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Maoist leaders believe that childbirth and subsequent childcare will be a hurdle for the movement. They fear that the couples might return to their villages to raise the children. So if any of the cadres get married, vasectomy is compulsory. Kamlu Vetti, recruited by Maoists at the age of 12, had to get a vasectomy a decade later when he got married. For Maoist cadres, this is compulsory, he said. The perception is that childcare will prove a distraction and the movement will suffer. After surrendering last year, he availed the government offer of free reverse vasectomy operation and the...

Ten policemen, including one senior officer, have been killed and dismembered by Maoist rebels in India's Chhattisgarh state, police say. The attack reportedly took place in the densely-forested Gariyaband area on the state's border with Orissa. The bodies of nine policemen were found on Tuesday. Officials say they were shot and then hacked into pieces. Maoist rebels say they are fighting for the rights of indigenous tribal people and the rural poor. They are active in several eastern and central states. In one of the most deadly attacks last year, rebels killed 74 policemen in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district. India's prime...

KOLKATA/BHUBANESWAR/RANCHI/PATNA: Maoists went berserk on Monday, protesting against the visit of US president Barack Obama, by killing six, blowing up a railway station, school and two government buildings, derailing a goods train and torching trucks and mobile phone towers in separate incidents in West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar. Four persons, including a woman, were shot dead by Maoists, in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district, during a 24-hour bandh called by them against US president Barack Obama’s visit. The bandh in Orissa saw two more persons in Nowrangpur district shot dead and a school building destroyed. In Jharkhand, Maoists blew...

Husband, son fell to outlaws earlier In yet another spine-chilling incident of Red terror, the Maoists operating in the Jangalmahal area burnt alive a woman after she tried to organise villagers to revolt against them. Not only this, the panic-stricken villagers were prevented from claiming and cremating the body which kept rotting for four days. A police officer at Jhargram, a police district under the West Midnapore district, told The Pioneer on Monday that....

In eastern India at least 71 people were killed and more than 200 injured when a high speed train derailed and collided with another train. Officials say they suspect sabotage by Maoist rebels caused the derailment. Most passengers were sleeping when 13 carriages of the passenger train derailed and fell on an adjacent track, where they were rammed by a freight train coming from the opposite direction. The Mumbai bound train originated in the eastern city of Kolkata in West Bengal. The crash occurred early Friday near the small town of Sardiha. Several carriages overturned completely. Some were badly crushed....

New Delhi, India (CNN) -- A human rights group has slammed India for its warning to citizens supporting Maoist rebels, who are considered the greatest internal security threat by the nation. India's home ministry said Thursday that nonprofit groups and intellectuals found helping the banned insurgents spread their ideology would be prosecuted under the country's laws. India has outlawed Maoist rebels and considers them terrorists. The rebels aim to overthrow the government and "have no place in India's parliamentary democracy," the federal home ministry said. Indian officials insist that the left-wing insurgents are hampering development in areas under their control,...

It is being called one of the most brazen attacks on civilians by Maoists. India's government blames the rebels for planting explosives below the pavement of a rural road that destroyed a passenger bus in the central part of the country. On board were about 50 people, and authorities say most of them were killed. The bus attack is the latest to be blamed on Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh, a mineral-rich state. Authorities say the bus exploded while traveling in the Dantewada district, mainly home to agricultural tribal people, in the Maoist heartland. Passengers included police and specially recruited officers,...

Early one morning last October police forces surrounded the residents of Gompad, a remote village in the state of Chhattisgarh in eastern India, and attacked. Sixteen people were killed, including an older couple and their 25-year-old daughter, who was stabbed in the head with a knife and had her breasts sliced off. Her 2-year-old son survived, but three of his fingers were chopped off. A neighbor who witnessed the massacre was shot in the leg as she tried to escape. What prompted the rampage? The cops suspected the villagers of sympathizing with Maoist insurgents, believing that some were informants. A...

Indian security chiefs are testing unmanned aerial surveillance drones – made by US-based Honeywell International – for potential use in the battle against Maoist guerrillas, who killed 76 paramilitaries in an ambush last week. The demonstrations, carried out this week in the central state of Chhattisgarh, came amid a heated parliamentary debate – and the eruption of disputes within the ruling Congress party – over how India should respond to the Maoist rebels, who now control territory in remote tribal areas. “This battle can’t be fought half-heartedly,” Arun Jaitley, a senior leader of the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party,...

At least 70 paramilitary police have been killed in an attack by Maoist rebels in India. A police patrol was ambushed by several hundred Maoist rebels in the central state of Chhattisgarh. Dozens of other paramilitary police sent to retrieve the injured were also attacked and an armoured vehicle was destroyed. The casualties were taken to hospital by helicopter. The Maoist rebels are demanding the overthrow of the Indian government and are active in up to 20 states across the country. Violence has escalated in the past two months, in response to a government offensive. Indian Home Affairs Minister P...

A decade and a half after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and more than three decades after the Chinese began to gradually unshackle themselves of Maoist dogma, to progressively embrace the mantras of capitalism, India is experiencing a vast and escalating surge of a violent Maoist rebellion. To the Western mind, the developments in both Russia and China irrevocably demonstrated the failure of the communist ideology, and it is bewildering to see a resurgence of this discredited doctrine in an India that has widely come to be regarded as an engine of growth, a dynamic economy, a rising global...

BHUBANESHWAR, India, April 4 (Reuters) - Ten policemen were killed when their vehicle struck a land mine planted by Maoist rebels in eastern India, officials said on Sunday. The attack in forested Koraput district of mineral-rich Orissa state, about 550 kms (340 miles) southwest of the state capital Bhubaneshwar, took place when security personnel were on a patrol as part of operations against the insurgents, they said. "We are confirming ten deaths, but it may go up" senior police official Sanjeeb Panda Panda told Reuters.

In eastern India, Maoist rebels have attacked a village, killing 10 people and wounding at least 20 others. This is the second major strike by the guerrillas. this week. Police say hundreds of armed Maoist guerrillas surrounded Phulwaria, in Bihar state, late Wednesday night, opened fire and detonated explosives. A number of homes were set on fire. The top police official in Bihar, U.S. Dutt says the rebels laid land mines, to delay the arrival of the police, and disappeared into neighboring jungles by the time the police arrived. "We have recovered ten bodies, so far, of women, children who...

KOLKATA, India, Feb 15 (Reuters) - About 100 Maoist rebels, many riding motorcycles, stormed a police camp in eastern India on Monday and killed at least 15 policemen as they fired indiscriminately and set fire to the site. Police said the ambush was on a camp in the state of West Bengal, 200 km (125 miles) west of the state capital Kolkata, in the same area where a major anti-Maoist offensive was launched last year. "No less than 15 security personnel were killed," senior police official Surajit Kar Purakayastha told Reuters in Kolkata. In June last year, police pushed back...

Few know the potency of the Maoist threat to India as well as Indian Railways, the world’s largest employer. Hardly a week goes by without sections of rail track being blown up, stranding train passengers on arduous journeys crisscrossing India’s interior. Worse, railway officials and police officers are singled out in attacks and executed. Some are beheaded. The railway network has become the favoured target of a Maoist movement that began four decades ago championing the cause of destitute peasants in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal. The Naxalites, as they are called, have now spread to eight of India’s...

NEW DELHI - In the past five years, Maoist rebels have emerged as the most potent threat to India's internal stability and left the authorities groping for a response to their increasingly audacious attacks. With an ambush last weekend that killed 30 police, the leftist insurgents demonstrated their ability to strike with apparent impunity and then melt back into their rural hideouts before anyone can react. Their insurgency, which started as a peasant uprising in 1967, has spread to more than half of India's 29 states and has been identified by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the number one threat...

Maoist rebels killed at least 30 policemen, including a senior officer, in two separate ambushes on Sunday in the eastern state of Chhattisgarh, police said. Both attacks took place in Rajnandangaon district, 56 miles from the state capital Raipur, the deputy inspector general of police in charge of operations against the Left-wing rebels said. In the first attack, the guerrillas shot dead two policemen on patrol in the area and then ambushed a security reinforcement team sent to investigate the incident, Pawan Dev said. "In all, 26 policemen were killed in the attack including superintendent of police VK Choubey," he...

Maoist rebels in India are rapidly expanding their insurgency and could move from remote rural areas to cities.... The rebels are estimated to have 22,000 fighters, and have spread to more than 180 of the country's 630 districts from just 56 in 2001, government and independent data says. "They have a very comprehensive plan to spread their tentacles into other parts of the country, including urban areas," M.L. Kumawat, special secretary (Internal Security) told Reuters... "We now need highly specialised forces to deal with the sophisticated weapons they have. Our police forces will be capable, I cannot say they are...

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Sixteen police are feared dead after they were ambushed by Maoist rebels in Maharashtra on Thursday, police said, the latest in a series of attacks which hit India's recent general election. "Sixteen policemen perhaps have been killed, I have got the information," Pankaj Gupta, a senior state police official, told CNN-IBN news channel. "Trees were felled and put across the road, and it was obviously a trap it seems." Dozens of people have died in recent weeks while Maoist violence marred India's month-long general election. The rebels attacked security forces and polling officials, bombed civic buildings...

RAIPUR, India (Reuters) - Maoist rebels killed 14 policemen in an ambush in Chhattisgarh, officials said on Monday, the latest in a string of rebel violence that has marred part of India's general election. Police said the rebels triggered blasts and shot at a security convoy that was searching for rebels on an intelligence tip but which turned out to be a trap. "The heavily armed rebels first triggered multiple blasts and then opened indiscriminate fire from hilltops," Girdhari Nayak, a senior police officer, told Reuters. Maoist rebel violence marred the initial phase of a staggered vote. They killed five...