India’s decades-long Maoist insurgency has claimed more lives in what Prime Minister Narendra Modi denounced as a “cowardly attack.”
At least 24 police officers were killed and seven others injured Monday when hundreds of suspected Maoist rebels attacked a convoy in central India, officials told CNN.
Since 2010, Maoist rebels have killed about 2,100 civilians and 800 security force personnel as part of their ongoing conflict with the Indian government, according to official figures.
Indian Maoist — or Naxalite — groups have been active in the country since the 1960s, but the modern insurgency did not begin until the early 2000s with the emergence of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.
‘Cowardly’ attack
According to police superintendent Jitendra Shukla, around 70 members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were patrolling a road construction project in Chhattisgarh state’s Sukma district when they were ambushed.
The security forces were hit by heavy gunfire from about 500 Maoist rebels hidden in the dense forests they were passing through, CRPF spokesman Siroj Kujur told CNN.
Kujur said 23 officers died at the scene, and one died later in the hospital. Seven officers were also injured in the attack.
Prime Minister Modi said the attack was “cowardly and deplorable.”
“We are monitoring the situation closely,” he said on Twitter. “The sacrifice of the martyrs will not go in vain. Condolences to their families.”
This is the second attack on CRPF troops in Chhattisgarh in less than two months. In March, 12 officers died in a suspected Maoist attack on another convoy in the same district.
The death toll in Monday’s incident equaled that of a 2013 attack on a government motorcade that killed 24 and injured more than 30.
Long-running insurgency
According to the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, Maoist groups are currently active in 156 districts of 13 states across India.
Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once described Maoist rebels — who are well organized and trained — as the country’s “gravest internal security threat.”
According to the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, the CPI (Maoist) “aims to overthrow the existing democratic state structure with violence as their primary weapon.” The group is listed as a banned terrorist organization.
The government has responded to the Maoist insurgency with a concerted security crackdown in areas in which the groups are active.
This approach has been criticized by some observers. According to a 2012 Human Rights Watch report, it has “resulted in serious human rights violations” as security forces “have arbitrarily arrested, detained, and tortured villagers, who are mostly from disaffected tribal communities.”
“Routine police brutality, corruption in public service that fails to deliver on the government’s development initiatives, and lack of access to resources leads to support for the Maoists who claim to defend the rights of the people,” the report said, while also highlighting repeated attacks by Maoists on civil society activists operating in impoverished areas.