With reference to the Anti-Maoist operation that took place in April 2024, which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. It took place in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra.
2. The operation w

Question

With reference to the Anti-Maoist operation that took place in April 2024, which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. It took place in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra.
2. The operation was launched by BSF and District Reserve Guards.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Only 2. The operation the paper is pointing to took place on 16 April 2024 in the Hapatola forest of the Chhotebethiya area, in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh — part of the Bastar division — and not in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. That makes statement 1 false. Statement 2 is accurate: it was a joint action by the Border Security Force and the District Reserve Guard, the two forces that operate together across northern Bastar, and 29 Maoists were killed, with 22 weapons recovered and three security personnel injured. It was the single largest anti-Maoist action in Chhattisgarh in years and was widely reported during the 2024 general election period. Since the question is written as a late-2024 current-affairs item and the exam was held on 22 December 2024, read 'April 2024' strictly — this is a dated event, and unlike a 'who holds the post' question its facts do not move with time. The reason statement 1 feels plausible is that Gadchiroli is genuinely a Left-Wing Extremism district and was the site of a famous earlier operation, in April 2018, in which about 40 Naxalites were killed across the 22-23 April twin encounters (an interim count of 37 was reported first). The examiner has borrowed the district from that older episode and attached it to the 2024 one. Two states, two operations, six years apart.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Rejects statement 2 as well, but statement 2 is the accurate half of the pair. The 16 April 2024 operation was conducted jointly by the Border Security Force and the District Reserve Guard, and the naming of those two forces is precisely what the examiner expected candidates to recognise.  (c) Exactly inverts the truth. Statement 1 puts the operation in the wrong state altogether — Gadchiroli is in Maharashtra, while the April 2024 action was in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh, in the Bastar division. Getting the state wrong is the single error the question is built around.  (d) The most tempting choice, because statement 2 is right and a candidate who verifies it may accept the whole pair. But a correct second statement never rescues a false first one. Statement 1 names Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, and the operation was in Kanker, Chhattisgarh.

Concept: Left-Wing Extremism in India is fought by a layered force structure, and the two names in statement 2 sit on different layers of it. The District Reserve Guard is a district-level unit of the Chhattisgarh Police, raised locally so that its personnel know the forest, the dialects and the villages; it has become the spearhead of operations across the Bastar division. The Border Security Force is a Central Armed Police Force under the Ministry of Home Affairs, deployed away from the borders into Kanker and other LWE districts in aid of the State Government, alongside the CRPF and its specialised jungle-warfare arm, CoBRA. That division of labour follows the Constitution: public order and police are State subjects, so central forces work in support of a State's own police rather than in place of it, and a joint BSF-plus-DRG column is exactly what that arrangement produces on the ground. Maharashtra's Gadchiroli police run their own equivalent elite unit, the C-60 commandos.

State PCS 2024 Q80 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q80 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer