Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Pomp and violence
Maoist rebels blow up bus carrying polling officials, ambush soldiers in forest
Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Vadra are showered with flower petals Saturday as Gandhi arrives in Amethi in India’s Uttar Pradesh state to file his Congress Party nomination in ongoing national elections. Violence struck in central India, where Maoist rebels killed 14 people in attacks aimed at disrupting the voting.
PATNA, India — Indian Maoist rebels killed 14 people in two separate attacks in the central state of Chhattisgarh on Saturday as they continue a campaign of violence aimed at disrupting a five-week national election.
Five election officials and two bus drivers were killed when a land mine exploded under their vehicle in the Bijapur district, where voting is to take place this week, said the police director general, A.N. Upadhyay.
After the explosion, the rebels opened fire on the bus. Five people also were injured in the attack and were being treated in a hospital, Upadhyay said. The rebels fled into the surrounding forest when paramilitary forces began firing back.
In another attack Saturday, rebels killed five paramilitary soldiers and two civilians in an ambush on the soldiers’ vehicle in the remote Darbha Forest in the south of the state, said police Inspector General R.K. Vij. Three soldiers were injured in that attack.
The rebels, who say they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting for more than three decades for a greater share of wealth from the area’s natural resources and more jobs for the poor.
Typically they target government and law enforcement officials in hit-and-run ambushes before disappearing into remote and poorly surveyed jungles within a wide swath of central India. Though they have a presence in 20 of India’s 28 states, they are most active from their strongholds in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal states.
Thousands have died on both sides in the conflict. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called them India’s greatest internal security threat, though none of India’s major political parties have said much about the rebel threat during this year’s election campaign.
The multiphase election runs for five weeks and ends May 12, with results for the 543-seat lower house of Parliament announced May 16. Voting took place Saturday in the west coast resort state of Goa as well as some parts of the northeastern states of Assam, Tripura and Sikkim.
The main Hindu opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has strong momentum on promises of a surge in economic growth, and is threatening to unseat the governing Congress Party after 10 years in power.
Vowing to prevent the rebels from disrupting the vote, the government has deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary soldiers to guard polling booths in insurgency-wracked areas. But the rebels have only stepped up their attacks while also asking citizens to boycott the vote.
Also creating trouble for the Congress Party, a new book by a former aide to India’s prime minister has caused a political stir by suggesting the outgoing leader was never fully in charge of his government.
Instead, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh, by Sanjaya Baru, describes the country’s top technocrat as having to compete with the Congress Party’s leader, Sonia Gandhi, for influence within his own Cabinet.
Singh’s office slammed the book, saying it “smacks of fiction and colored views of a former adviser” gathered during the first five of Singh’s 10 years in office.
“It is an attempt to misuse a privileged position and access to high office to gain credibility and to apparently exploit it for commercial gain,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement Friday.
Baru was Singh’s media adviser from 2004 to 2008, and says his book does not deal with Singh’s second term, which began in 2009.
Baru’s memoir, however, does directly addresses the growing notion that the economist Singh had been unconcerned with corruption in his government.
“Dr. Singh’s general attitude toward corruption in public life, which he adopted through his career in government, seemed to me to be that he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others,” the book says. “In practice, this meant that he turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of his ministers.”
In an interview published Saturday in the Indian Express, Baru said he was “amused” by the government’s objections to his book, insisting “most of the book is positive” and that he wrote it reluctantly after Singh “started coming under attack” in 2012. “I felt he is not being defended enough,” he said.