India's Maoists kill 55 in police post attack

In an attack that sent a shudder of fear through India's security establishment, Maosit rebels yesterday stormed a police post and killed at least 55 security personnel.

It was more than just another piece of political violence. It was a statement by India's Maoists that they have arrived as a political force to be reckoned with.

More than 300 guerrillas attacked a police camp in the dense jungle of Chhattisgarh state. Armed with rifles, grenades and petrol bombs, they set the camp alight. They killed at least 55 of the 79 security personnel guarding the post, and injured several more. All the guerrillas escaped alive.

The Naxalites, India's Maoists, have been largely ignored by the West. But no one underestimates them in India. Last year the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, described them in a speech as "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country".

That would make them a bigger challenge than the Islamic militants operating in Kashmir. More than 6,000 people have been killed in the Naxalites' campaign of violence. At least 749 people were killed last year alone, 285 of them civilians, according to the Asian Centre for Human Rights.

The Naxalites are part of a side of India that rarely makes headlines outside the country. While the West's attention is on emerging India, in the east of the country there is a vast tract of land that stretches all the way from the Nepalese border to the southern tip much of which is controlled by the Maoists - the so-called "Red Corridor".

It is the cities of the south and west that are dominating India's economic emergence. But in the dirt poor jungle states of the east, people are seeing no improvement in their daily lives. These are the heartlands of the Naxalites, who are committed to Mao's vision of achieving a communist revolution through violence.

It's not just out of the way places like Chhattisgarh. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, the Naxalites aren't that far from the IT city of Hyderabad.

And so far the Indian authorities have come up with no answer to them. Reluctant to send in the Indian military in force and risk exacerbating the situation, as they did in Kashmir, they have experimented with training local villagers as a militia force called Salva Judum. It has been a disaster. The poorly trained and equipped Salva Judum have been cut down by the far more disciplined Maoists. At leats 39 of the dead yesterday were members of Salva Judum.

Once a series of disparate local organisations with a shared ideology, in recent years the Naxalite groups have become increasingly coordinated. When Nepal unexpectedly negotiated a peace deal with its Maoist rebels last year, it was the Indians who were the secret brokers who engineered it behind the scenes Ð because they feared that otherwise the Nepalese Maoists might end up in alliance with the Naxalites.

Last year the Naxalites showed their power by seizing a passenger train for 12 hours. Then they eventually let the passengers go unharmed. This time they have gone further. Still the Indian government is hesitating to send the army in. But it is running out of options.