INDIA:At least 50 policemen, including local militia members, were killed when Maoist guerrillas attacked a jungle security camp in central India's Chattisgarh state early yesterday morning in one of their fiercest attacks so far.
Officials said some 300 Maoists, including women fighters, surrounded the Rani Bodali camp 310 miles south of the provincial capital Raipur, attacking it with hand grenades and petrol bombs before setting it on fire.
The attack, in which 12 policemen were also injured, lasted some four hours, until dawn.
Before fleeing with weapons stolen from the police post and the bodies of those of their comrades killed in the ensuing firefight, the attackers scattered land mines around the area, making it difficult for security forces to give chase, a senior state official said.
The Maoists, who launched their "people's war" 30 years ago, claim to be fighting for the rights of landless farmers and neglected tribes and are a formidable force in 14 of India's 28 states.
They have stepped up attacks in these provinces over the past year, killing dozens of civilians and policemen and sparking concern over their growing power. They have even put multinational companies anxious to invest in India on notice.
Last year the Maoists stunned the country by seizing Jehanabad, a large town with a population of some 200,000 in eastern Bihar state, for several hours and freeing over 400 prisoners, including many comrades, from a jail before making their escape.
Prime minister Manmohan Singh has identified the Maoists as the single biggest threat to the nation's internal security.
He conceded that his administration's writ ran only partially over vast portions of 160 - or over a quarter - of the country's 602 districts, now effectively controlled by armed Maoist groups.
Mr Singh said the Maoists drew strength from "deprived and alienated sections of the population", trying to establish "liberation zones" in which they claimed to be dispensing basic state functions like justice, education and revenue collection.
Organised and ideologically committed, the Maoists have successfully adopted Mao Zedong's guerilla warfare tactics and claim to be waging an armed struggle to "annihilate class enemies" in order to economically, socially and politically empower millions of India's tribals, low caste Dalits, peasants, landless labourers and the dispossessed.
The insurgents recruit fighters from among these marginalised peoples - oppressed by upper caste landlords and in tribal areas where forests, which have been the mainstay of these aboriginal natives for centuries, have been appropriated by the influential.
Security officials admit that the Maoists eventual aim is to establish a "people's government" in their areas of control by progressively dominating the countryside through coercion and indoctrination, but not by holding territory and by encircling, but rarely, attacking cities.