A tiny room, one light bulb, a table and a chair, an AK-47 hanging from a nail on the wall, a cot in one corner with four bamboo sticks jutting out of its sides to prop up a mosquito net. This is the office and “residential quarters” of Inspector F Kerketta, the man in charge of the Koylibeda Police station in Bastar, whose job is to win one battle in the ongoing war against Naxalites whom Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls the biggest internal security threat to the country today.

Beyond the police station are the forests of Abujhmad (literally meaning unknown forests), the strongest Naxalite bastion in the state for the past three decades. Two police personnel were killed and five injured here in an ambush by Maoist extremists on February 10. The area, long claimed as a “liberated zone” by CPI-Maoist cadres is also a confirmed spot used by Naxalites to run a training camp.

You wouldn’t know this if you looked around the police station.

To monitor an area of 25 square km in some of the most treacherous terrain in the state is a group of just 43 police personnel: 33 from the district police and 10 men from the Chhattisgarh Armed Police. Forget winning, the battle they fight is just to “hold the post,” the last semblance of any administration in Kanker district. “At least a company level force of 100 personnel has to be placed at this station,” says Assistant Platoon Commander Manohar Lal Soni who is 55 years old.

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