Team News Riveting
Raipur, May 30
Maoists cadre in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region are in a fix. Literally, not because of Corona but cops.
The second wave of the contagious virus had hit the remote areas tucked away unobtrusively. And according to Bastar police battling the Left Wing Extremists (LWE) in a vast land, the region was no exception and insurgents had been infected by the novel COVID-19.
The information was no less than an operation in terms of impact as the Maoists had to come out with a statement. The rebels refuted the charges of police.
“Neither we (Maoists) nor the tribal people have been infected by Corona,” the South Sub-Zonal committee of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) said in a statement. Terming the reports as a “poisonous” campaign of police, the rebels called for vehement protest against the alleged crusade.
In the statement, they mentioned two women cadres and claimed that they died of malaria and typhoid. The Maoists claimed that because of the lockdown, the medical care could not be provided to them that resulted in the death.
Earlier, the Maoists had claimed in the statement that the PLGA (People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army) doctors had been treating the villagers.
Interestingly, the rebels suspect that the security forces, categorized as frontline workers, could be the carrier of COVID-19 in Bastar’s remote villages. “The police men had been violating the lockdown protocol and attacking the villages in the remote areas that raised fear of Corona spread,” the statement added.
The rebels claimed that police had written a letter in their name and circulated it that Maoists had been infected by COVID-19.
Maoists expert could not establish what was wrong even if a rebel had been tested COVID positive!
