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Agence France-Presse

Indian police on Monday killed at least 21 rebels in a shoot-out in eastern India, a local officer said, one of the deadliest incidents this year in a long-running Maoist insurgency.
Police said they ambushed a meeting of 30 to 40 Maoists in a forest near the border of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh states, triggering a gunbattle.
“Now 21 bodies of the Maoists have been recovered. The search operation is still on,” sub-inspector C.K. Dharua said by telephone from Malkangiri district in Odisha where the attack occurred.
Dharua had earlier confirmed 18 deaths but warned the toll could rise as “there was a large number of people at the meeting”.


A top Maoist leader and his son were suspected to be among those killed, the Press Trust of India news agency said, citing unnamed police.
Local media also said two police officers were injured in the battle, but that could not immediately be confirmed.
Dharua said weapons including four AK-47s and three self-loading rifles were recovered from the rebels in the forest, some 640 kilometres from the state capital Bhubaneswar.
Outside China, these places are where Maoism is alive and kicking
India’s Maoist insurgency began in the 1960s, inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, and has cost thousands of lives.
The rebels, described by former prime minister Manmohan Singh as India’s most serious internal security threat, say they are fighting authorities for land, jobs and other rights for poor tribal groups.
Monday’s gunbattle comes after 10 paramilitary commandos in eastern Bihar state were killed in July after suspected Maoist rebels ambushed their convoy and set off a series of homemade bombs.
In March, suspected rebels triggered a powerful landmine blast in central Chhattisgarh, killing seven policemen.

The rebels operate in at least 20 Indian states but are most active in the forested and resource-rich areas of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.
They draw recruits from tribal communities whose members are often desperately poor and living in underdeveloped areas neglected by successive governments.
The Maoist insurgency has claimed more than 7,000 lives between 2005 and 2016, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal website which tracks separatist trends.
The remote forests of Malkangiri district are a major transit point for rebels because it borders Maoist-strongholds in Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, the Hindu newspaper said Monday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been seeking to stem the insurgency by earmarking development funds for revolt-hit areas and improving policing.
Last year, Modi urged Maoists to put down their guns and take up ploughs, saying “violence has no future”.
Government critics say attempts to end the revolt through tough security offensives are doomed to fail, and the real solution is better governance and development of the region.


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Narendra Modi

Indian police kill at least 21 Maoist rebels in forest gunbattle

Indian Maoists ready their weapons as they take part in a training exercise in a forested area of Bijapur District in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh in 2012. File photo: AFP

Members of Naxalites, officially the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that takes its name from the Naxalbari, a village outside Calcutta where the revolt began in 1967, exercise at a temporary base in the Abujh Marh forests, in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh, April 13, 2007. Over the past four decades, this Maoist army with 10,000-15,000 fighters using old or handmade guns, has taken root in places forgotten during India's spectacular economic rise, creating an archipelago of rebel territory scattered across nearly half of the country's 28 states. In the past two years, nearly 2,000 people, police, militants, and civilians caught in the middle, have been killed in Naxalite violence. (AP Photo/Mustafa Quraishi)

TO GO WITH India-Maoist-unrest-military,FEATURE by Pratap Chakravarty Indian police commandos take part in an exercise at Combat Operating Base (COB) Arjun in Kanker District some 150 kms from Raipur on April 22, 2010. A huge explosion and men locked in combat on a sun-baked hillside are signs of the Indian government's toughening resolve to wrest back control from a raging Maoist insurgency. The rebels, who are active across east and central India, killed 76 soldiers in the Kanker district of Chhattisgarh state on April 6 -- their deadliest strike since the insurgency emerged in 1967. The carnage, which followed an attack in February when Maoists shot 24 policemen in West Bengal state, may prove a watershed in the government's long and fruitless anti-insurgency campaign. The Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College, which has sent 12,500 commandos into battle against the Maoists since 2005 in Kanker, 150 kilometres (90 miles) from Raipur, trains both police officers and paramilita

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