- March 17, 2007
INDIAN security chiefs were meeting in crisis sessions last night after hundreds of Maoist guerillas killed more than 50 officers and militia men in an attack on a police station in the central state of Chhattisgarh.
In the worst single attack of their insurgency, the Maoists shone spotlights on their victims, who were then shot and killed one by one.
The tactics shocked strategists in New Delhi, and there were suggestions yesterday that the 1.2 million-strong Indian army could for the first time be deployed to fight the Maoists.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year described the Maoists -- known as Naxalites after the village in West Bengal where they launched their insurgency in the 1960s, and who now operate in 15 of India's 29 states -- as "the single biggest internal security challenge faced by our country" since independence.
Mineral-rich Chhattisgarh is where they are strongest, but they operate in a "red corridor" that stretches from the border with the Himalayan nation of Nepal, where Maoists will soon form part of the Government, to the state of Andrah Pradesh.
The increasingly well-armed Maoist Naxalites are estimated to have at least 10,000 guerillas -- men and women -- under arms, supported by many more tens of thousands of auxiliaries.
According to reports, the Maoists have established a research and development wing that is tapping into a support base believed to include scientists, among them a married couple who until recently worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai.
Security agents are reported to have recently unearthed a research and development unit of Naxalites working near Bhopal. And they had earlier discovered similar groups working elsewhere to support the Maoists.
The attack on the remote jungle police post in the Chhattisgarh village of Rani Bod-li, 500km from Raipur, the state capital, has shaken the authorities.
Government officials say between 400 and 600 guerillas surrounded the post at 2am and lit it with high-powered spotlights running on portable generators.
Policemen and local tribal militiamen were picked off one by one, as grenades and petrol bombs were thrown. The attack is reported to have lasted three hours. The Naxalites then entered the compound and used machetes to massacre those still showing signs of life, and to lay landmines that would detonate when help arrived.
The executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, Ajai Sahni, was quoted last night as telling a news agency the Maoists had spent much of the past year amassing arms.
"This period has been a period of planning and consolidation and you will now see the consequences," he said, adding that mass support for the insurgents continued to grow.
He forecast an escalation of violence in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, police in West Bengal yesterday shot more than 15 peasants protesting for land rights in an area earmarked to become a special economic zone.
The peasants, mainly farmers, had for months been resisting attempts to expropriate their land for the SEZ.
Police sent by West Bengal's communist Government moved in earlier this week to remove the protesters, but fired indiscriminately into the crowd of men, women and children.
The shootings have embarrassed the ruling United Progress Alliance led by Sonia Gandhi's Congress party, because the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is one of the partners in the coalition.
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