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  Suryakant saw a group of his colleagues running away. His first instinct was to duck back into the room and hide. Then he realized it. Oh God, they are after the missile!

  His mind seemed to go blank. He ran out of the corridor and tried to sneak past the assailants, or at least past the positions where he thought they were firing from. Firing at him. The golden words of Dr Leonard McCoy –'I am a doctor, not a commando!' – started to echo in his brain.

  As he rounded a bend, he saw two of his colleagues fall to bullets. They screamed. The handful of security personnel in the inner facility were being easily overpowered. It was a sensitive location, not many were cleared to serve here. For that reason, the security had focused on defending the outer perimeter. Why defend the nucleus when nothing can get past the outer periphery? The logic had been sound, only now did Suryakant realize that it was backfiring.

  He saw blood splattered on the white-tiled floor, making it slippery. He started to sob, his tears coming fast as he ran. Someone shouted. He stopped and peeked over his shoulder, it was a friend. The man motioned with flailing hands and whispered hoarsely, 'Get away, doctor sa'ab. Run!' Suryakant stood rooted to the spot. He was a man of thoughts, not a man of action.

  A voice shook him up. It was his superego. Without thinking, he climbed atop the nearest table and shouted in a scratchy but surprisingly loud voice, 'Stop! Please stop. Who are you? What do you want?'

  He heard the guns stop for a moment. He saw a ray of hope shining through the dark. Then, without warning, the guns started firing again. This time he felt the bullets ricochet near him. Suryakant did not have time to think. He jumped off the table to run for cover. Then, with a loud bang, he felt the world explode in a thousand brilliant colours...before it started to go dim. Time seemed to slow down.

  He looked down to see his lab coat was stained with blood. His blood. A volley of bullets had found their target. Suryakant felt no pain. His knees buckled and his lifeless body crashed to the ground.

  ♦

  The second group continued its advance towards the main facility. Three sentry posts and four barricades had been overrun even before the security forces had time to mount a defence. No alarm had been sounded in time. The attackers had had no trouble overpowering stray pickets and routine patrols.

  Their strategy was ruthless. The attackers opened fire the moment anything or anyone moved. The atmosphere reverberated with the din of MP-5 suppressed sub-machine guns, SA80, Kalashnikovs and M16s. The attackers had been clearly briefed on the layout and the security drills. The heaviest concentration of security was around the perimeter. Once that was neutralized, getting in was a piece of cake. The forward teams had already sabotaged the lone MI-35 Hind Gunship assigned to the base. It would be flying no sorties to defend the perimeter.

  They entered the inner facility with surprising swiftness, and divided in sub-groups, each with a particular area to secure and sanitize.

  The leader of the group ran towards the flight lab; resistance was sporadic and scattered. However, the resistance had another deadly flaw that doomed its effectiveness, the leader thought. Fear.

  The security here was caught unawares. They did not know who they were facing. A holiday posting had suddenly gone horribly wrong. The first teams to enter the facility had destroyed their contact with the outside world, they faced innumerable odds, and to top it all, most of them were civilians, unsure of what to do in such crisis situations.

  But we had been thoroughly briefed, trained, re-trained and perfected, the leader thought and chuckled. Trained to kill.

  They saw a man shouting for order. The leader turned around. The man, trying to exude confidence, surrendered. 'Yes, let us talk, shah we?' the leader muttered under his breath, grinned, and shot that man in the chest the very moment. He moved on almost callously.

  Their guns kept firing. Their hands were aching by now because of changing magazines continuously. They left no one alive. Dead men tell no tales. Researchers, security personnel and maintenance workers, all lay dead, blissfully ignorant of the impending doom. Finally, when all proof of life had been eliminated, they stopped firing.

  Stage One was complete. Time for Stage Two. Soon they would have India at her knees. The world would follow.

  ♦

  The intruders got to work immediately after firing the last bullet. Each one of them had been assigned a specific task to complete. They did not run around or fret to locate their objectives, like the disorganized tribesmen they earlier posed as, would have. They were familiar with the entire area. They had been made to memorize its map–locations, tunnels and landmarks – in painstaking detail.

  The men streamed into the assembly room where the components of Pralay were kept. The ultra modern equipment did not perturb the farmers. They did not hesitate. In fact, they felt more at ease. Technology was roughly the same across nations and cultures–it provided them common ground. With extraordinary focus, speed and finesse, they started assembling the missile. As was the case with the base, it was the same with the missile. They had absorbed its blueprints and the technical know-how required for the launch to such an extent that they could have assembled it even in their sleep.

  'How much time will it take?' asked a heavily-built man with a rough military demeanour. This was the first time someone in the group spoke. No one looked up but the one to whom the question was addressed.

  'Seven hours, sir. Just as we estimated it will,' he replied.

  A brief flicker of relief played on a few faces. 'Hurry up!' Thereafter, silence resumed.

  The leader whipped out a radio and a short coded burst followed from the sole operational radio on the base. Piercing the atmosphere, it headed for a Chinese military satellite passing overhead at that precise moment. The transponders realigned themselves and passed on the message to a secure location in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan.

  The leader smiled. Glory was coming to them on the wings of death.

  Army House, New Delhi, India

  Local time: 1430 hours

  Date: 23 April 2014

  Bloody hell, thought General Rohit Malhotra, chief of army staff and former chair of the Strategic Forces Command, as he placed his coffee mug on the dining table and reached across to receive the hotline his deferent orderly held out to him. General Malhotra's face had a vacant expression. Something had been gnawing at him for a long time. It was not exactly painful, but it made him restless. He felt incomplete; something was missing in his life. Not even the medals and decorations bestowed upon him could give him a sense of satisfaction now. Nor did the status of the 'most-liked' general of the Indian army given to him by the press do any good. Malhotra was thinking of doing something constructive, which would make him feel alive again. He wanted a new goal, which he could pursue the rest of his life.

  Handling calls was the last thing in the world he wanted to do right now. Nevertheless, the call was very urgent and unwillingly Malhotra had to break his chain of thoughts. He answered it, 'Yes…what?'

  Exactly seven minutes later his car was speeding towards the PM's residence. Sitting glumly inside the car, Malhotra wondered what had happened. He was not told much over the phone, only that an incident had happened, a big one at that, and he was immediately required. He tried to guess what it could be – the Directorate of Military Intelligence had predicted no major development.

  He had been ordered to report immediately to the PM's residence for an emergency National Disaster Response Council (NDRC) meeting. Malhotra would have been looking forward to another fruitless discussion on tackling infiltration in the Kashmir Valley or violence in the Northeast had it not been for the urgency in the PM's voice. Well, this was surprising; he rarely used to get calls directly from the PM. Usually his secretary would call. It implied something big had happened–or was about to happen.

  Malhotra hoped it was not the prime minister reversing his earlier anti-Naxal policy. That was one of his biggest concerns these days. For Malhotra, Na
xalism was probably the greatest threats to Indian national security. Despite the announcement of multiple Integrated Action Plans (IAPs) by the Centre and state governments, the money allocated for the development of the affected districts had not reached the grassroot level. In cases where it had, subsequent implementation was rendered impossible by the total domination of Naxalites over land. The condition got from bad to worse, for any remedy, even when properly administered, failed to cure the menace of Naxal hegemony on the minds of people.

  Finally, it had happened–the Big Putsch of encircling urban centres and laying siege. A couple of months ago, the Maoists-Naxalites had overrun and taken de facto control of a number of district headquarters in four Indian states. They isolated civilian administration, paralyzed governmental machinery, looted armouries and banks, indulged in executions of public functionaries and were almost on the verge of declaring their states liberated Red Republics when Malhotra had decided that the army could no longer fear bloodying its hands.

  The political executive had taken no drastic steps to counter this situation and had stuck to their wait-and-watch approach to Naxalism, an approach that they had followed to the letter since the past four years. The army too, for various reasons, had not been keen to engage in proactive steps to wrestle control back from the Naxalites. The reasons were many. One, it was already bogged down in Kashmir and the Northeast. Any more theatres of engagement would have led to more casualties; the morale would have sagged further. Two, the terms of engagement in the impenetrable forests made the Red Corridor a prospective Dien Bien Phu for all the sanitizing forces. An armed Naxalite was the same as an ordinary villager-travelling through fields on a bicycle carrying a stick or a concealed gun. Identification was next to impossible. Air attack was not only useless but also increased the chances of collateral damage. The army wanted no Vietnams to its discredit and chose to stay away.

  Thirdly, and most importantly, Malhotra's corps commanders had raised serious concerns, though in private, about how the army jawans could easily have been brainwashed and converted to follow the Naxal cause by the wily propaganda machine of the extreme left. The last thing the generals wanted was to have battalions deep inside hostile territory reading Naxal pamphlets on Marx and Lenin, interacting with 'liberated' tribals, and be indoctrinated by the Naxalites to turn against the Indian state itself. 'Hmm… class-war? This Marx seems like a decent chap. What he said makes sense…Why should we fight our poor brothers and give away our lives for 5000 rupees a month?' was not what they expected to hear from their jawans. If some captured Naxal commanders were to be believed, the sudden spurt in kidnappings of government officers and killings of tribals was meant to be the bait. It displayed the inability of the state police and the Central paramilitary forces to tackle the Naxalites – thereby forcing the Centre to deploy the army in combat zones. This decision would have given the Naxalite command direct access to the lower ranks of the army, in the red terrain, away from their bases, and exposed to a sustained ideological attack through propaganda and psychological warfare. This would have been the ultimate victory for the Naxalites. The hounds of state turned on the state itself.

  However, things had to change one day. It was then that Malhotra, along with the then home secretary (and now the current Cabinet secretary), Ajay P. Mishra, an IAS officer of the 1982 batch, had decided to pick up cudgels to make the political leadership listen. They had convinced the PM to implement an integrated anti-Naxal action-plan prepared by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), and the Special Centre for Internal Security of the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

  The report called for a multi-staged, multi-pronged operation consisting of three stages. Stage One proceeded by notifying severely Naxalite-infested areas in the Red Corridor as 'Disturbed Areas' and brought them under the purview of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) that conferred special powers upon the armed forces to restore law and order. The purpose was to regain physical control of territory by utilizing the army, Cobras (CRPF), Jaguars and Greyhounds with close-air support provided by the Indian air force gunships operating from the Anti-Naxal Joint Operations Command (ANJOC) set up at Raipur. ANJOC worked under the direct supervision of the Special Secretary (Naxalism) at the Ministry of Home Affairs. It aimed to flush the Naxalite-Maoist combine out into the open, strengthen the law and order machinery, run a sanitizing operation, and thereby pass control of the affected districts back into the hands of the civilian administration.

  Stage Two required to isolate covert and overt political support to the Naxalites, negate any foreign aid to their cause, and de-doctrinate (but not de-politicize) the lured away youth.

  With the rule of law thus established, would begin Stage Three. It aimed at consolidating the victories of the army by pacifying the people of the region and promptly initiating schemes for equitable socio-economic development. This was to be achieved by zealously fortifying the Panchayati Raj Institutions with regular meetings of the sarpanches with the chief minister and chief secretary of the respective state, apart from a representative of the Central government. Grievance redressal was to be the focus and the judiciary was to act as an effective appellate authority in the guise of fast-track courts. Steps were to be taken to ensure that the decision-making became bottom-up, participative, accountable and transparent to the people, and red-tape was minimized.

  Presently, Stage One was well under way and the Naxalites-Maoists were about to be routed–their command and control structures smashed, their communication lines cut, their supplies depleted, political and foreign support quashed, and their morale crushed.

  Convincing people to do it had not been easy. The prime minister had called a national-level high-powered meeting. The chief ministers of the affected states, when asked for their opinion on the implementation of the report, had been the biggest obstacles. They had vehemently protested against the use of force to dislodge the Naxalite-Maoist combine from their hold. Elections were coming, they had argued, and to strike out at their own people was far more dangerous than just sitting on files. The states did not like military action to be initiated against the insurgents at such a grand scale. As long as the people of their state voted for them, the Centre could keep barking.

  The chief ministers also knew that allowing the army access to their states in combat operations would not merely turn their home turfs into active war zones and thus cost precious lives but may also cost even more precious votes. They had howled in protest and tried to convince the PM to give the Naxals another chance and to let things be.

  'We cannot send the army against the Naxals, they're not... terrorists (gasp!), are they? They are our own people, forced to turn to violence by want and hunger. It is an internal matter! Let the state police deal with it' was the argument put forth.

  The top bureaucrat had heard them out patiently and retorted, in the unctuous civil way he was known for: 'So why use the army against terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir or the Northeast? Are not they our own too? Where do we draw a line between external aggression and internal disturbance?'

  The chief ministers had looked at each other, confused and shocked. The prime minister, briefed by the wily Ajay Mishra and the resolute Rohit Malhotra, had given the chief ministers a simple choice – agree with the PM in public and allow the army in, or the PM would be forced to act as per Article 356/365 of the Constitution and recommend the imposition of President's Rule in the rebel state, thereby dissolving state legislatures. If even then leaders at the state-level fostered discord, the PM, with a clear mandate in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, would turn to Article 3 of the Constitution and change the boundaries of the states to the disadvantage of the party ruling the state at the time.

  The chief ministers were away from their party high commands, their voters and the briefings of their conniving political secretaries. They had no option but to bow down to such cowboy tactics, simply because they were up against
a unified military and bureaucracy, both supported by the supreme political executive, the PM. The chief ministers had babbled amongst each other. They were unsure of what to do.

  Taking advantage of the vacuum, Mishra had continued, 'Yes, I think you are right. We do not need Central forces in states as the state police are more than capable of handling threats. Thus, we do not need the presence of the Central Paramilitary Forces in the states. We should withdraw regular army and all Central forces from all these locations. Let the states deal with such law and order problems themselves. We can start by pulling out all the Central paramilitary personnel from unwilling states, including those engaged in VIP protection. NSG, CRPF, CISF, BSF. All out.'

  His proposal was met by a ghastly silence. Someone coughed uncomfortably. The CMs were livid. How could it happen? National territorial sovereignty was above all! The ploy had worked. The prime minister, Bipolab Roy, a young dynamic reformer, the first member from a party overtly left of centre to rule India, had agreed and declared with his trademark charisma, 'Gentlemen, we are a union, not a federation. The army moves in.'

  Fifteen days later, the Maoists were on the run.

  By now, the army chief's bulletproof black, shiny ambassador had reached the PM's residence. Like other cars going in and out of the PM house, his car was thoroughly checked. Though he was the chief of the Indian army, the Special Protection Group (SPG) took nothing for granted. Moreover, security had been beefed up after attacks on the high office holders of the country by terrorists disguised as Red-beacon functionaries.

  Malhotra had no problems with the security checks. What he had problems with was what unfolded after that.