Like their fellow Maoists in Peru’s Shining Path, the Naxalites are capable of great cruelty. Though their cadres use guns, bows and arrows, and even spears to fight the security forces, they prefer the sickle when killing and mutilating alleged informers and traitors. -Local militias raised to fight the Maoists have been equally brutal, driving tens of thousands of people from their homes.

If you read the Indian papers, the drumbeat of Maoist attacks -begins to sound like the news from Iraq or Afghanistan: a police fort overwhelmed here, a Land Rover blown up by a landmine there, an oil pipeline ruptured, another official assassinated. Nevertheless, India’s spreading Maoist insurgency has had remarkably little coverage abroad, even though the insurgency cost some 1,400 lives in 2007 and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared in 2006 that it is “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country”.

This was a shocking statement in light of the ongoing Kashmir conflict or the horrors of the Sikh insurgency in the Punjab in the early 1980s and the fact that police stations are periodically torched and mobs fired on in other areas of India, including in states with no on-going insurgencies. For example, on May 26 of this year, police gunned down 15 demonstrators from the Gujjar caste as they assaulted a station in Rajasthan. Last year, West Bengal police and armed activists of the ruling Left Front government killed at least 14 peasants during a demonstration against the establishment of a special economic zone in Nandigram near Calcutta.