In the early hours of 27 October, the Maoists attacked a cultural programme in Chilkhadia village in Jharkhand, killing 18 people, including former Chief Minister Babulal Marandi's son. According to reports, the Maoists resorted to indiscriminate firing, and hurled bombs to strike terror at the cultural show that followed a football match. On 29 October, about 200 Naxalites ambushed and surrounded a 20-member police party in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh, killing five policemen in indiscriminate firing, while three were seriously injured and 12 others are missing.

On 15 March 2007, about 500 Maoists besieged a police outpost in Bijapur district, killing 54 people and wounding a dozen more before fleeing into the surrounding jungle. In this operation, they also seized a cache of 33 weapons. On 4 March, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader and Lok Sabha MP, Sunil Mahato, was shot dead by Maoists in Ghatshila near Jamshedpur. In all, an estimated 749 people, including 285 civilians, were slain in 2006 in various Naxalite attacks in 76 districts of 6 states in India.

Since its inception in 1967, Naxalism has been a major security threat in states stretching from Bihar to Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and parts of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, or what is called the "red corridor". In April 2006, at the meeting of ministers of six affected states, in Delhi, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, declared the Maoists to be the "single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country." According to a former senior official of the Research and Analysis Wing, about 20,000 Naxalites now have arms, adding that it is no less a security threat than Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, Maoism now has more followers in India than China.

Official figures place the armed Maoist cadres at around 10,000, and over ground workers at around 45,000. In the affected states, Maoists are in complete control: they make the laws, and implement them. What is striking is the Maoists have modeled themselves on the lines of the Indian army - from training manuals to undercover training. The manuals translated into Hindi from Telugu by the security forces give a chilling insight into the People's Liberation Guerilla Army's planning, military skills and motives.

So far, regular reviews and meetings at both the Central and State levels have not been able to contain the problem. In fact, the Maoist menace continues to expand without any signs of government initiatives working, except where it has been confronted by a coherent use of force. The Centre has tried to project the Andhra Pradesh model of dealing with Maoist extremism, but even there it has only met with limited success because the extremists are on the run. Regrouping and reworking their strategies, the Maoists find it easy to strike in one State and flee into a neighbouring State, which underlines the unsatisfactory coordination among the affected States. Discussions with Directors General or Inspectors General of Police and the CRPF in New Delhi or the State capitals have not yielded any results; there has been a lack of concerted and coordinated action against the known hideouts of the Maoists. Lack of intelligence information sharing is perhaps the greatest hurdle.

According to the Union Home Ministry's Status Paper on Internal Security, "Chhattisgarh alone accounts for 49.30 per cent of total incidents and 59.80 per cent of total casualties in the current year." Other States, however, remain unprepared. Indeed, a consistent feature across all the major Maoist-affected States is that they have extraordinarily poor policing capacities. As against a national average of 122 police personnel per 100,000 population, Bihar has only 57, Jharkhand 85, Chhattisgarh 103, Orissa 90 and Andhra Pradesh just 98. More painful is the reality that a large chunk of the Central allocation for police modernization and up-gradation remains unspent or is being diverted or misspent. Utilization of funds has been particularly poor over the years in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

There is an urgent need to realize the need to pay more attention to security issues in the Maoist infested states and find ways to use money and administrative influence to promote law, development and social justice. Another political step needed is to bring out the Maoists to join mainstream politics apart from taking tough security measures, jointly evolved by the Centre and the affected States. A joint strategy to bring the Maoist groups to the negotiating table and address the serious socio-economic problems of the people, especially the tribals, must be initiated. The political parties can use their influence to bring the warring rebels to the negotiating table, else India will continue to face these security threats from the Maoists.