The Andhra Pradesh police have asked its personnel deployed on the borders of Orissa not to cross over lest the move be construed as combing operations to free Malkangiri Collector R. Vineel Krishna, who was abducted by the Maoists on Wednesday night.
Instructions were issued on Thursday morning to the civil police and the Grey Hounds teams stationed in agency areas of Visakhapatnam not to cross over to Orissa under any circumstances. “We do not want to be seen as aggressors,” a top police officer confided when asked to speak about the kidnap episode.
A ‘cut-off' area
Kudumulagumma block of Malkangiri, from where Mr. Krishna was abducted, falls in the ‘cut-off' area of the district, a euphemism for the place being totally inaccessible to police forces.
Another police officer involved in counter-insurgency operations likened it to the Jaffna peninsula of Sri Lanka, a stronghold of the LTTE in its heyday. “Mostly, Orissa police would venture into these cut-off areas, in joint operations with the Grey Hounds of Andhra Pradesh.”
250 armed Maoists
The Andhra Pradesh police estimate that around 250 Maoist armed cadres are operating in Malkangiri and surrounding districts, which form part of the Maoist Andhra-Orissa Border Special Zonal Committee (AOBSZC).
The committee covers East Godavari, Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam, the four north coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh, and Malkangiri, Rayagada, Gajapati, Koraput and Nabranagar of Orissa.
In addition to two companies of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, police estimate that the Maoists have squads named after Kalimela, Korukonda, Jhanjavati, Motu and Poplur areas, operating in AOBSZC.
The abduction, incidentally, came just a week after Chhattisgarh police went on a high alert about the possibility of ‘soft targets' being abducted. The Maoists have been employing the tactic of kidnaps, rather frequently in Southern Chhattisgarh, but mostly they were concentrating on the security forces only. Recently, five jawans of the Central Reserve Police Force were abducted and released after a month or so in Bastar forests.
Sensational kidnaps
Andhra Pradesh too had seen some sensational kidnap cases by the Maoists. In 1993, Congress legislator Balaraju was abducted and released only after a Naxalite leader was released in exchange. In the State capital, the Maoists had abducted P. Sudhir Kumar, then legislator, from his house in Basheerbagh in 1991 and he was let off only after the government released some top Naxalite cadres.
The most sensational kidnap was that of a group of seven IAS officers, including S.R. Sankaran, in 1987. At that time also, the government headed by late N.T. Rama Rao had to yield to the Naxal demand to release their leaders from jail.
