Bhopal : Ten police personnel and their driver were killed in a blast carried out by Maoists in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district today. The area is located around 450 km from the state capital Raipur. The incident took place when a team of the state police’s District Reserve Guard (DRG) was returning after an anti-Maoist operation.
A significant chunk of Chhattisgarh is under the Red Corridor – the influence zone of the Maoists. The corridor spans across ten states in two coal-rich, remote, forested hilly clusters in and around the Dandakaranya-Chhattisgarh-Odisha region and the tri-junction area of Jharkhand-Bihar and West Bengal.
Dantewada is among the ten districts – Bastar, Bijapur, Kanker, Kondagaon, Narayanpur, Rajnandgaon and Sukma – of the state which is affected by Maoism.
Here are major Maoist attacks in Chhattisgarh:
APRIL 2010: Seventy-five Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and a state police personnel were killed in an ambush on April 6, 2010, in what is considered the country’s worst Maoist attack ever, in the thick Mukrana forests of Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district.
MAY 2013: Around 250 Maoists in civilian clothes struck a convoy of Congress leaders during the party’s rally in Chhattisgarh’s Jagdalpur on May 25, 2013, killing at least 25 people, including then state Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel and senior party leader Mahendra Karma.
APRIL 2017: Twenty-five soldiers, including the company commander, were killed in a deadly Maoist ambush on April 24, 2017. The well-planned massacre was carried out by a group of hundreds of Maoists.
MARCH 2020: Seventeen security personnel, including several District Reserve Guard (DRG) and Special Task Force (STF) personnel, were killed in a gunbattle with Maoists in forests of Chhattisgarh’s insurgency-hit Sukma district on March 21, 2020.
APRIL, 2021: Twenty-two security personnel were killed in an ambush by some 400 insurgents who surrounded the jawans from three sides in an area devoid of vegetation and rained on them machinegun fire as well as IEDs for several hours in the state’s Bastar region on April 4, 2021.
JUNE 2022: Three CRPF personnel were killed in a Maoist ambush at a security post at the Chhattisgarh-Odisha border on June 21, 2022.
The Maoist insurgency is an ongoing conflict between Maoist groups, also known as Naxalites or Naxals, and the government. They are largely active in tribal and rural areas of India which are remote and under-developed.
