"..We further hold that tribal youth, who had been previously engaged as SPOs in counter-insurgency activities, in whatever form, against Maoists/Naxalites may be employed as SPOs to perform duties limited to those enumerated in Sections 23(1)(h) and 23(1)(i) of CPA 2007.."
- Supreme Court's order, 5 July 2010
Section 23 (h) To help people in situations arising out of natural and manmade disasters, and to assist other agencies in relief measures (i) To facilitate orderly movement of people and vehicles, and to control and regulate traffic
- Chhattisgarh Police Act 2007
"At one go, the best fighter against the Maoists has been reduced to a traffic policeman," said a police officer, posted in Bastar, the region in south Chhattisgarh, where counter insurgency operations have come to heavily rely on the services of barely literate tribal youth, hired on less than one third the salary of a police constable, and designated 'special police officers' or SPOs.
With the Supreme Court asking Chhattisgarh government to "immediately cease and desist" from deploying SPOs in anti Maoist operations and recall their firearms "forthwith", confusion prevails over the future of these four thousand odd young, fit, trained fighters.
While they stand to lose their weapons, the police maintained that the SPOs would not immediately lose their jobs. However, it was not clear whether they would be absorbed in other duties, or 'regularised', by being inducted into the regular ranks of the police.
Currently, candidates need to have studied at least upto tenth standard in school to qualify for the job of a police constable. "This condition limited the availability of candidates from the tribal community in the interior areas," said Vishwa Ranjan, the director general of Chhattisgarh police. "While there are enough tenth class pass tribal youth, say, in the town of Dantewada, but there are not too many in Chintalnar (an interior village)," he explained.
This served as the logic to hire the youth from these areas as 'special police officers', or temporary appointees, a category that exists in the police acts of most states, but one that is rarely evoked.
In Chhattisgarh, the category came handy, in the aftermath of the Salwa Judum, an anti Maoist movement that broke out in 2005. Its supporters claimed it was a spontaneous upsurge by adivasis, who rebelled against the Maoists, and left their villages for the safety of government camps, but its critics alleged it was cynically calibrated program by the state and the local elite, that adopted a scorched earth strategy and forcibly emptied villages to expose rebel hideouts.
The Judum's by-product was the arming of tribal youth by the state, initially as a civilian vigilante army. The government claimed the armed men would protect those who had left their villages, but critics alleged they were used to inflict violence on those who did not.
Faced with questions over the legality of arming civilians, in 2007, the government gave the Judum fighters formal accreditation as 'special police officers' or SPOs. But Judum and SPOs are not co-terminus : while some SPOs emerged from the Judum, others hired subsequently have no links with it; like constables, all SPOs report to the superintendents of police, and not private Judum bosses, although informal ties appear to have endured, something that come to fore during the recent attack on Swami Agnivesh and the media in March.
Deployed at the frontline, the SPOs very rapidly became the lynchpin of counter insurgency in Chhattisgarh. As locals they possessed what the regular police and paramilitary forces did not -- knowledge of terrain, topography, people and even the methods of the Maoists, since some of the young men were renegade insurgents. Besides, they enabled Chhattisgarh to bolster its anti Maoist operations at a fraction of the cost of raising regular police battalions. Initially, SPOs were paid 1500 rupees. Last year, this was raised to 3000 rupees, less than one third of the starting pay of a police constable.
This led the Supreme Court to conclude that the state was simply using under-paid tribal youth as 'canon fodder'. It called the use of SPOs as "an abdication of constitutional responsibilities to provide appropriate security to citizens, by having an appropriately trained professional police force of sufficient numbers and properly equipped on a permanent basis".
But can the young adivasi men be transformed into a trained, professional, permanent policemen? "Expenditure should not be a concern, given that there are 12000 police vacancies in Chhattisgarh. Funds for these have already been sanctioned" said a senior police officer. "To absorb the SPOs, all the government needs to do is amend the recruitment rules and waive off the minimum education requirement," he said, adding this has been done once in 2008, while raising a battalion of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF), when the educational qualification for eligible candidates was lowered to fifth class pass.
But should this be done? While security officers, from both the police and paramilitary, who have served in the region, offered unequivocal praise for the fighting abilities of SPOs, some conceded the SPOs were prone to recklessness and bouts of indiscipline. "The onus is on the senior officers to streamline and discipline them just like they do with constables who come from the same background," said a senior CRPF officer. In its order, the Supreme Court maintained, "..youngsters with such low educational qualifications cannot be expected to understand the dangers that they are likely to face, the skills needed to face such dangers, and the requirements of the necessary judgment while discharging such responsibilities".
While the official establishment worked out the long term future of the SPOs, police officer on the ground expressed more immediate concerns. "We will have to communicate the fine print of the order to them, collect their weapons, and work out ways to keep them calm," said a police officer.
According to one view expressed in Chhattisgarh, the unarmed SPOs could become easy targets for the Maoists, in the sense that they could get killed. But another view interpreted this differently: "The SPOs have experienced the power of carrying a gun. If the police will no longer provide them one, maybe they will go back to those who will. Remember some of the SPOs were Maoists earlier".
Ironically, these very concerns feature in the Supreme Court order; in fact, the judges have held them as further reason to strike down the appointment of temporary SPOs as unconstitutional. The order says, "If force is used to collect such firearms back, without those youngsters being given a credible answer with respect to their questions regarding their safety, in terms of their lives, after their appointment ends, it is entirely conceivable that those youngsters refuse to return them. Consequently, we would then have a large number of armed youngsters, running scared for their lives, and in violation of the law. It is entirely conceivable that they would then turn against the State, or at least defend themselves using those firearms, against the security forces themselves; and for their livelihood, and subsistence, they could become roving groups of armed men endangering the society, and the people in those areas, as a third front".
This is perhaps what makes the future of the SPOs more than just a crisis of individuals, but a larger crisis, that in the days ahead, Chhattisgarh government will have to find ways of tackle.
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