Bihar : Maoists ban mobile phones among cadres

Maoists leaders in Bihar have banned their cadres from using mobile phones and asked them to work out an alternative communication system or stick to the traditional method of hiring messengers to transfer information.

The order comes in the wake of the arrest of ten Maoist leaders whose whereabouts were tracked by the police through their mobile phones.

The Bihar-Jharkhand special area committee of the banned outfit Communist Party of India-Maoist has banned its cadres from using mobile phones. Lal Chingari, the Maoist mouthpiece, warns its cadres, "Don't use it and never call on any outfit leader's cell phone." A circular to this effect has also been issued among the CPI (Maoist) cadres.

As many as ten Maoist leaders have been arrested in the last three years after the police tracked them down through their mobile phones.According to a report in Lal Chingari, between September 2004 and June 2007, five special area committee members and five regional committee members of Bihar-Jharkhand CPI (Maoist) have been arrested.