Suspected Maoists, including women, staged a demonstration at Kambamala near Thalappuzha in the district here on Saturday noon.
The seven-member team, including three women, reached the area around 1.30 p.m. on the day and they spent nearly 20 minutes with workers of the Kambamala tea estate, a rehabilitation project of the Kerala Forest Development Corporation for Sri Lankan refugees, District Police Chief R. Ilango told The Hindu.
They covered their face with clothes and four of them carried guns, Mr. Ilango said. They pasted posters on the walls of a toilet block in the estate and raised slogans before returning to the adjacent forest under the North Wayanad forest division, he said.
The posters, pasted on behalf of the Kabani Dalam, an armed force unit of banned Communist Party of India (Maoists), said the Tamil-speaking workers in the estate were not Sri Lankans, whereas they were the citizens of the country now.
It asked the people to challenge physically the officials who would reach the area to collect details of the workers for the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
It also called upon the people to express solidarity with the protests launched by various organisations against the NRC and Citizens (Amendment) Act (CAA). They also wanted them to foil the attempt of the government to evict the workers from the area on behalf of the tourism industry.
The police attached to the Thalappuzha and Mananthavady stations made a quick search in the region. The Kambamala tea estate, bordering Kottiyoor and Periya forest ranges in Wayanad and Kannur districts respectively, was started in the 1970s to rehabilitate refugees from Sri Lanka, and close to 200 refugee families have been staying in the estate.
A few weeks ago a group of Maoists vandalised a newly constructed resort on the fringes of the Meppadi forest range at Anakkunjimoola, near Attamala, in the district.
