K’taka plans meet to rein in Naxalites

The Karnataka Government has decided to hold a meeting of political leaders

The Karnataka Government has decided to hold a meeting of political leaders, senior Government and police officials to discuss measures to tackle increased Naxal activity in the districts of Dakshina Kannada, Chikmagalur, Shimoga and Udupi.

The decision to convene the meeting, announced by Home Minister M P Prakash in the Assembly on Monday, comes following a series of retaliatory incidents in the region involving the police and Naxals over the past few months.

In the latest such incidents, a group of six alleged Naxals entered four homes in a village in the Tirthahalli police limits in Shimoga district after midnight on Sunday and looted cash and jewels worth nearly Rs 2 lakh.

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The Naxals reportedly told the house owners, three of whom are from the dominant Vokkaliga community, that they were carrying out the looting to compensate the families of five people killed in a police encounter at Menhasidanapalya.

Following the July 10 encounter killings, local residents in the Tirthahalli area have been refusing to cooperate with the police on the grounds that two of the people killed, including a woman Kaveramma and her husband Ramegowda, were innocent.

The encounter occurred when the police raided the residence of Ramegowda and Kaveramma after Gowtham and two others turned up at the house for dinner. Locals carried out a protest against the killing, resulting in the detention of several of them.

The area where the Naxals allegedly carried out the robberies on Sunday night was earlier in the news when a Government bus was burnt by a group of Naxals in retaliation to the killing of CPI (Maoist) central committee member Sende Rajamouli in Andhra Pradesh.

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At the meeting on Tuesday the elected representatives of the four districts in the Western Ghat region which are seeing Naxal activity will interact with top police officials, Deputy Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa and Home Minister M P Prakash.

The Shimoga district where much of the Naxal-related action has occurred in recent months is the home district of the BJP Deputy Chief Minister and the party has a number of MLAs in the area.

Araga Jnanendra, the MLA who represents the Tirthahally constituency, told the Assembly that the Naxals had threatened to kill him and blow up his house. He called for immediate measures to tackle the Naxal problem in the region.