India struggles with rebel threats during election

RAJNANDGAON, India — Indians cast ballots Thursday on the biggest day of voting in the country's weekslong general election, streaming into polling stations even in areas where rebels threatened violence over the plight of India's marginalized and poor.

Nationwide voting began April 7 and runs through May 12, with results for the 543-seat lower house of Parliament to be announced four days later. Among the 13 key states voting Thursday was Chhattisgarh, now the epicenter of India's four-decade Maoist insurgency.

"I want a good life for my baby, security and peace," said Neha Ransure, a 25-year-old woman who was voting in the Chhattisgarh town of Rajnandgaon despite fears of violence. "The rebels are bad. They kill our soldiers. I don't go outside of town. It is too dangerous."

Rebels always threaten to disrupt Indian elections, and this year was no different.

On Saturday, insurgents killed 14 people in two separate attacks in Chhattisgarh in a campaign to disrupt the polls. The dead included five election officials, five paramilitary soldiers, two bus drivers and two civilians.

Last month, rebels in Chhattisgarh killed 15 law enforcement officers and one civilian in their deadliest raid in almost a year.

More than 4,800 people, including about 2,850 civilians, have been killed in rebel roadside bombings, jungle ambushes and hit-and-run raids nationwide since 2008. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the insurgents India's biggest internal security threat.

But authorities say that, amid the bloodshed, there are signs that the rebels have waning support — including lines of voters shuffling into polling booths Thursday in Chhattisgarh, the heartland of a rebel campaign that has affected more than a dozen of India's 28 states.

Despite the insurgents' calls to boycott the election, 59 percent of voters turned out in Chhattisgarh's rebel stronghold of Bastar last week. So far, no voting machines have been looted or stolen, police said, after 18 were taken in 2009 elections and 23 in the state's 2008 assembly polls.

"People are even boycotting the boycott," said that state's chief electoral officer, Sunil Kumar Kujar. Authorities are trying new tactics such as staging polls simultaneously in rebel strongholds nationwide so insurgents cannot target voting on different days. Elections in Chhattisgarh have been split into three stages so more security personnel can guard polling stations, which close before dark.

Chhattisgarh's last districts vote on April 24.

"Whether all of this strategy will work in the end, we shall see," Kujar said, acknowledging that the rebels "are still in a better position, more flexible and more violent."

The insurgents are referred to as both Maoists and Naxals, for the West Bengal town of Naxalbari, where they first rose up in 1968, inspired by the founder of China's communist regime, Mao Zedong. Officially, they are called the Communist Party of India (Maoist) — not to be confused with India's political Communist Party of India (Marxist).

With a rag-tag army of disciplined fighters who accuse authorities of plundering resources and stomping on the rights of the poor, the rebels have waged a violent campaign, hoping for nothing less than to spark a full-blown peasant revolt.

They have made strategic changes in recent years — becoming better armed and more sophisticated in communication technologies and guerrilla tactics, according to officials, political analysts and journalists who have spent time living and reporting among the Maoists.

Despite the upheaval, the insurgency is seen as a local issue by the main candidates from the ruling Congress party and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, who rarely even mention it in their speeches.

The rebels' demands for an end to corporate land-grabbing, industrial pollution and commercial exploitation have helped them gain a foothold among local tribal Adivasis, an umbrella term for all of India's indigenous tribal inhabitants within rural jungle communities, many of them left behind during the country's breakneck economic growth in the 1990s.

The state of Chhattisgarh itself was formed only in 2000, carved from its western neighbor Madhya Pradesh based on its large tribal population. But while mining operations have exploded in mineral-rich Chhattisgarh, many of its areas remain without schools, clinics and roads. Chhattisgarh is so little traveled that the Lonely Planet's 1,244-page guide to India contains only six pages on the state.

The government blames the rebels for thwarting development inside their self-proclaimed "Liberated Zones," where only ethnic tribal residents are allowed and politicians or uniformed officers are targeted in attacks.

The tribal communities are also isolated by speaking a language — Gondi — that few but the Maoists have bothered to learn.

The rebels' main service to the locals, analysts say, has been chasing away government and business prospectors.

"The tribals are a very gentle, docile people. They are just looking for anyone to support them," said Shubhranshu Choudhary, who wrote the 2012 book "Let's Call Him Vasu," based on the seven years he spent as a journalist with the rebels. "The Maoists have given them their forests back. But it has come at a heavy cost."

The Home Ministry says the rebels "wish to keep the population in their areas of influence marginalized to perpetuate their outdated ideology," in explaining why "development has been set back by decades in many parts of the country."