MAOIST REBELS armed with bows and arrows yesterday hijacked a train carrying more than 500 passengers in eastern India’s Jharkhand state.
They commandeered the train as part of a protracted campaign to fight for what they see as the rights of downtrodden tribal people and landless farmers. Four hours after the attack, however, they released the train.
The seizure by some 300 Maoists in remote Latehar district, 160km west of the provincial capital, Ranchi, was a bid to enforce a boycott of today’s second round of voting for parliamentary elections in the state.
“All the [train] passengers have been released and they are safe,” said state official Sarvendu Tathagat. The rebels fled into the surrounding jungles, he said.
The hostage-takers were also protesting the death of five villagers allegedly shot dead by paramilitaries last week during the first round of voting in Jharkhand.
Eighteen people, including 10 security personnel, died in armed attacks launched by Maoists during polling on April 16th. India is holding a staggered general election vote, which ends on May 13th.
Maoist groups launched five other attacks on railway stations and government buildings in the region yesterday as part of attempts to enforce what they see as social and economic justice in a region rich in minerals and forest resources, where the people are among India’s poorest.
The Maoist insurgency has proliferated across more than half of the country’s 29 states, claiming almost 9,000 lives since 2002.
Security officials say the eventual aim of the Maoists 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 cities, but rarely attacking them.
They have dominated in regions populated mostly by illiterate and underprivileged persons, areas that have effectively remained outside the scope of the newly emerging prosperous India.
Unfair land distribution six decades after independence have led to abject poverty, large scale unemployment, ineffective policing and corrupt and inequitable governance, and so has contributed to the Maoists’ successes.
The rebels have filled the power vacuum in their areas of control with Jan Adalats (people’s courts), dispensing kangaroo justice, raising taxes, running village schools and setting educational curriculums.