RAIPUR, May 28: “Peoples’ Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) cadres main aim was to eliminate Mahendra Karma and few other Congress leaders.” These are the words said by Communist Party of India (Maoist) Dandakaranya special Zonal committee spokesman Gudsa Usendi on Tuesday who defended the killing of senior leader Mahendra Karma and Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee Preident Nand Kumar Patel for their role in Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt. They also expressed their regret over the death of other “innocent” persons.
The Maoist Spokesperson said, “Both the BJP and the Congress are equally responsible for repression in tribal areas.” He claimed that the attack was primarily to take revenge for “Salwa Judum” – the controversial anti-Naxal movement which began in June 2005 that led to largescale violence and displacement of thousands of villagers in Bastar. He also said that Salwa Judum had become a curse for the people of Bastar.
“The mayhem in Bastar, precipitated by the Salwa Judum, is incomparable to any gory incident taken place in the history”, the statement said while Mahendra Karma and his family had turned exploiters of tribals. Congress president Nandkumar Patel, during his tenure as home minister between 2000 to 2003, had initiated the deployment of more para-military forces in the tribal region.
CPI (Maoist) spokesman described Shukla as an enemy of masses as he had always played an active role in politics for long as a representative of imperialist forces, capitalists and landlords and supported their policies of exploitation while referring to the attack on veteran Congress leader and former union minister V C Shukla.
Maoists also demanded withdrawal of para-military forces from “Dandakaranya”. They also demanded calling off Operation Green Hunt in tribal Bastar region and release of all arrested Maoists. The Reds also alleged that hundreds of innocent tribals were languishing in prisons.
Last year, Maoists had abducted the then Sukma district collector Alex Paul Menon and had placed similar demands in exchange for his safe release. After hectic negotiations between state government and Maoist interlocutors, the state government had set up a three member committee to review the cases of all those who are languishing in jails and secured the release of the abducted collector. However, the committee has had several meetings so far but without any concrete outcome.
Expressing regrets over the killing of some ‘innocent’ Congress functionaries in the attack, the Maoists blamed chief minister Raman Singh, the Congress leadership-including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and others-for keeping mum when innocent people were killed what they termed as state sponsored violence.
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