|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Thursday, 22 April 2004 |
 |
|
 |
World | |
| News Business Features Editorial Security Politics World Letters Sports Obituaries
|
Leftists train guns on Indian polls JEHANABAD, Wednesday (AFP) "Boycott elections and capture power through armed revolution," said the writing on a mud hut in this remote village in India's lawless eastern state of Bihar. Milling around the deserted polling booth in the village, in Jehanabad district 75 kilometres (46 miles) from the Bihar state capital Patna, locals said they were not able to vote in the parliamentary poll as Maoist guerillas had warned they would chop off their hands and legs if they did so. It takes courage to ignore these sorts of threats in India's eastern badlands, the hotbed of an armed Maoist insurgency where a decades-old war has raged between landless peasants and high-caste landowners. The outlawed People's War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), the two most dominant leftist groups active in the region, have banned voting across vast rural stretches of their domination. Some of those who chose to defy the message posted by the leftwing extremists ended up in hospital. At least two ended up in the morgue after being abducted and killed by an unknown group, police said. Bihar is one of 13 Indian states where the first phase of the staggered poll took place on Tuesday. But in at least five villages, including Kinari, not a single vote had been cast by early afternoon, a senior intelligence official told AFP, blaming the lack of balloting on intimidation by Maoist rebels. Ahead of the elections that end May 10, leftwing ultras from the MCC and the PWG distributed leaflets to villagers, urging them to boycott the polls and prepare for "armed revolution." At Kinari, of the 1,392 legal voters in the village of about 2,000 people, no one had cast a ballot when an AFP team visited there mid-afternoon. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
Produced by Lake House |
