Communist rebels biggest threat to India, says PM
Friday, December 21, 2007
NEW DELHI: **Communist rebels that roam India’s hinterlands pose the single biggest threat faced by the country, the prime minister said, calling for the creation of specialized forces to combat the insurgents.
India has long contended with scores of militant and insurgent groups, from Muslim extremists blamed for bombings that have killed more than 300 people since 2005 to ethnic separatists fighting for independence in the country’s remote northeast. But none of those groups have managed to spread their influence - and fight - as far and wide as the communists, known as the Naxalites, who are active in 13 of the country’s 28 states and hold sway over grindingly poor forest communities and farming villages largely left out of India’s economic boom.
So far, at least 6,000 people have been killed in the rebellion. “Not a day passes without an incident of left-wing extremism taking place,”** Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told top state officials at meeting on internal security Thursday.
Targeting economy: “They are carefully targeting all aspects of economic activity,” he continued. “They are targeting vital economic infrastructure so as to cripple transport and logistic capabilities and also slow down any development activity.”
While there’s little fear the insurgency could destabilize all of India, **the rebels 40-year fight has intensified in the past year and they are now a major disruptive force across a so-called “red corridor” stretching from central India to the east coast and north to the border with Nepal.
Singh called fears of the “red corridor” exaggerated, but acknowledged the rebels were keeping the government from developing poorer parts of the country - creating a vicious cycle that helps the insurgents, who say they are fighting for the poor and marginalized, attract fresh recruits. “I have said in the past that left-wing extremism is single biggest security challenge to the Indian state,”** Singh said. “It continues to be so.”
A big part of the problem is the rebels often make quick work of ill-equipped, poorly trained and badly led police. One recent example took place over the weekend in Chattisgarh state, in eastern India, where Naxalites staged a jailbreak to free imprisoned compatriots. A total of 300 people, some of them rebels but many ordinary criminals, escaped.
“I hear that there were only three staff in the Dantewada jail where the jailbreak took place,” Singh said. Chattisgarh was also the scene in March of one of the most deadly Naxalite attacks in recent memory when a group of rebels bombarded a police post in the state’s remote jungles with gunfire, hand grenades and gasoline bombs, killing 49 people.
Coordinated response: “We need a coordinated response to this challenge,” he continued. “This requires improved intelligence gathering capabilities, improved policing capabilities, better coordination.” The Naxalites have been fighting to create a communist state since 1967. Their rallying cry of land and jobs has long resonated among the poor, especially central and eastern India’s indigenous peoples, who live on some of the country’s richest mineral deposits and amid its largest timber reserves but rarely benefit from them. ap
