Police finds Maoist-run schools in Bastar area
Bijapur (Chhattisgarh), Feb. 5: On October 17, 2010, two Naxals were killed in an encounter with police at Mankeli in Chhattisgarh’s restive Bijapur district. Police had then asked a child eyewitness, aged below 5 years, to identify the deceased. The kid’s reply stumped the security personnel.
“Ve saheed hain (they are martyrs)”, the child said.
The police was puzzled at the child speaking the Maoists’ language. A further probe by police led to the sensational discovery of a school for budding Maoists- in the village.
The child was among 12 others, all aged below five, who were students of the school run by the rebels. While five of them were children of three female Naxals, whose husbands were killed in police encounters at different places, seven others were children (all boys) of Maoist couples.
All the children were later shifted to an ashram school (residential school for tribal children), run by the Chhattisgarh government, at Bhairamgarh, nearly 40 km from Bijapur, the district headquarters town.
Later, security personnel raided two other schools in the neighbouring villages, and “rescued” 17 students, all children of Maoist couples, or widows, to rehabilitate them in other ashram schools in Bhairamgarh.
The police recovered books meant for the pupils and courses designed to teach the children alphabets of different languages and Maoist ideologies.
“A caretaker of such a school, arrested by police, had spilled the beans by revealing existence of such schools in Bastar region, comprising districts of Bijapur, Narayanpur, Dantewada, Kanker and Bastar,” a senior district police officer told this newspaper.
Security intelligence later found evidence of existence of a dozen such residential schools, each having one or two Naxal teachers, between Abujhmad, a thickly forested belt in Narayanpur district, and Indravati in Bijapur district.
“These schools were established in 2006-07 to not only to rehabilitate the children of Maoist couples and of Naxal widows, but to produce assured cadre for the Maoists, after the Maoist leadership failed to attract new recruits in good numbers in the past few years”, the Bijapur district superintendent of police, Mr Rajendra Narayan Das, said.
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