MAOIST GUERILLAS yesterday killed at least 35 people, mostly policemen by detonating a mine under their bus in central India’s province of Chattisgarh, the second deadly attack on the security forces in the same region in as many months.
The attack took place in the Dantewada district, a Maoist stronghold, where rebels ambushed and brutally slaughtered 75 paramilitary personnel last month in the worst ever massacre of security forces by the left-wing extremists.
The bus was believed to be carrying about 50 people and local television reports have put the death toll as high as 40. Television footage showed mangled bodies laid out on the road next to the wreckage of the bus, the front portion of which had almost entirely been blown away.
But nobody was asking why the security force personnel were travelling on a civilian bus in the rebel-infested area, nor how the guerrillas managed to find out about it in time to mount an attack.
“The killing and targeting of innocent civilians travelling on a bus is to be strongly condemned by all right-thinking people,” the senior-most civil servant in India’s federal interior ministry, GK Pillai, said in New Delhi.
Earlier in the day the bodies of six villagers were found with their throats slit near where the bus was blown up in an apparent revenge attack by Maoists on suspected police informers.
In recent weeks the rebels have stepped up attacks in response to a government offensive against them launched late last year in the forests of the “Red Corridor” that stretches across north and eastern India. Home minister P Chidambaram has offered to hold talks with the rebels provided they renounce violence. But senior Maoist leaders said they would open negotiations only if the government ended Operation Green Hunt which involved the deployment of some 56,000 paramilitary personnel in six states in addition to local police to neutralise them.
The Maoists, who claim to be fighting to secure economic, social and environmental justice and legal rights for the poor and dispossessed tribal people neglected for decades by successive administrations, have a palpable presence in some 250 of India’s 620 administrative districts.