From the Times of India [2], May 16:
NEW DELHI — The government on Tuesday informed Parliament that naxalites were working in close coordination with some terrorist outfits operating in J&K and were also in touch with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka.
"Though the government has no documentary evidence of any memorandum of understanding signed between international terror outfits with naxalites in the country, we have enough information suggesting that there is coordination between them," home minister Shivraj Patil said in the Lok Sabha during zero hour.
Patil said it was difficult for the government to interfere in security matters in some states as the dispensation there did not take it very kindly. He said this in an oblique reference to the naxalite problem in Chhattisgarh, which, according to him, accounted for 40%-60% of all Naxal incidents in the country.
He said the government had provided UAVs to anti-naxal paramilitary forces deployed in the state which has so far only been used by the Army to gather intelligence on movement of ultras.
Now let's see... The Naxalites are militant atheists, the Tamil Tigers are Hindu ethno-nationalists, and the Jammu & Kashmir militants are Islamic fundamentalists. However much they may all hate the Indian state, seems to us they probably hate each other even more. We are utterly skeptical of these claims—and far more concerned that the anti-naxal paramilitaries have been provided UAVs!
See our last posts on India's tribal insurgencies [3], the Naxalites [4] and the Tamil Tigers [5].
See also out special report [6] on the Naxalite insurgency.
