Greyhounds (Anti-Naxal Force)

The Greyhounds are a specialised commando force raised by the undivided State of Andhra Pradesh in 1989 under the leadership of K.S. Vyas, then Inspector-General of Police, to counter the People's War Group (PWG) and allied Naxalite formations operating in the forested tracts of Telangana and coastal Andhra. The force was constituted under the State's police powers, drawing on Entry 2 (Police) of the State List in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, since "public order" and "police" are State subjects under Articles 246 and 162. Unlike Central Armed Police Forces raised under Union statutes, the Greyhounds remain an organic wing of the Andhra Pradesh (and, after the 2014 bifurcation, the Telangana) police, headed by an officer of the rank of Additional Director-General or Inspector-General. Their creation marked a doctrinal shift away from conventional, vehicle-bound police deployment toward small-team, foot-mobile jungle warfare modelled loosely on the tactics the insurgents themselves used.

Operationally, the Greyhounds function in compact teams—typically squads of eight to ten commandos—who infiltrate forest terrain on foot and remain self-sufficient in the field for extended patrols lasting several days. Recruitment is voluntary and drawn from serving police personnel who pass a rigorous physical and psychological screening; selected candidates undergo a long induction course at the dedicated Greyhounds training centre at Manchirevula on the outskirts of Hyderabad. Training emphasises jungle-warfare craft: marksmanship, ambush and counter-ambush drills, navigation without roads, survival, and physical endurance under tropical conditions. Intelligence-led operations are the central tenet: the force pairs tactical mobility with a sustained covert intelligence apparatus that identifies the movement of armed Maoist dalams (squads) before launching targeted strikes rather than reactive sweeps. Commandos rotate between field deployment and recuperation to preserve fitness and operational edge.

A distinctive feature of the model is its layered structure of dedicated supporting institutions. The Greyhounds are complemented by the Counter-Intelligence (COBRA-adjacent) cells and, at the State level, by the Octopus organisation for counter-terrorism in Telangana and the equivalent in Andhra Pradesh. Their success rested partly on superior pay, allowances, insurance, and welfare provisions designed to attract and retain volunteers, and on autonomy from routine law-and-order policing. The force also pioneered the principle that anti-Naxal units must not be diverted to bandobast (crowd control) or VIP duty, preserving operational specialisation. Their reputation was forged in numerous encounters through the 1990s and 2000s that significantly degraded the armed leadership of the PWG and, after its 2004 merger, the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Contemporary examples illustrate both the reach and the cost of the model. In an October 2016 operation in the Andhra–Odisha Border (AOB) region near Ramaguda, Greyhounds commandos killed roughly two dozen Maoists in one of the largest single anti-Naxal actions of the decade. Conversely, the August 2008 Balimela reservoir tragedy in Odisha—where a boat carrying Greyhounds personnel was ambushed and dozens were killed—exposed the vulnerability of inter-State riverine movement. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has repeatedly cited the Greyhounds as the template for Central capacity-building, leading to the raising of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) under the Central Reserve Police Force in 2008–09, and to State-level replicas such as Chhattisgarh's District Reserve Guard and the Special Task Forces in Odisha and Jharkhand.

The Greyhounds must be distinguished from adjacent instruments of the counter-insurgency architecture. They are not a Central Armed Police Force like the CRPF or its CoBRA battalions, which are deployed across States under Union command and Section 6 of the relevant Acts. Nor are they an intelligence agency; they are a strike force that consumes intelligence produced by State Special Branches and the Multi-Agency Centre. They differ from the now-defunct Salwa Judum, a State-backed civilian vigilante movement the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in Nandini Sundar v. State of Chhattisgarh (2011), because the Greyhounds are a trained, accountable, uniformed police force operating within the legal framework, not an irregular auxiliary. They are also distinct from the Indian Army's Rashtriya Rifles, which operates under a different constitutional basis for internal security.

Controversy has attended the force on two fronts. Human-rights organisations have questioned the proportion of fatalities in "encounters" versus arrests, raising concerns under Article 21 and the National Human Rights Commission's guidelines on encounter deaths. The 2014 reorganisation following Andhra Pradesh's bifurcation under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act created friction over the division of the shared Greyhounds assets, training infrastructure at Manchirevula, and personnel between the successor States, an issue partly addressed through bilateral arrangements and Schedule provisions. Operationally, the shrinking of the Maoist footprint—officially reduced to a handful of districts by 2023–24 per MHA data—has prompted debate over the force's future role and the risk of capability atrophy as the threat geography contracts toward the Bastar–Bijapur corridor.

For the working practitioner, the Greyhounds remain the reference case for how a sub-national government can build a sustainable, intelligence-led counter-insurgency capability without militarising civil policing. The model offers lessons in selective recruitment, ring-fenced funding, doctrinal specialisation, and the integration of tactical force with covert intelligence—principles the Ministry of Home Affairs has institutionalised through the SAMADHAN doctrine and the LWE-focused security-related expenditure scheme. Examiners and policy analysts cite the force when assessing the federal division of internal-security responsibility, the comparative effectiveness of State versus Central forces, and the conditions under which kinetic operations succeed only when matched by development and surrender-and-rehabilitation policy.