A raid on an Indian police post by Nepal's Maoist rebels and arrests of their comrades on Indian soil could be indications that a bloody revolt in that country could be spilling over.
A group of armed men, including some Nepalis, overran the post and took away weapons last month in thick forests in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, which shares a long border with Nepal, the head of a special Indian police unit said.
The attack on the police post came shortly after 12 Maoists, including some middle-level operatives, were arrested from a house in Patna, Bihar's capital, along with a huge haul of explosives, ammunition and Marxist literature.
"This is the first organized attack of its kind near the border and the most serious threat ever," said Deputy Inspector General Vinay Kumar Singh, the head of a unit whose task is to put down left-wing extremism in Bihar.
"We are simply not prepared to face the Maoists of Nepal," he said late on Wednesday.
More than 10,000 people have died in Nepal since the rebels began a campaign in 1996 to replace the constitutional monarchy with communist rule.
Bihar, one of India's poorest and most lawless states, has its own clutch of outlawed radical-left guerrilla groups who have helped the rebels with training, shelter, medical facilities and arms.
But the Nepali Marxists are not known to have carried out strikes on Indian soil before.
"The day they start full scale operations into Indian territory, we will find ourselves very inadequate," Singh said. "We don't have enough police stations, we don't have enough weapons to tackle them."
Analysts have long warned that an unstable Nepal, sand-wiched between India and China, would turn into a security nightmare for both Asian giants.
With the Maoists controlling a vast swath of mountainous Nepal, there is also concern that the desperately poor nation could become a haven for international militant groups.
Nepal and India share a long and open border which thousands of people cross each day. Kathmandu has repeatedly urged New Delhi to increase surveillance along the border and to crack down on rebel hideouts.
Singh said the Maoists caught in Patna told their landlord they were students. The landlord later said he had little reason to doubt them because Nepalis are rep-resented in almost every walk of life in India.
Since 2001, police in Bihar have arrested 42 Nepali Maoists, including some who had come for treatment of wounds sustained in the fighting in the mountain kingdom. Others made the trip to deepen ties with left-wing groups, including in southern India.
Singh said guerrilla leaders in Nepal and India had often spoken of a "red corridor," stretching from the Himalayan kingdom to large swaths of the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh.
"We all laughed 10 years ago at the red corridor. Nobody is laughing anymore," he said.
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