Chief Electoral Officer Teeka Ram Meena on Thursday chaired a high-level meeting of top police officers in a bid to draw up a fool-proof strategy to insulate the election process from a range of threats, including Left-wing extremism.
Officials privy to the closed-door meeting said the deliberations focussed on the embryonic but potentially disruptive Maoist activity in Wayanad, Kozhikode, Kannur, and Malappuram.
The meeting decided to intensify anti-Maoist operations in Wayanad, where Congress president Rahul Gandhi was contesting the Lok Sabha elections. It would entail more paramilitary forces in Left extremist “affected” localities and area domination exercises, including injection of special forces into forested areas for long-drawn search-and-deter operations.
An officer said the police would constrict the capacity of Maoists to move with impunity in the vast expanse of forests and adjoining habitations contiguous to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, known as the tri-junction.
Senior officers said the armed irregulars posed a threat to VIP security and they had appeared at tribal settlements in Wayanad to distribute pamphlets denouncing the elections recently. The police have formed quick reaction teams comprising elite Thunderbolt commandos and trained anti-Naxalite forces in all police stations in Wayanad.
Sensitive booths
They have also singled out sensitive polling booths vulnerable to Maoist disruption using a predictability calculus based on past Naxalite activity.
The meeting also focussed hard on Kannur district, which had witnessed internecine strife between political fronts, including street violence and tit-for-tat murders. The CEO has categorised 250 booths in Kannur as critical, the highest security grading. His officers have reported that 611 booths in Kannur are vulnerable to violence and disruptive and 24 as sensitive. Kannur district has a total of 1,857 booths. Web cameras would cover most of them.
The CEO has already deployed 57 paramilitary companies to police the elections. He has sought additional reinforcement, an estimated 2000 armed law enforcers, from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
