?All our important leaders are being either arrested or eliminated. How is this possible? Police have penetrated our ranks. We have to disown the PCAPA (People?s Committee Against Police Atrocities). We have to convince the media that PCAPA and CPI-Maoist are different organisations with different political agendas… that neither Chhatradhar Mahato nor Asit Mahato has any links with us.?

That?s a cellphone conversation Koteswara Rao or Kishenji, a top CPI(Maoist) leader who is on the run after a near-fatal encounter with the security forces in March this year, had with a senior squad leader in Lalgarh. The conversation, intercepted by intelligence agencies, a part of which has been accessed by this reporter, reveals that the Maoists are realigning their strategy in Lalgarh after a string of recent reverses.

For close to two years now, Lalgarh, a village in Jhargram subdivision of West Bengal?s West Midnapore district, has been the site of a bloody turf war between cadres of the ruling CPM and police forces on one side, and on the other, suspected Maoists who organised a coalition of villagers against police forces. This coalition, the PCAPA, had the not-too-hidden patronage of the Trinamool Congress. In November 2008, the PCAPA laid siege to Lalgarh, felling trees and digging trenches to keep out the state administration. But the West Bengal government hit back with Operation Lalgarh, which saw some smart strategic planning by the combined force of the state police, the CRPF and the commando force, Cobra.

Infighting, distrust

It?s now clear that fault lines have surfaced between the Maoists and their frontal organisation, the PCAPA. In the cellphone intercept, Kishenji was speaking about the recent successes by security forces in Lalgarh?about a dozen encounters were carried out in the past six months?and that it was clear someone was giving away their positions.

This sense of distrust isn?t entirely without basis, says Zulfiqar Hassan, IG, Western Range. He attributes the recent successes of security forces to ?human intelligence? in Lalgarh and surrounding areas.

Before the March encounter in the jungles of Hathiloth, in which Kishenji is believed to have been critically injured and his leg later amputated, the police came close to trapping him twice in the Goaltore and Lakkhanpur jungles. He managed to flee both times but apparently, the security forces had been tipped off about his movements.

Probably the worst crisis to hit the Maoists followed thereafter, when on June 16, 14 Maoists were killed in the Ranjya forest encounter. And then on July 26, six people, including Sidhu Soren, PCAPA secretary and chief of its armed wing Gana Militia (People?s Militia), were killed in the forests of Metala near Lalgarh.

The Jnaneswari train accident was the last straw. The initial plan was to derail a goods train but when the PCAPA derailed a passenger train that killed over 100 people, senior Maoists leaders started disowning the PCAPA. Their spokesperson said the people who had triggered the massacre were ?hired goons of the CPM?, out to malign the Maoists.

Strategic blunders

Senior Maoists leaders admit that the hold-up of the New Delhi-Bhubaneswar Rajdhani Express in October 2009 and the Jnaneswari sabotage clearly showed that the Maoist leadership had made a ?strategic blunder? in Lalgarh by sharing ?military information? the PCAPA.

?PCAPA is not a frontal organisation; it is a mass organisation. A political organisation like CPI(Maoist) can have its military wing, but the PCAPA, a mass organisation, cannot have a militia. So there is something wrong with the idea of PCAPA,? says senior Maoist ideologue Varavara Rao.

But Hassan, the Western Range IG, sees no distinction between the PCAPA and the Maoists. ?It is an old Maoist strategy to eliminate leaders and dilute an organisation after their purpose has been served. After this, they will bring up some other organisation through which they will revitalise their movement,? he says.

The counter-attack

In the initial days of Operation Lalgarh, CRPF companies posted in Lalgarh and other Maoist areas depended entirely on the state intelligence units and the local administration. Now, everyone from the CRPF camp-in-charge to the jawans are roping in villagers, asking for leads. CPM supporters in some of these villages are being used to alert forces about the movement of Maoist squads.

And then, the healing touch. There are initiatives like football tournaments at the village-level. Two tribal boys from Lalgarh have been chosen for their football talent and are being sent to Bayern, Munich for a 10-day camp. Special computer training camps have been set up in at least 11 affected blocks in Lalgarh.