India - Maoists eyeing trade unions for urban push

Far from their bastions in the jungled tracts of central India, activists and sympathisers of the Communist Party of India (Maoists) have been making repeated attempts to penetrate into workers’ associations and trade unions in the national capital. “Associations with close ties to the CPI (Maoist) have been very active in the last few months. We have come to know of several such meetings where representatives of such associations have met trade union activists, but without substantial success till now. But Delhi is a focus area for Maoists,” a top government source told HT on condition of anonymity.
These efforts are also in keeping with the key resolutions adopted by the fourth central committee meet held in the dense forests along the Chhattisgarh-Odisha border sometime in February-March 2013. In a document of the adopted resolutions, suspected by security agencies to have been penned by CPI (Maoist) general secretary Muppalla Laxman Rao alias Ganapathy himself, it is written:
“We should mobilise the non-peasant vast masses in all our strategic movement areas. We should build the urban movement and rally the working class and the vast urban masses into the revolutionary movement.” While security and intelligence agencies had indicated the ‘presence’ of Maoist elements across many urban areas including New Delhi and in Bihar and Jharkhand, their ‘influence’ was always under doubt. “The latest strategy is to ramp up the ‘influence’ in the urban network. This is a ‘tactical’ effort to get forces of urban discontent together on the basis of a common workable understanding,” said the source. Traditionally, tribal communities across central India have been the usual mainstay of the Maoists for support, with the inaccessibility and remoteness of such areas facilitating construction of bases for weapons training and ideological indoctrination.