Inmates at the relief camp on the first floor of Kantapahari Vivekananda Vidyapeeth watch an armed jawan patrolling below. The security forces reached Kantapahari on Monday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Kantapahari, June 29: Praveen Kumar looked at his watch, took off his bullet-proof jacket and set aside his AK 47.

“That is Kantapahari,” the DIG said in the shade of a date palm tree, pointing to the north in the direction of a white single-storey house and a radio tower.

The Lalgarh operation today passed a milestone, almost bloodlessly, with security forces reaching Kantapahari from two sides. The link-up from Lalgarh town and Ramgarh completes a periphery — the so-called “circle of domination” — for the security forces. (See map)

The official toll so far is one: Gobindo Daw, reportedly a Trinamul Congress worker, was killed in crossfire Saturday before last. The Maoists, too, have retreated — also bloodlessly, so far — in their rebellion in Lalgarh since the state launched its offensive 12 days ago.

“Chalo, yeh to ho gaya. Par jang abhi baaki hain (at least this much is reached but there is a lot of fight left),” Kumar said.

Kumar, the deputy inspector-general (Midnapore range), led the forces today from Lalgarh police station to Kantapahari, the village suspected to be a Maoist den, where his team linked up with forces coming from Ramgarh led by Siddhinath Gupta, the deputy inspector-general (CID).

“Actually, the battle has just begun,” Kumar said.

The challenge was presaged by Kumar en route to Kantapahari. “There used to be five police camps in the Lalgarh police station area before November last year. Now we will need at least 15 in five police station areas,” he told this correspondent.

Kumar and Gupta met in front of the Vivekananda Vidyapeeth. Villagers gawked at them, faces creased like question marks. Kumar and Gupta were leading forces that were supposed to trap the Maoists in a “pincer” attack.

There was no such attack. Because the Maoists did not show up. They were in the blades of grass and the stems of date palm trees today. Yesterday, they were on the road and fields over here. They were here the day before, too.

Police accompanying Kumar expected Kantapahari to be vacant like many of the villages they had been through. That was not what it was like.

“We have always been here,” said Bimal, who did not want to give his last name. He lives in a village just outside Kantapahari. “We were waiting for the police. We knew they were coming.”

And the Maoists? “Dada, what do I know? Yesterday they said ‘be firm, we will protect you’ and today the police are here,” he said. Protect him from what. “The ‘sontrash bahini’ (repressive force), the police.”

The police are setting up camp in the Vivekananda Vidyapeeth. From its first-floor balcony, women, many of them with children in their arms, stare down at the ground where mine protection vehicles, buses and utility vehicles are piling up.

This is a relief camp run by the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities whose spokesperson Chhatradhar Mahato, the police say, must be arrested on sight. “I have not seen so many police for so long,” says one of the women. “What will happen to us!”

“This is not really a confrontation,” the deputy inspector-general (range), B.R. Kamath, explains. “What we are doing is a show of force and they (the Maoists) realise that they cannot stand up to us and they are just retreating; they hardly put up any opposition.”

The main job of the security force that set out from Lalgarh this morning towards Kantapahari was road-clearing and checking the road for mines. But there was none.

The CRPF’s 50th battalion deployed two companies to man the flanks — Alpha and Foxtrot — anticipating attacks or ambushes by Maoist armed squads from the forests. The road from Lalgarh goes through flat land.

But on the right flank an extension of the Jhitka forest offered cover from where Maoist armed squads could have attacked — as they did the day before yesterday.

There was none today. Not a single shot rang out as the state security forces marched through the areas that were suspected to be in the Maoist core zone in Lalgarh. The guerrilla in retreat is not merely passive.

He/she is quiet as the earth.