DANTEWADA (India): White-haired Budhri thought her two children would take care of her in her old age. Instead she lost her daughter to the Maoists hiding in the forests of central India. The police took her son.

Thousands of tribal families in far-flung Chhattisgarh state have been torn apart by a vicious Maoist insurgency and a no-holds-barred crackdown aimed at suppressing it.

“My daughter used to go to Naxal (Maoist) meetings. After that they came to our house to ask for her,” said the middle-aged Budhri as she lit a fire in her mud hut.

She said her husband and son fought with the Maoists to stop them from conscripting the teenage girl but they took her anyway.

Then a man was murdered in a neighbouring village, and Budhri’s husband and son, hailing from a hamlet regarded as pro-Maoist, were suspected and carted off by police.

“I have a son in jail. I have a daughter who the Naxals took. How can I live?” she said.

Chhattisgarh’s landscape is placidly beautiful with carefully thatched huts nestled in thick forests of mango, tamarind and teak.

But any sense of tranquillity is regularly shattered by convoys of heavily armed police speeding along the one-lane National Highway 16 that cuts through Danteweda, the heart of the Maoist revolt.

The rebels control large swathes of forest north of the highway, a “liberated zone” where their state within a state collects tax and conducts trials as a first step in their ultimate goal of overturning capitalist India.

According to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the rebels are a “virus” and the biggest single threat to the country.

As the government struggles to keep the grindingly poor tribal villagers who live a world away from India’s economic boom out of the ranks of the Maoists, some 50,000 people have been driven into state-run relief camps.

In the largest, Dornapal, 18,000 villagers who once lived in tiny hamlets spread spaciously over acres of land are crowded into a sprawling shanty of mud huts with tin roofs.

Some camp residents say they fled their homes for fear of the rebels, who first made inroads by fighting for better prices for villagers who earn a meagre $50 a year gathering leaves used in Indian cigarettes.

But the Maoists also beat or killed those who flouted their orders.

“They wanted to make the village their own, and we had to do what they told us to do,” said Lakmu, a boy in his late teens who, like everyone spoken to in the camp, asked for his full name not to be used.

But others said they were hounded out of their villages by police and members of the state-backed Salwa Judum which local leaders translate as “peace movement” but which observers say is little more than hired guns.

“The police and people beat us. They said we gave the Maoists shelter,” said Dharma, an elderly resident of Bhairamgarh camp, adding that the rebels demanded food whenever they passed through his village.

Some locals said they were forced to go on Salwa Judum marches, where they saw police and camp residents burning houses and were threatened with the same fate.

The local police are afraid, too.

“We are getting hunted,” Dantewada police chief Rahul said.

The police official says he commands security forces of only 4,000, along with 1,800 temporary village recruits, against a Maoist army of 5,000 backed by a network of 15,000 supporters.

Policemen are regularly killed in ambushes and last month nearly 300 prisoners broke out of Dantewada prison — including accused Maoists.

“We’re at the receiving end,” Sharma said. “Look at the state of the police — they’re terrified.” But perhaps no one here is as afraid as the villagers, forced to choose sides in a cauldron of suspicion.

“We used to be together. Now some of us are on one side and some of us on the other. And both have guns,” said special police officer Ramesh, 22, adding that the Maoists particularly target tribals like him who guide the police.

“We are a worm that has a chicken grabbing at it from both ends.”—AFP