The Dantewada police have arrested Essar group's General Manager for Kirandul, D.V.C.S. Verma, as part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of the company routinely paying the banned Communist Party of India (maoist) significant sums of money to operate in rebel-controlled territory. This is the first time that an individual, directly employed by Essar, has been arrested in this connection. The group has denied allegations that it paid protection money to...

Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, lacking sportsman’s spirit, has stuck to his post like Dendrite paste, despite a series of failures in combating secessionist insurgencies including the armed offensive led by the Communist Party of India (maoist). He parrots Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and considers maoists to be “the most formidable challenge to governance.” “Only if villagers think that the real adversary is the Naxal who keeps them under threat will...

-The Telegraph   Mamata Banerjee tonight used her strongest language yet to condemn “the Jungle Mahal mafia” and virtually warned of a rethink on the undeclared ceasefire in the maoist zone after the leader of a local party was shot dead in West Midnapore. Although the chief minister sought to paint the killers as the mafia, not maoists, she ripped into the rebels’ supporters in universities in Calcutta, reflecting the distance she has...

I got a call around midnight in the Delhi summer. It was Lingaram, the young Muria adivasi from Sameli village in Dantewada, then studying in Noida’s International Media Institute of India. Linga’s misfortunes never seem to end: first he was accused of helping the maoists, then tortured in the police station toilet, forced to be a special police officer, then released thanks to a habeas corpus petition. In a few months,...

An Orissa lawmaker, wheelchair bound since maoists targeted him seven years ago, was shot dead in front of hundreds of people today as he distributed land title rights to villagers in a rebel-infested zone. The afternoon attack was the third by suspected maoists on Umerkote MLA Jagabandhu Majhi, who was said to have been popular because of his social work. “It might be a maoist attack. The area falls in a maoist...