five CRPF paramilitary battalions have simultaneously begun a clear-and-hold operation in five districts. Operation Vikram is slated to expand to a total of 18 districts? and include joint action by the states of Orissa and Bihar. Three members of a Naxalite splinter group have been killed so far.

The Maoist strategists will likely avoid direct confrontation to allow the state forces to flail without any push-back. The overreach has been set in motion.

Given the lack of private sector talent, private airlines are turning to the military. Indian Air Force (IAF) aviators earn between Rs. 25,000 and Rs. 40,000 a month. The private sector is able to lure them away by offering pay increases of up to 1,000 percent. The IAF is authorized 12,128 officers, but is currently operating with 88 percent of that number and is lacking bodies to fill 600 of its 3,278 pilot slots. Just under ten percent, or 300 pilots have left in the last three years alone.

The Army is authorized 46,615 officers for its 1.13 million soldiers but operates with 75 percent. The amount of officers applying for early retirement has steadily increased by anywhere from 20 to 40 percent every year since 2002. Over 3,000 have applied in past three years, 950 this year alone, and approximately half were approved.

The worst-hit areas are lieutenants, captains and majors. This is alarming, given that highly trained small unit leaders are vital in waging a successful counterinsurgency campaign.

It is important to note that this decline in retention will increase and expand as India’s military industrial complex slowly boots up from the wreckage of the public sector monopoly.

POSCO expects to output some 600 million tons of iron ore over the course of the 30-year lease approved by the Orissa government in 2005. Mining is slated to begin in 2009 and the South Korean company expects to create 18,000 jobs over 10 years.

The physical infrastructure to be built includes a plant and a port which require a total of 4,004 acres. Till date, POSCO has gained control of less than 10% of that figure despite offering employment and other forms of compensation to the 4,000 families facing displacement.

In large part this is due to the organized response of the POSCO Pratirodha Sangram Samiti (PPSS), an organization that began in 2005 when its leader, Abhaya Sahu, empowered by only a rickshaw-mounted microphone went from village to village building support.

Since then, the public counter-POSCO effort has been gaining steam by aligning itself with environmentalists who argue that the port will disrupt local ecology and NGO’s who argue that the livelihood of fishermen and farmers is at stake.

In addition to the political track, PPSS members have taken to preventing encroachment by state or corporate officers by guarding village entrances with bamboo sticks.

This marked the beginning of a transformation towards a more combative approach:

• In May of this year, a vehicle carrying three Indian POSCO executives was swarmed by 10 villagers with sticks. The corporate officers were taken captive and were released the same day when POSCO promised not to send anymore staff to the area.
• On October 11, 10 laborers bound for the project site were kidnapped by the PPSS.
• On October 13, four POSCO executives – three South Koreans and an Indian – were swarmed and taken prisoner by a crowd of 40-50 armed villagers while dismounted. Their vehicle was pushed into a ditch, again no reward was demanded, and the corporate officers were freed when the local police promised that neither state nor POSCO staff would enter PPSS controlled areas.

Due to the potential for enormous payoff POSCO will likely press on with its efforts despite excruciatingly slow progress and localized unrest. To deter POSCO, PPSS has to make it economically inviable to pursue construction and later, production. The increasingly activist posture reflects that, to some degree, this understanding is taking hold. The only question is what form this economic deterrence will take.

Update: The 10 laborers taken prisoner four days ago on their way to build a bridge at the project site have been released after the government gave in to the PPSS demand that the unused timber be removed and the project not be restarted.

Update 2: Private intelligence firm Stratfor tracks the same topic here.

1. Jama Masjid. April 14, 2006. Delhi. Two nearly simultaneous bombs at this prominent mosque resulted in 14 dead.
2. Shab-e-Barat. September 8, 2006. Malegaon. Three bombs interrupted a festival. 38 dead, 200 injured.
3. The Samjhauta Express. February 19, 2007. Simultaneous suitcase IEDs caused a fire resulting in 68 dead and 50 dead on the single railway link between Lahore and Delhi.
4. Mecca Masjid. May 18, 2007. Hyderabad. A bomb in the 400 year old mosque resulted in 14 killed and 50 injured. In the ensuing violent protest an additional five were killed by anti-riot police.

Influenced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization, the Tanzim Qaidat Al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn or Al Qaeda in Iraq, HuJI is targeting physical religious infrastructure an effort to collapse the fragile social structures that contain diverse local communities.

“It is an act of terror, no religion including Islam permits it and the perpetrators of the act aim to break the Indian nation in to religious lines,” said Maulana Badruddin Ajmal Al-Qasmi, president Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF).

In short, HuJI is searching for the social systempunkt. Iraq’s al-Askari Mosque bombings and the ensuing sectarian violence exemplify this approach.

HuJI’s attacks have wildly fluctuated in terms of effectiveness due to technical considerations such as unexploded or inadequate ordinance and, so far, the secondary violence stemming from these attacks has been relatively mild.

Should HuJI close the gap between its strategic thinking and tactical abilities, it could explode through the systempunkt and potentially cause significant disorder.

The going rate for a poached leopard or tiger on the eastern coast of India is $50. A forest-dweller can, in a few hours, increase his monthly income (on average $42) by 119 percent by participating in this economy. The skin, after traversing the globe, sells for upwards of $2,000 – a 4,000 percent return on investment that is likely immediately absorbed by another black market.

Obviously, efforts to combat this global network such as the Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking – the US and India are both active members – will require significant economic power in order to make any sort of measurable impact.

• 86,899 detonators
• 20,150 kilograms of slurry explosives
• 52,740 meters of fuse
• 419 kilograms of gelatin sticks

International connectivity plays a major role in driving the theft of explosives. Explosives bound for India’s Border Roads Organization, which builds connectivity into rural areas of Afghanistan, were stolen some 20 miles off the coast of Mumbai. 61,000 detonators were found by the Sri Lankan Navy on a vessel falsely marked as a gulf oil company transporting oil.

At the same time, the illicit explosive RDX, formerly a driver of the illicit trade network between Bangladesh and eastern India is being supplanted by the open-market alternative of ammonium nitrate (used as fertilizer and in the mining industry) which is making it tougher for the security establishment to trace and react.

We were driving back from a sales trip into the (further) interiors in the stockist’s car when a bunch of gray boys, in their mid teens, formed a human chain across the road to block us…It did seem a primitive toll tax booth but when we stopped, the stockist actually started negotiating the toll amount with them..they came down from 100 bucks to 70, but started getting agitated when pressed further. Suddenly the leader of the gray pack shouted angrily “Pay up 100 now nahi to bhaiya will visit you personally tomorrow.”

This bhaiya, I found later, is the local self styled naxalite who does the ‘collection’ to keep the wheels of agitation well oiled.