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Tuesdays news that Maoists in Jharkhand have attacked several rail installations,cellular towers and block development offices in Bihar should come as little surprise. After all,the Maoists,for all their talk of representing the poor and excluded,have consistently focused on maintaining the exclusion of the poor from Indias growth. Mondays news,that Maoists had laid siege to the Grand Trunk Road near Giridih and Dhanbad in Jharkhand as well as to NH-77 elsewhere in the state,was even more shocking. All reports from the scene stressed that the violence was protracted,that it disrupted traffic across a distance as well as for some time,and that a mob of about a hundred Maoists burned trucks and attacked their drivers.

Such stories are all too common,and certainly not limited to the Maoists. The truth is that immature politics is causing our highways to be increasingly insecure. Since the Amarnath and Gurjjar agitations,there has been an upsurge in the level of violence on Indias roads. Yes,the big-name agitations get noticed a lot; but they are far from alone. A blockage,and the fear of violence,imperils road-users regardless of whether the Maoists,the VHP,or some less-organised mob is carrying it out. Consider western Uttar Pradesh,the industrial hinterland of the national capital. In September alone,there were half a dozen incidents in which major arteries were blocked by various mobs. Towards the end of the month,for example,a DTC bus was set afire and motorists stoned by people protesting the reopening of the government school where five girls had been killed earlier that month in a stampede. A week earlier highways across the area were para-

lysed by lawyers demanding a local high court bench for Western UP. Earlier,UP government employees had similarly held to ransom traffic on highways around Kanpur. This is a pattern repeated across the country,even in supposedly business-friendly states. Gujarat has seen some of the most sustained attacks,and appears especially prone to seeing road-blocking as a tool of protest,whether in Saurashtra against the price of fertiliser or even,recently,against the biased admission decisions of MS University in Baroda.

This,never a legitimate form of protest,cannot be allowed to gain greater acceptability. But it appears that cave-ins to agitations that have used such means have emboldened pretty much everybody with a grudge. It is always difficult to try a mob; but the individuals who obstruct and vandalise must be called to account,and held responsible for the damage. Our highways must keep moving.