In India, Maoist Guerrillas Widen 'People's War'

In India, Maoist Guerrillas Widen 'People's War' - New York Times: "Mr. Markam's ragtag forces, who hew to Mao's script for a peasant revolution, fought a seemingly lost cause for so long, they were barely taken seriously beyond India's desperately wanting forest belt. But not anymore.

Today the fighting that Mr. Markam has quietly nurtured for 25 years looks increasingly like a civil war, one claiming more and more lives and slowing the industrial growth of a country hungry for the coal, iron and other riches buried in these isolated realms bypassed by India's economic boom.

While the far more powerful Maoist insurgency in neighboring Nepal has received greater attention, the conflict in India, though largely separate, has gained momentum, too. In the last year, it has cost nearly a thousand lives.

Today the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which exists solely as an underground armed movement with no political representation, is a rigidly hierarchical outfit with toeholds in 13 of 28 Indian states. It stretches from the tip of India through this east-central state to the northern border with Nepal, where the Maoists have set off full-scale civil war.

Estimates by Indian intelligence officials and Maoist leaders suggest that the rebel ranks in India have swelled to 20,000, though the number is impossible to verify. One senior Indian intelligence official estimated that Maoists exert varying degrees of influence over a quarter of India's 600 districts.

The top government official in one of Chhattisgarh's rural Maoist strongholds, Dantewada, acknowledged that the rebels had made some 60 percent of his 6,400-square-mile district a no man's land for civil servants. Not that there are many civil servants. His district's police department has a vacancy rate hovering around 35 percent; in health care, it is 20 percent.

The Maoists, meanwhile, survive niftily by extorting taxes from anyone doing business in the forest, from bamboo merchants to road construction companies. Last June, an apparently synchronized set of nine attacks in Bihar State left 21 people dead as Maoists robbed two banks and looted arms from a police station.

In November, also in Bihar, hundreds of Maoist troops orchestrated a jailbreak, freeing more than 300 prisoners and executing nine members of a private militia raised by upper-caste landlords. In February, here in Chhattisgarh, rebels attacked a warehouse of a state-owned mining company, killing nine security officials and making off with 19 tons of explosives.

Later in February they set off a land mine under a convoy of trucks on a remote country road, instantly killing seven and then, according to wire reports, butchering several others. All told, 28 civilians were killed. So far this year, the conflict has killed nearly two Indians a day.

The Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights, in a report in March, found children in the ranks of the Salwa Judum. The center also accuses the Maoists of recruiting child soldiers. It calls the conflict "the most serious challenge to human rights advocacy in India."