News from India; Maoist Guerillas

From The Hindu;

HYDERABAD: When Naxalites announced the formation of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) a decade ago, security agencies dismissed it as an attempt by the rebels to regroup their cadres and propaganda to boost their perceived military strength.
Buoyed as they were by the phenomenal success in killing three Central Committee members on December 2, 1999, in an encounter in Koyyuru, the security agencies misjudged the consequences of what was sought to be projected as a “mere nomenclature change.”
Now, the security forces are bracing themselves for intensified attacks in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal as the Maoists have announced month-long celebrations coinciding with the 10th anniversary of PLGA formation. All these years, the celebrations were only week-long. “This means bigger strikes can be expected in Maoist-affected States,” authorities concede.
In retrospect, it becomes clear that the formation of the PLGA — on December 2, 2000, first death anniversary of the “Koyyur martyrs” — helped the underground organisation improve its military capabilities spectacularly and register an impressive spatial spread of revolutionary movement in newer areas. So much so that the Centre now deploys 62 battalions of the Central Para Military Forces (CPMF) for anti-extremist operations in different States.
The PLGA consists of three layers: main, secondary, and base forces. The main force consists of platoons, companies and battalions, while the secondary force comprises local guerrilla squads (LGS) and special guerrilla squads (SGS). The base force consists of people's militia which could form themselves into grama rakshaka dalams (GRDs) or self-defence squads (SDS).
Intelligence agencies estimate that while the main and secondary forces constitute around 3,000 fighters, the number of people's militia constituting the base force could be nearly 30,000.

For the rest click here.