Junior Home Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal admitted in Parliament that the Naxal menace in India is more threatening, cause more disruption, and resulted in more deaths that the Pakistan-inspired terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted that the Naxal menace in India is the largest single threat to the nation.
Covering more than 175 districts in over 13 states, terrorist acts from the Naxals have increased rapidly in the last few months. They methods seemed to have improved. Armed with sophisticated weapons and equipped with latest communication equipment, these terrorist take advantage of poorly equipped police to extort money, hijack trains, takeover stations, commit murder, and collect “taxes.”
While the Home Ministry’s initial response was a major peoples’ movement called Salwa Judum, they realized soon that the poor peasants were being targeted by the terrorists causing large scale migration of these villagers to refugee camps in squalid conditions. Even so, the hastily released document in March espoused a
Naxal policy
again called for only militia and no coordinated action against the
Naxals.