Maoist insurgents extend their campaign of violence in India

“That is their liberated zone,’’ said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers.

The Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, but Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has sparked a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has absorbed a handful of secessionist rebels by coaxing them into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. They want to topple the system.

Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, and infant mortality.

Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated.

“The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,’’ said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.’’

India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges, and even an energy pipeline.

If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn, they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, and hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a brazen raid against a West Bengal police station.

Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but, as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing.

“Earlier,’’ said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.’’

The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained.

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,’’ predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable.

Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges, and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders, and private contractors, numerous government reports have found.

“The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,’’ said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.’’

India’s Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by communists in West Bengal. By the 1980s, many Maoists found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the area across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, they recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out.

Violence is frequent in the region, such as the ambush near the village of Laheri, in Maharashtra state, carried out by the Maoists on Oct. 8.

About 40 miles from Laheri, a processing plant owned by Essar Steel has been closed for five months. Maoists sabotaged Essar’s 166-mile underground pipeline, which transfers slurry from one of India’s most coveted iron ore deposits to the Bay of Bengal. “I’ve told my management that I’ll take a team and do the repairs,’’ said S. Ramesh, the project manager for Essar. “But I can’t promise how long it will last.’’

The Essar plant is part of a broader undertaking by the Indian government and several private mining companies to extract the resources beneath land teeming with guerrillas. Ramesh said 70 percent of India’s iron ore lay in states infiltrated by Maoists; production in this area is stalled at 16 million tons a year even though the area has the potential to produce 100 million tons.

Ramesh fretted that India’s growth would be stunted if the country could not exploit its own natural resources. Yet he also cautioned that the counterinsurgency operation was no cure-all.