Maoists Attack Passenger Train in Bihar

NEW DELHI - Maoist rebels in one of India’s poorest states on Thursday stopped a train crammed with 1,500 passengers and killed a soldier and a passenger and injured at least one other person before melting back into the forest, an official said.

More than 100 attackers surrounded the train near Jamui in the state of Bihar, with some firing at the train indiscriminately, Indian media reported. The attackers took guns from at least two security guards on the train, the media reports said.

Indian Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said that the police were pursuing the attackers. “Operation is on,” he said in a televised briefing.

After the gunmen left, the train resumed its journey to Patna, Bihar’s capital.

Last month, hundreds of rebels attacked a convoy of political leaders from the Indian National Congress Party in the nearby state of Chhattisgarh, killing 28 and injuring 24.

Maoist rebels are concentrated in remote, tribal regions in India’s east, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called them India’s biggest internal security threat. Their ranks are filled with tribal people, some of them women and girls. Tribal people are India’s most marginalized citizens, and their traditional lands have sometimes been appropriated for huge mining operations in the mineral-rich areas.

But Maoist bands have sometimes sustained themselves by demanding bribes from the mining operations.

The government has sought to end the insurgency with a mix of get-tough security polices and welfare handouts. And federal and state officials often blame one another for security lapses in the wake of attacks.

Despite their violence, Maoist rebels still command considerable sympathy among India’s left-of-center intellectual class. A recent editorial in the Economic & Political Weekly, one of India’s most important academic publications, wrote of last month’s bloody attack, “Didn’t it serve the cause of justice? Wasn’t it morally justified? Hadn’t the oppressed been left with no other way but to challenge the violence that reproduces and maintains their oppression?”