Each day, when Sub Inspector R L Thakur gazes at the setting sun falling behind the hills facing his police station, he shivers. The gathering darkness raises the fear of a roar from these very quiet hills — the roar of gunfire and the spectre of a Naxalite attack. Staring at the steady fire in the community kitchen, he whispers, “SLRs or carbines won’t be effective from that distance. But they can shoot us down using an LMG (Light Machine Gun) from the hilltop.” And Thakur knows very well that the Maoists have LMGs in numbers even he cannot comprehend.

The vulnerability of Banke Bazar police station is something that everyone here is aware of. Understandably so, as it is located just on the brink of the region beyond which the outlawed Maoists hold fort. Every man in uniform here acknowledges that the writ of the state is limited to a radius of just 3-4 km around the police station though its jurisdiction spreads across a radius of 15 km. “Beyond that, we hardly tread,” says a Bihar Military Police (BMP) jawan.

Ironically, this sense of fear is all-pervading despite the fact that Banke Bazar is among the best-equipped police stations in the Naxal heartland of Bihar. It has a strength of 20 jawans (16 constables and four head constables) of the BMP armed with SLRs and carbines. The police station on the Sherghati-Imamganj state highway has a concrete building, two watch towers and a fortified boundary wall. The compound houses the headquarter of BMP-1 where at any given time 20 “Gurkha” jawans stand guard.

... contd.