Maoist insurgency drops in UPA regime

NEW DELHI: The UPA, which didn’t have much to celebrate on in 2013, is likely to find a fall in Maoist insurgency in the past year as something to cheer about. The year saw the fewest number of deaths in Maoist or Naxal attacks since the UPA took over nearly a decade ago, according to the home ministry.

Incidentally, for the Congress party that leads the UPA, 2013 was a tragic one with almost its entire top leadership in Chhattisgarh being wiped out in a Naxal attack in May.

“The Left-wing extremism theatre witnessed the lowest violence in 2013 in the last ten years,” said a home ministry report submitted recently to Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde. As many as 394 people were killed in 1,129 Naxal attacks in 2013, according to the report, seen by ET.

This is the first time that the death toll has dropped below 400 in a year under the UPA. In 2004, 566 people had been killed in Naxal attacks and the number had risen to the highest at 1,005 in 2010. The number of violent incidents in 2013 was also at the lowest in the past decade at 1,129, almost half the figure of 2,213 incidents in 2010.

Stepped-up anti-Naxal operations, which reduced the number of attacks by the ultras, also meant that 99 Naxals were killed and 627 weapons recovered from them in 2013, a senior home ministry official said. However, the figures show a drop in the number of arrested Naxals -to 1,397 last year from 1,901 in 2012.

The number surrenders also fell to 283 from 445 a year earlier, despite the government introducing a new surrender and rehabilitation policy. Still, the arrests of CPI (Maoist) central committee members Aklanta Rabha and Gujanand Naskar as well as the surrender of their chief spokesman GV Prasad alias Gudsa Usendi were big achievements.

In fact, a central committee meeting of CPI (Maoist) in 2013 acknowledged a decline in its movement and expressed concerns over the losses, the official said. “Voters ignoring the Maoist poll boycott call in Chhattisgarh, and coming out to vote in record numbers in the assembly polls was also a major success point in 2013,” this official added.