A milk can, suspected to be stuffed with explosives, left behind by the guerrillas on the police route after the strike at Shilda. Below the can is a Maoist poster. (Samir Mondal)

Calcutta, Feb. 15: The Eastern Frontier Rifles — EFR— is a wing of the Bengal police raised to control riots, insurgency and law-and-order trouble.

But never in its existence since the British period has the force bled as much as it did this evening.

About 450 personnel of the force with a strength of 2,700 are now deployed in Maoist-hit West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia.

But senior police officers who would not go on record said though an emergency force, the EFR lacked the battle-readiness of central outfits such as the CRPF. To the Maoists, they are soft targets.

“The level of training and exposure for BSF and CRPF personnel is different. They are engaged in combat with Maoists and insurgents across India. They are always battle-ready. The EFR’s experience is limited, they are soft targets,” a senior officer said.

There have been at least two large-scale Maoist strikes on EFR personnel in West Midnapore in the past few years. In October 2004, six policemen were blown off in the Bankishole forest of Lalgarh. Four cops were killed in a bazaar in Jamboni last November.

After the last strike, state armed police inspector-general Anil Kumar, who heads the force, had accused his own men of not following the “basic rules of a combat zone”.

“They were too relaxed. Had they been alert, they could have… retaliated,” he had said, unwittingly raising a question about his own role.

In private, a cop had hit back, saying: “Motivation is very low here…. (To keep the motivation high) is the job of our superiors. They should visit camps regularly and brief us. But they hardly do. They sit in their air-conditioned rooms and pass instructions.”

The EFR is headquartered at Salua near Kharagpur, also in West Midnapore. To enter the force, candidates have to clear an entrance test and undergo a year’s training.

The men in grey shirts and khaki pants were a familiar site in Calcutta when riots were feared after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984.