When intelligence fails…

Bhubaneswar ( Orissa): The 1974 batch IPS officer and Director Intelligence cum ADGP of Orissa, Manmohan Praharaj has been passing through sleepless nights following series of Intelligence failure.

After the Wednesday’s mayhem, Praharaj has been receiving severe criticism from various quarters.

Yesterday’s incident was the second time in the history of Maoist attack that an anti-land mine vehicle (ALV) has been blown away by ultras. First was on 4 September 2006 at Gadchiroli of Chhatisgarh, in which as many as 22 policemen were killed and second repeated in Malkangiri.

As there was a general perception that whenever Maoists successfully executed their action plan, many very often blame the Intelligence network for its failure to gather inputs of maoist movements. With the series of Maoists mayhem in recent past, Prahraj now seems to be in receiving end.

Praharaj, who represented Orissa in Wednesday's high-level anti-Maoists meet conveyed by the Union Home Ministry at national capital, also reportedly received flake from Union Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta.

Interestingly, within seven months in this year, the outlawed Leftwing guerrillas have successfully executed their plan for consecutive third time taking the benefit of Orissa Police's outdated intelligence systems.

The plans have reportedly been drawn by the Central Military Commission of the CPI (Maoists) and it has been worked out in a regular interval.

First in the series, they have executed Nayagarh mayhem meticulously taking all police force and intelligence wing into surprise.

It was considered as big set back to the police force and a moral booster to the red rebels.

Ironically Nayagarh is not far away from the State capital Bhubaneswar and police headquarter, which is situated in Cuttack.

Secondly , they had chosen to target the elite Greyhounds Jawans of Andhra Pradesh on Orissa soil and in third attempt, they virtually demoralize the Special Operation Group Jawans, who were expert in anti-insurgency warfare.

Union Home Ministry is now exploring options to open Jungle Warfare School in Orissa. The outlawed CPI (Maoists) cadres have repeated their six-year-old trick to make the policemen their easy target and killed as many as 26 people including special commandos of Special Operation Group Jawans.

Maoists had used the same tactics (land mine blast) to kill seven CRPF personnel near Gothalpadar in Rayagada district on August 11, 2002 by a major landmine blast. On the night of August 10, 2002 night, they had killed a police informer, Narasingha Sahu, at Gothalapadar.

The next day they had targeted the police team that headed towards the village to investigate the murder. The police vehicle carrying the CRPF men was in a hurry to reach the village and it had fallen prey to the landmine blast.

The Maoists made slight changes to their plans in Malkangiri after six years. This time they let the police team reach MV-41 village without any trouble to remove suspicion. But they had planned a massive blast on the return journey.

The blast was so severe that it blew up the anti-landmine vehicle and the SOG jawans who were sitting in it like sitting ducks