Over 1.29 million voters of Bastar, which is tagged as the country’s worst Naxal insurgency-hit lok Sabha constituency, are set to exercise their franchise on Thursday in a shadow of terror and the guerrillas’ diktat to people to boycott the polls.
Barely 24 hours before the voting, Maoists orchestrated bloodbath in Bastar on Wednesday in which three troopers were martyred and six were injured in two attacks. Heavily armed Maoists opened indiscriminate firing on the anti-Naxal force COBRA’s jawans, in a forested patch in Sukma district, when they were returning after escorting a polling party to a booth for Thursday’s polling. run Dev Gautam, Inspector-General of Police (Bastar), informed that three COBRA commandos were gunned down and three others received multiple bullet shots.
In the second terror attack in Bijapur district, the 85th battalion jawans of the CRPF were hit by two successive IED blasts, in which three cops sustained injuries. The injured jawans of Sukma and Bijapur attacks were airlifted to Raipur, as their condition was stated to be highly critical.
Security agencies in Chhattisgarh fear more sporadic terror attacks on Thursday during polling hours. Roughly 40,000 jawans drawn from para-military, Chhattisgarh police, have been deployed in restive Bastar to ensure violence-free polling.
A total of eight candidates are in the fray for the Bastar seat, where roughly 80 percent out of the total 1797 polling booths have been identified as Rs ultra-sensitive’. The main contest is between the BJP nominee and sitting MP Dinesh Kashyap and the Congress candidate Deepak Karma, son of the late Mahendra Karma who was the founder of a controversial civil militia movement, Salwa Judum.
The presence of AAP candidate Soni Sori, a tribal woman of Bastar, who is now on bail granted by the Supreme Court, after she was charged with acting as a conduit for the Maoists, has added a new twist to the battle for Bastar. Sources at the police headquarters in Raipur say that besides Sori, none of the other seven candidates dared to campaign in the interiors, because the Maoists command majority of the areas.
“The terror angle has played big in the minds of Bastar candidates. Except Sori all candidates restricted their electioneering either to urban areas or the tribal settlements close to main roads, as they lacked guts to sneak into vast forested belt for campaigning, where rebels can strike at their will,” a top official at State Intelligence Bureau (SIB), told The Pioneer. The officer remarked that Sori who had a fair idea of Bastar interiors roamed in freely for campaigning mainly in Bijapur district.