Bengal cops seen in a district, as quickly as a Maoist hotbed.
Kolkata:
Almost a decade after Maoist presence shrunk from the tribal-dominated Jangalmahal district of West Bengal after three years of upheaval, police are probing attainable movement of the left wing extremists (LWE) and tales of them making a comeback inside the area, as quickly as a hotbed.
Director Regular of West Bengal Police Virendra held a high-level meeting with quite a few completely different excessive cops on Saturday at Jhargram, 150 km from Kolkata. “Now now we have talked about the LWE state of affairs on the meeting,” he suggested reporters.
The officers later visited the Dhangikusum area in Belpahari inside the Jhargram district to probe a attainable degree of entry of the Maoists into Bengal from neighbouring Jharkhand.
On Thursday, four youth from West Midnapore district, who had gone to a waterfall on the same spot, which is one factor of a vacationer draw, reported to police that seven armed Maoists had seized their cellphones.
On Friday, Maoist posters had been found at Sinduria village moreover inside the Belpahari police station area ordering a contractor to stop developing an space road. “Sourav Roy, stop road constructing,” the posters written in pink ink talked about. Beneath that was scrawled the phrases CPI Maoist.
The police is probing the ‘thekadar‘ posters and has dismissed the report about Maoists seizing telephones from the vacationers. The Jhargram Superintendent of Police talked about one in all many four vacationers had misplaced a mobile; nonetheless, possibly because of family stress over the shortage of the cellphone, claimed Maoists had taken it away.
Nevertheless these incidents in quick succession are merely two of four suspected Maoist related incidents in Jhargram district inside the last four weeks or so.
On 27 August, a house at Ponchapani village inside the Belpahari police station was fired upon by unknown people. The occupant of the house, a gasoline cylinder provider, suggested police they might have been Maoists who had despatched him an extortion observe for Rs 2 lakh in July.
Two completely different contractors or shop-owners inside the village had obtained comparable notes. Sources say police are probing the Madan Mahato squad of CPI Maoists which is suspected to be tenting in forests on the Jharkhand Bengal border.
On August 15, about 20 Maoist posters had been found at Bhulabheda market in Belpahari that saaid ‘Independence Day should be observed as a black day’. A woman Maoist chief reportedly visited the village the day sooner than and suggested locals to take care of their telephones switched off all through her go to.
These tales are moreover being probed and the possibility that some unscrupulous components are using the CPI Maoist poster menace for extortion. Nevertheless with the Director Regular of Police visiting the district, clearly antennas are up regarding the attainable resurgence of pink terror.
Maoists had surfaced in West Midnapore district of which Jhargram was a element in the middle of 2008. In November that yr, then Chief Minister and CPM chief Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s convoy was hit by a landmine planted by Maoists at Salboni.
As a minimum three districts – West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia which is a tribal belt loosely known as Jangalmahal – had been hit by pink terror. The Lalgarh subdivision now in Jhargram district that was not too way back carved out of West Midnapore, turned a no man’s land taken over by the LWE who killed dozens of people. It took an infinite CRPF presence to reassert administration in about two years.
The Maoist terror was one among many parts that effected a change in authorities in Bengal in May 2011 with Mamata Banerjee displacing CPM chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. The Maoist movement efficiently ended after M Koteshwar Rao larger usually referred to as Kishenji, the CPI Maoist chief who spearheading the movement there, was killed in an encounter on 24 November 2011.
