Trinamool 'playing footsie' with Maoists: CPI-M

Seeking intensification of the joint operations against Maoists, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) launched a scathing attack on the Trinamool Congress on Thursday for "playing footsie" with the extremists for electoral gains.

"The TC continues to play footsie with Maoists as clearly demonstrated by its chief (Mamata Banerjee) unwilling to name the Maoists as being responsible for this attack... The TC is pursuing such a diabolical electoral agenda at the immense cost of human life and spread of anarchy," CPI (M) Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said.

"The Congress and the United Progressive Alliance-II will have to take a call on explaining to the people how a union cabinet minister can act in defiance of the prime minister's public utterances that Maoist violence constitutes the gravest threat to India's internal security," he said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of the CPI(M) organ 'People's Democracy'.

Yechury quoted a series of public statements by Maoists as saying that "there will be no action or punishment of any kind against TC functionaries".

"By now it is well-known that the TC has openly called for a halt of all operations by security forces against the Maoists so that the latter can continue to terrorise the people through their violence and browbeat them into opposing the Left Front in the elections to the state assembly in 2011," he said.

Yechury said the Maoists were taking advantage of the fact that forces of one state cannot operate in the other except when explicitly permitted to do so as law and order was a state subject.

He said the Maoists squads reportedly returned to their hideouts in Jharkhand after the latest attack on the Eastern Frontier Rifles camp at Silda in West Bengal.

Asserting that it was "time to meet this threat squarely in the interests of the nation and the people," Yechury said Home Minister P Chidambaram had "earlier sounded a little sympathetic to the TC demand" for discontinuing the joint operations.

"With this latest outrageous attack, it is clear that Maoists are bent upon perpetuating their violence and are finding a high degree of solace and comfort to carry out their murderous attacks given the stand taken by the TC," he said.

Maintaining that 168 CPI(M) activists were killed in cold blood by the Maoists, he said, "All these comrades belonged to those very exploited and oppressed classes whose interests the Maoists claim to espouse."

The targeted killing of key CPI(M) cadre was "part of the game plan to terrorise the general public and in turn favour the prospects of the TC in the forthcoming assembly elections," the CPI(M) leader said, asserting that such "political manoeuvring at the cost of bloodshed and at the expense of loss of human life" should not be allowed to succeed.