Maoists present in Kerala forests

Kerala Director General of Police Jacob Punnoose said on Wednesday that some Maoist groups from the north Indian states have infiltrated into the state. Talking to reporters at Aleppey, he said Left-wing extremists from Orissa, Jharkand and Chattisgarh were active in the forests bordering Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Punnoose said many Maoists hunted by the police in these states were also coming to the state and engaging in various jobs. However, he said there was no evidence of them directly participating in any terrorist activities in the state. He said that the police were making efforts to trace them with the help of other agencies. He refused to divulge further details. The disclosure comes in the wake of intelligence reports that the Maoists were using the border areas of Kerala and Karnataka as a hideout ever since the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) launched the “Operation Green Hunt”. The reports said that there were sufficient indications suggesting these Maoists were also trying to set up a guerrilla squad in the tribal dominated northern district of Wayanad. Following this, the police and forest officials from Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu had made joint searches in the forests. Earlier there were reports that several youths from Kerala were sent to Jharkhand for military training. Police believed that this was part of a move to carve out a new guerrilla zone in South India, covering Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Some of these trained Maoist cadres were deployed in the Kerala-Karnataka -Tamil Nadu border. Naxalism had taken deep roots in Kerala in the sixties and seventies, when the state witnessed several incidents of naxalite-related violence. The major incidents included the Thalasseri, Pulpally (1968), Kuttiyadi (1969) and Kayanna (1976) police station attacks, and the murder or looting of landlords in the districts of Wayanad (1970 and 1975), Kannur (1970), Kottayam (1970), Kasaragod (1970), Quilon (1970) and Trivandrum (1970). However, a major hunt by the police under chief minister C Achutha Menon and Home Minister K. Karunakaran in the seventies forced several hardcore naxalites to lay their arms and join the mainstream. Interestingly, a police officer, who was responsible for the killing of a major naxalite leader Varghese then, was convicted recently. The former Inspector General of Police Lakshmana is now lodged in a jail here. A recent Naxlite-related violence in Kerala was the abduction of Palghat district collector W R Reddy by the Ayyankkali Pada in October 1996.