May turns bloody in Maoist belt – ToI – 26.5.11

Supriya Sharma | TNN

Raipur: A burst of light machine gun fire rips apart the bodies of nine policemen; a vehicle carrying CRPF jawans is thrown up in the air by a powerful explosion; another landmine blast waylays a wedding baraat.
    May has been a bloody month in terms of Maoist violence. Within 25 days, more than 50 lives have been lost in or around Chhattisgarh. Thirty-three of those killed were security personnel, with the rest being primarily civilians.
    Barring one episode, none of the killings made it to the front-pages of national newspapers. Scattered across disparate districts, and tucked away from the national limelight, these deaths are symptomatic of the insistent insurgency engulfing Chhattisgarh, literally, from all four sides.
    "If 20 people die in one incident, everyone takes notice, not when they die in ones and twos over 20 days," says Ajai Sahni, director, Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhibased think tank, who decries the way the national response lurches from one watershed event to another, ignoring persistent routine violence.
    For Purnima Sarkar, May 4 was no routine day; it was her son's much anticipated wedding. Early morning, her son Manoram woke up and dressed up in a sherwani. Accompanied by his doting 70-year-old grandmother Tarulata and other relatives, he left their home in Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh and headed for Chandrapur in Maharashtra, where his fiance waited in bridal finery.
    The wedding party, a convoy of two Sumo vehicles, had crossed the border into Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra when a landmine blast hit the second car. Moments later, Manoram walked out, blood splattered on his sherwani. His grandmother and five others were dead, including a four-year-old child.
    Ten days later, on May 14, another wedding was interrupted, in Gumla, Jharkhand, bordering Chhattisgarh's Jashpur district in the north. Gunmen broke into the small mandap and shot dead the groom and four others. "My son was home for the marriage around a fortnight ago from Punjab where he had gone for a job,'' Chumdru Oraon, the mother, told TOI.
    From the north, the trail of violence travelled south to Dantewada, Chhattisgarh's most intense battleground. Arvind Rai, commandant of CRPF's 2nd battalion, left his station at Sukma, on May 17, with a group of jawans. He travelled a short distance to Kerlapal, on the badly broken NH-211, to inspect new barracks to accommodate jawans who had to vacate a school building on the Supreme Court's orders.
    As Rai headed back in a Scorpio that led a convoy of three vehicles, the second vehicle, a Tavera, was hit by a powerful improvised explosive device (IED) blast. The vehicle flew 50 feet away.