Sanjukta Parashar takes charge as the first woman to lead CRPF's CoBRA battalions

Sanjukta Parashar, a 2006-batch Indian Police Service officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, has taken charge as Inspector General of the Central Reserve Police Force's Commando Battalion for Resolute Action. She is the first woman to head the 10-battalion jungle warfare force. She succeeds Danesh Rana, a 1996-batch officer of the AGMUT cadre. CRPF headquarters issued the order last week.

Parashar was heading the Criminal Investigation Department of Assam Police before the move. She earlier served as a deputy inspector general in the National Investigation Agency. Colleagues in Assam still use the label Iron Lady of Assam, a name that attached to her after the 2013-14 campaign against the National Democratic Front of Bodoland when she was superintendent of police in Sonitpur.

What CoBRA is for

The CRPF raised CoBRA in 2008 and 2009 to fight Left-wing extremism in forest belts. The battalions train for long patrols, ambush and counter-ambush, improvised explosive devices, and intelligence-led strikes. The same skill set has been used against insurgent groups in the Northeast. Two CoBRA units were recently sent to Manipur as armed violence there continued. The force has also been holding ground in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in areas taken back from Maoist groups. Officials say those operations helped bring Left-wing extremism close to an end by March 2026.

An inspector general at CoBRA does not walk point on a night patrol. The job is to set tasking for ten battalions, keep the training pipeline full, and decide which companies move when a state government or the home ministry asks for them. That is now Parashar's desk. The Manipur deployment sits on it from the first day.

The file she brings

Parashar studied political science at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, then international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She took an all-India rank of 85 in the 2006 civil services examination and chose the police service. Her first posting in 2008 was as assistant commandant at Makum in Assam. She later served in Udalguri during clashes between Bodo groups and migrants from Bangladesh.

As Sonitpur SP she led a drive against NDFB that official accounts credit with 16 militants killed and 64 arrested. A photograph of her on an operation with an AK-47 circulated widely and drew death threats from Bodo militants. The NIA posting added a different kind of work: case files on terror and extremist networks rather than district operations. The CID job in Assam put her back on state crime and organised groups.

The CRPF has, in the same round of orders, named V.K. Birdi, a 2003-batch AGMUT officer, as inspector general of the force's VIP security wing. Officials describe Parashar's CoBRA posting as part of a wider move to put women officers into combat-facing commands, not only into staff and welfare posts.

What the first months will measure

CoBRA's original enemy in central India is much weaker than it was a decade ago. The live pressure is now in the Northeast, where ethnic militias, ceasefire groups and village defence outfits sit on the same hills. Two battalions in Manipur will test whether a force built for Maoist forests can hold roads and hamlets in a Naga-Kuki-Meitei triangle without being pulled into the politics of any one side.

Parashar knows that terrain from Assam, not from Bastar. That is the practical change in the command. The rest is a first: a woman IG on a force that was raised as an all-male commando stream. The order does not rewrite the doctrine. It changes who signs it.