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NEW DELHI, India: India's railways minister said on Friday she would seek extra protection for the state-run service after the latest in a series of rebel attacks left two dead in the east of the country.
Maoist insurgents were accused by police of derailing a passenger train in the state of Jharkhand, killing two people and injuring more than 40, as part of a series of attacks ahead of regional elections.
"I have instructed my officials to meet the home secretary because these kinds of things are now on the rise," India's Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters in New Delhi.
"Every day there are obstructions, kidnappings, bomb blasts and the lives of passengers are being endangered. This is unacceptable," the minister said.
The rebels frequently target train tracks in the "red corridor" of Maoist activity stretching across north and eastern India, but usually without deadly consequences.
Last month, Maoist-backed activists hijacked an express train in the adjoining West Bengal state to demand the release of a tribal leader arrested in September, but there were no casualties.
Separately in Jharkhand on Friday, the insurgents were suspected of seizing 20 members of an anti-Maoist village volunteer force and of bombing one mine and attempting to bomb another.
"All this is part of a tactic to spread panic among the people before the polls (later this month)," a police officer from the area of the derailment, A.B. Homkar, told AFP.
At the train crash site, two bodies were found in an overturned carriage, and 48 people were injured, Jharkhand police chief V.D. Ram said from state capital Ranchi.
"Maoists attacked and blew up the tracks between stations late Thursday night," said Ram.
The train was travelling from the eastern state of Chhattisgarh to Jharkhand when eight of its 10 coaches derailed in the southeastern district of West Singhbhum after guerrillas detonated bombs in front of the engine, said Ram.
The Maoist insurgency started as a peasant uprising in 1967, but has now spread to 20 of India's 29 states. The rebels claim to be fighting for the rights of India's poor and tribal populations.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has labelled the leftist rebels the greatest threat to India's internal security, and a massive security operation planned by the federal government to wipe them out is tipped to start this month.
The rebels also bombed a mine owned by the state-run Steel Authority of India Ltd. on Friday in Jharkhand near its border with the state of Orissa, police said.
"Maoists detonated a low-intensity bomb in Meghatpur, but there were no injuries," a police official who asked not to be named told AFP from Orissa's state capital Bhubhaneswar.
Another bomb in a mine on the border between Jharkhand and Orissa was defused, he said.
- AFP/so
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