INDIA:A fierce gun battle continued for the third consecutive day yesterday between police backed by military helicopters and Maoist rebels in India's eastern Orissa state, after their cadres killed 13 policemen at the weekend.
State officials said about 1,000 security forces personnel, including some 200 commandos from the elite Greyhound anti-Maoist force, were pursuing the Maoists who had dispersed in the hilly forests in Ganjam district, 250km (155 miles) west of the state capital Bhubaneswar.
Some 400 Maoist guerrillas, including women fighters, had retreated to the jungle after executing multiple attacks on several police stations and a government armoury in Nayagarh district early on Saturday morning.
In the attack they not only shot dead 13 policemen but also escaped with hundreds of rifles and ammunition boxes to arm their cadres.
"Firing is continuing from both sides," a senior police official said of the fighting yesterday.
Provincial home secretary Tushar Kanti Mishra said at least 20 rebels and three security personnel had been killed so far in the firefight.
Orissa is one of India's poorest states and one of 16 of the country's 29 provinces where Maoist cadres claiming to be fighting for the underprivileged, neglected tribal people and landless farmers, are incrementally gaining ascendancy.
The Maoist insurgency which prime minister Manmohan Singh has referred to as India's "biggest internal security challenge ever" emerged out of a peasant uprising in 1967. Over the past decade this had afflicted more than a quarter of the country's 602 districts.
Officials said close-knit and ideologically committed extreme left-wing groups who have successfully adapted Mao Zedong's guerilla warfare tactics, maintain they are waging an armed struggle to "annihilate class enemies".
The insurgents recruited cadres from among marginalised peoples oppressed by upper caste landlords and in tribal areas where forests, that have been the mainstay of these aboriginal natives for centuries, had been appropriated by the politically influential.
Land distribution systems remain unfair six decades after independence from colonial rule, resulting in abject poverty, large-scale unemployment, ineffective policing and corrupt governance.