India: ten members of the security forces killed in a Maoist rebel attack

BET À DAY

Ten members of the Indian security forces and their driver were killed in east-central India on Wednesday when a roadside bomb exploded as their vehicle passed, the AFP police, accusing Maoist rebels. 

“They were returning from an operation when the explosion took place, aiming at their vehicle,” said Vivekanand, whose identity has only one name, the director general of the police of the state of Chhattisgarh, a stronghold of the Maoists.

They were police reservists returning from a mission to investigate rebel movements in the isolated district of Dantewnda.

They are the worst losses suffered by security forces in India in more than two years.

Originating in a peasant uprising in a village in West Bengal in 1967, Maoist guerrillas have been fighting New Delhi with arms for half a century. It is now folded into a “red corridor” of forests in central and eastern India.

The conflict has intensified since Narendra Modi took office as Prime Minister, a Hindu nationalist.

“My condolences to the bereaved families. This battle is in its final stretch and we will not spare any Naxalite, we will prepare an adequate plan to eradicate Naxalism”, reacted the head of the government of Chhattisgarh, Bhupesh Baghel, using the official name of the Maoist insurgents in India. /p>

No rebel group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.

Naxalite groups claim to be fighting for rural populations and the poor and their strongholds are in areas where much of the population remains mired in poverty, without access to essential services.

This movement is said to be present in ten Indian states.

The government has deployed tens of thousands of men to fight the rebels. He has also injected millions of dollars to develop infrastructure in these tribal areas and claims to have inflicted setbacks on the insurgency.

As of April 2021, twenty-two members of the Indian security forces were killed and 30 injured in a firefight with Maoist rebels in the same state of Chhattisgarh.

A few months later, in November, it was in a remote area in the jungle east of Bombay, the capital of Maharashtra, that 26 rebels fell under the bullets of Indian special forces.