There is no evidence so far to justify reports that Naxalites might have been responsible for the recent violence at the Maruti Suzuki (MSIL) factory at Manesar, Haryana. Security agencies have not come across any.
Senior officials in the home ministry say 12 people, including doctors, engineers and trade union leaders, have been arrested in the recent past in Delhi and Haryana for suspected links with the Communist Party of India (Maoist) but nobody has been booked from Manesar or Gurgaon, where MSIL has production units.
“It is true that intelligence agencies had sent reports of Maoist presence in Haryana earlier and the state government was informed about it but the local police in Manesar and Gurgaon have not found any links between the workers and the CPI (Maoist). The police are questioning all those arrested so far to find out if Maoists were responsible for instigating the violence but we do not have any such evidence,” said a senior official.
So far, 97 workers have been arrested, including Yogesh Kumar, organising secretary of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union, by the state police in connection with the violence at the unit that had resulted in the killing of a senior executive and injuries, some severe, to 100 others. The workers have been remanded to judicial custody for 14 days. Police sources say arrest warrants have been issued for the remaining 11 members of the workers’ union.
A senior executive at MSIL, too, acknowledged on condition of anonymity, “We have not received any information that there was any Maoist influence in the incident that took place at Manesar. The acts were, however, pre-meditated, as only supervisors and company executives were injured, which has led investigators to believe members of the management were singled out.”
Senior officials in the home ministry say Maoists are working on an “urban perspective plan” to spread their network beyond jungles and set up bases in urban industrial areas. Intelligence agencies had first found the presence of a sub-zonal committee in Haryana in 2007, and the network was broken in 2009 with the arrest of Pradeep Kumar, a doctor who was described as the commander of the Haryana unit of the Maoists. Soon after, raids were carried out in Yamunanagar, Jind, Kurukshetra and other places in the state, which resulted in the arrest of an engineer, a postgraduate in English and a school teacher.
