Govt move comes despite Left objecting to such a description.
Describing the Maoists as “terrorists” in his monthly press conference on Tuesday, Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde tried to undo the omission that the all-party meet called by the prime minister was forced to undertake on the insistence of Left party leaders.
On being asked why the resolution passed at the all-party meeting did not mention the word “terrorist”, Shinde said, “There was a problem in the drafting of the resolution.”
Left party leaders – Gurudas Dasgupta of CPI and Basudeb Acharia of CPM had argued that describing Maoists as terrorists would mean the government was treating it as only a security problem.
A toned down resolution described Chhattigarh massacre as a “pre-meditated attack on political workers with the intent to intimidate and overawe all political workers” and as an attack on “democracy, freedom, and free speech and expression”.
The strongest it came to describe Maoists was, “Nothing can be more dangerous to our Republic than the insurgency of the CPI (Maoist) in the pursuit of its misguided goal of overthrowing Parliamentary democracy and the Constitution of India through violent means.”
Indicating that the security approach would now be the core, Shinde came hard on the Maoists and said “the kind of violence they have unleashed, the way they treated Mahendra Karma by shooting him 74 times is nothing short of terrorism and they are terrorists.”
Also, the government has sanctioned fresh funds totalling Rs 2,079 crore to the CRPF and nine Maoist-hit states to combat challenge with a bulk of the money earmarked for the central force.
Shinde said the Rs 2,079 crore an amount of Rs 1,981 crore has been sanctioned to CRPF for bolstering the capabilities of the lead anti-Maoist operations force.
Shinde said the remaining Rs 98.85 crore was released by his ministry as an “advance” fund to the nine states under Security Related Expenditure (SRE).
“Under the Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Scheme, on May 28 an amount of Rs 9885.46 lakh was released as advance to nine Left Wing Extremism affected states of Andhra Pradesh (Rs 992.61 lakh), Bihar (Rs 1371.66 lakh), Chhattisgarh (Rs 1398 lakh), Jharkhand (Rs 2421.30 lakh) and Madhya Pradesh (Rs 55.75 lakh),” Shinde said.
The other beneficiary states were Maharashtra (Rs 738.51 lakh), Odisha (Rs 1,780.81 lakh), Uttar Pradesh (Rs 108.82 lakh) and West Bengal (Rs 1,018.73 lakh).
The SRE funds are meant to upgrade and modernise the state security apparatus to combat extremism. — With Agency inputs
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