Need better strategies to counter Naxal threat: PM

Admitting that the government had met with less than the desired levels of success in countering Left Wing Extremism over the last five years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today told Directors General of Police and Inspectors General of Police that they needed to work harder on this as it continued to be a matter of concern.

The PM said it was a problem of managing a society where a section of the tribal poor continue to support this form of extremism and the movement has a certain ‘elan’ among some sections of urban civil society. All this added to the complexity of the problem and needed to be kept in mind to devise better strategies to deal with the problem.

The PM confessed that he was less than comfortable with the situation in the North East, especially Manipur and Assam. But better security management, especially as in terms of numbers, the problem affected very few people, could help overcome it.

While he noted that the conditions in Jammu and Kashmir improving, he said infiltration across the Line of Control and also via other routes such as Nepal, Bangladesh and the sea had been going up.