Naxals up ante in the east

Burn down Birandih railway station, blast tracks, threaten more violence.

For the second straight day, parts of east India came to a standstill as Naxals enforced a blockade, burnt down Birandih railway station, 55 km off Purulia in West Bengal, and blasted railway tracks at Bokaro, causing damage assessed at Rs 40 crore. They also warned that protests against special economic zones (SEZs) would continue.

Yesterday, cadres of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) had damaged a communication tower of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd at Balimela in Orissa's Malkangiri district.

Extreme Left groups warned that more was to come. In an interview posted on a Naxal website last month, Ganapathy, general secretary, CPI (Maoist) said for the first time, a single directing centre for the Indian revolution had emerged after the merger of the two major Maoist streams in the Indian Communist movement.

A party congress "" the highest authority in the party "" was held earlier this year after 37 years. The current bout of activity is the first by this unified force of Naxals.

Ganapathy said their new central committee had time-bound programmes and plans. "We hope to actively intervene in these issues and build a broad-based militant political mass movement," he said in the interview.

This was reflected in the two-day action programme of the Naxals to resist the "imposition" of SEZs, which they said had caused "massive displacement of the poor in both urban and rural areas, against draconian laws, state repression, unemployment, corruption, inflation and neglect of social welfare".

"Not less than Rs 20 crore per day must have been lost due to the economic blockade, most of the loss occurring because trucks carrying minerals remained off the road," said Arun Bhudhia, president of the Federation of Jharkhand Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

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Naxals or Maoists?

The application of Chairman Mao's methods of armed resistance in Indian conditions by a group of people who believe in a classless society has motivated them to call themselves Maoists.

However, China officially rejects Indian (and Nepali) Maoists and repudiates their methods. Maoists now prefer to call themselves Naxalites after the famous uprising in 1967 in Naxalbari, West Bengal.

Source: Status Paper on Internal Security Situation, Union Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India