New Delhi – Communist rebels besieged a police outpost in eastern India on Thursday, killing 54 people and wounding nearly a dozen more before fleeing into the surrounding jungle under cover of darkness.
The early-morning raid was one of the bloodiest attacks in years by the so-called Naxalites, Maoist insurgents who have waged an armed campaign against the Indian government for the past four decades.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the group the nation’s No. 1 threat to public security.
Police said about 2 a.m. Thursday, up to 500 rebels descended on the remote outpost in the district of Bijapur, near the southern tip of Chhattisgarh, which has borne the brunt of Maoist violence. The guerrillas opened heavy fire and hurled grenades and homemade gasoline bombs at the station, which was manned by a joint force of police and members of a state-sanctioned anti-Maoist militia.
The rebels seized a cache of 33 weapons, then vanished into the thick forest.
HePrabir Das, who is in charge of Chhattisgarh’s anti- Naxalite operations, said 38 militiamen and 16 police officers were killed out of a total force of about 75 people at the station. Going in to rescue the injured, recover the dead and hunt the attackers was complicated by the typical guerrilla tactic of strewing the vicinity with landmines.
It was the single-deadliest eruption of Communist extremism in India since July, when insurgents stormed a government-run relief camp in Chhattisgarh, killing at least 32 people.
The New Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights estimates that 749 people, including 285 civilians, were slain last year in Naxalite violence.
The Naxalite movement was launched in 1967 in West Bengal. Named after the district of Naxalbari, where the uprising began, the insurgents claim inspiration from Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s teachings of rebellion in the countryside.
The rebels have flourished in impoverished areas where the Indian government is often absent. The worsening violence has displaced about 50,000 villagers, who have fled their homes to live in squalid relief camps.
