The Union Ministry for Home Affairs (MHA) has alerted three southern States after the Communist Party of India(Maoist)’s message at an international conference in Milan on opening up a new war front in the Sahyadri (Western Ghats) border region of Karnataka-Kerala-Tamil Nadu.
The message of the CPI(Maoist) Central Committee at “the International Conference in Solidarity with the people’s war in India” held on September 27 and 28 comes even as the proscribed party admitted that it was “facing heavy odds and losses” in many of its strongholds.
As early as 2011 the CPI(Maoist) had begun operations in Gudalur, Wayanad, Nilambur, Kodaikanal, Udupi, and Dakshina Kannada. This tri-junction became part of their activities following Operation Green Hunt by the Central Reserve Police Force against Naxalites in the Dandakaranya area in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh.
Intelligence agencies attribute the 15-page message from the CPI(Maoist) to efforts at garnering support in European countries in spite of New Delhi’s caution.
A similar conference was held in Hamburg, Germany, in November 2012.
The League Against Imperialist Aggression had then organised the conference coinciding with the first death anniversary of Maoist leader Mallojula Koteshwara Rao aka Kishenji who was killed in an encounter in West Bengal.
Incidentally an MHA annual report for 2013-14 fails to mention the Maoist threat in any of the Southern States. However, it says that the front organisations of the Left Wing Extremists (LWE) are active in 20 States in the country.
The Maoists continued to remain the most dominant and violent LWE groups, accounting for more than 80 per cent of the violence and killing.