FEDERAL PARAMILITARY units deployed yesterday to a remote region in eastern India’s Bengal state to lift the siege by Maoist insurgents.
The insurgents had killed at least five people, captured more than a dozen villages and burned police stations and government offices.
But officials said police were unable to reach the insurgent-held Lalgarh region, 155km (96 miles) southwest of the state capital Calcutta as locals, mostly from impoverished indigenous tribes, backed the Maoists by forming a “human wall” and blocking roads leading to the area by cutting down trees.
The poverty-stricken villagers accuse Bengal’s Marxist government, in power for 32 years, of corruption. They look upon the Maoists, waging a “people’s war”, as their saviours.
This is the first time Maoist cadres have launched armed operations of this magnitude in Marxist-ruled Bengal, in what security analysts term the “Red versus Red” phenomenon.
“We can’t go for a crackdown right away as the Maoists will use tribal women and children as human shields. We have to minimise casualties,” Bengal’s visibly shaken chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said.
“The situation is grim at Lalgarh,” senior state police officer Raj Kanojia said, adding that paramilitary forces were camped some 30km (18.6 miles) from the Maoist-controlled Lalgarh area waiting to advance.
Maoist cadres have cut deep into the heart of central, eastern, western and even southern India. dominating regions populated by illiterate and underprivileged people – areas like Lalgarh that have effectively remained outside the scope of India’s newly emerging prosperity. Some 62 years after independence from colonial rule, land distribution systems remain unfair, resulting in abject poverty, high unemployment and corrupt governance.
More than 70 per cent of India’s population of more than 1.2 billion live on less than $2 a day and for them social, economic and environmental justice remains a dream.
India is home to one-third of the world’s poor and a recent survey backed by Unicef revealed that almost 46 per cent of Indian children under the age of three are undernourished.
Maoists have stepped into these depressed regions with people’s courts, raising taxes, running village schools and setting educational curriculums.
The Maoists’ influence has expanded from about 77 districts in 2004 to 160 to 180 of India’s 603 administrative districts in 13 of India’s 28 states.
These include southern Andhra Pradesh and contiguous Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala provinces, and the eastern states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal, Orissa, Uttaranchal and Uttar Pradesh.
Maoist cadres are also active in central Madhya Pradesh, neighbouring Chhattisgarh – the state worst affected by insurgent violence – and western Maharashtra states.
According to the Asian Centre for Human Rights in New Delhi, 1,965 civilians died in Maoist violence between 2004 and 2008, mainly in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, compared with 1,195 killed in the northern wartorn Kashmir region wracked by insurgency since 1989.
Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh has identified the Maoists’ “protracted people’s war” as India’s “biggest internal security challenge ever”, and admitted that his administration’s writ was absent in about a quarter of the country, where the insurgents, known locally as Naxalites, hold sway.
The Naxalites are named after the remote Naxalbari region in eastern India near the Himalayan town of Darjeeling famous for its tea, where the movement erupted violently in the late 1960s.
Mr Singh said the Maoists draw their strength from “deprived and alienated sections of the population” and are trying to establish “liberation zones” where they claim to be dispensing “basic state functions”.
The Maoists say they are waging an armed struggle to annihilate “class enemies” and to economically, socially and politically empower tribal people, low-caste Dalits, peasants, landless labourers and the dispossessed.
In Maoist-affected districts, many state institutions have ceased to exist or have a token presence. The Maoists’ eventual aim is to establish a “people’s government” in their areas of control.