LATE in the afternoon, a long convoy of vehicles, lightly guarded, trailed along a narrow road in the bush. Crammed with Congress politicians—currently the opposition in Chhattisgarh state, though part of the ruling party nationally—the cars contained most of the party's state leadership returning from a campaign rally. Whether from complacency, or ineptitude, the convoy was poorly secured as it passed through an area known for activity by India's violent Maoist, or Naxalite, movement. A few weeks earlier the extreme leftists, who claim to fight on behalf of tribal people and for a forthcoming Communist revolution, had spread leaflets in the area, opposing the Congress campaign. The cars were packed together, making a single, juicy target. Few police or other security men were present. One of the first cars reportedly hit a landmine, before a group of attackers—numbered variously at between 150 and over 1,000—opened fire from a hillside, with small arms. The few close-protection police in the convoy reported that their own weapons jammed, or else they quickly ran out of ammunition. Some politicians and their advisers attempted to flee, or play dead. Some begged, successfully, for their lives. But the Maoists, reportedly guided by a local woman, rounded up targets chosen for execution, leading them into nearby trees to be shot.
At least 29 people were killed in the massacre on May 25th. That the victims were politicians out campaigning, and that so many civilians were killed in one go, marks a change from previous, even bloodier, battles with paramilitary and police forces. The main target, Mahendra Karma (pictured above), may have represented—in the eyes of Maoists at least—a semi-legitimate figure for attack. A notorious political figure in mineral-rich Chhattisgarh, he had been a Communist in his youth, but switched to be a Congress parliamentarian and was accused of complicity with corrupt firms that plundered the state’s tribal areas for their forests and mineral wealth. Most important, he was the man most responsible for starting a vigilante force in 2005, arming tribal villagers to attack Maoists. That force, Salwa Judum, led to tens of thousands of tribal people being displaced and hundreds of villages evacuated. It led to the violent division of the Bastar region, with civilians abused by both the Maoists and the government’s security forces; they were suspected by both sides. Mr Karma was despised by many, and eventually his vigilante group was found to be responsible for widespread abuse, including rapes, murder and arson in the villages and inside the fortified resettlement camps that been established for the villagers, as in a war zone. Salwa Judum was ordered to disarm by the Supreme Court in 2011, but by then it had already come to be seen as a hated failure, an example of how not to conduct counter-insurgency. It almost certainly encouraged more people to join the Maoists.
