Clash in eastern India kills 49

An hours-long battle between police and Maoist rebels armed with machine guns and mortars ended with the deaths of 25 rebels and 24 police, authorities said Wednesday.

The rebels ambushed more than 100 policemen and the gunbattle lasted more than five hours in Dantewada district of Chattisgarh state, said Rajendra Kumar Vij, inspector general of state police.

At least 25 communist rebels were also killed in the gunbattle Monday night, but their bodies were yet to be recovered, he said.

The rebel assault was the latest in a series in the region, where widespread poverty has fueled a lengthy insurgency by militants who demand land and jobs for agricultural laborers and the poor. The movement claims inspiration from Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong.

After festering for decades with scattered small attacks, the insurgency is now spread across 13 of India's 28 states and the rebels are believed to have 10,000-15,000 fighters in an increasingly well-armed force.

There's little fear the insurgency could destabilize all of India. But the Maoists have proven to be a major force stretching from India's central hinterlands to its east coast, and their attacks are growing more deadly.

In March, 55 policemen and government-backed militiamen were killed when up to 500 rebels descended on an isolated Chhattisgarh police station. Over the past two years, nearly 2,000 people have been killed.

Monday's fighting took place in Elampatti-Regadgatta jungle of Dantewada district, nearly 350 miles south of Raipur, the capital of Chattisgarh state.

The police team had gone to attack suspected rebel hideouts, but they were ambushed by the insurgents, Vij said.

The rebels refuse entry to government forces and most outsiders into their territory, where they are effectively the government.

The rebels, known as Naxalites because of the Naxalbari region where the movement was born, are mainly active in six of India's 28 states _ Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Karnataka, Orissa and Chattisgarh.

While India's economic boom has created immense amounts of wealth, the prosperity hasn't reached most of India's 1.1 billion, two-thirds of whom are farmers. It's those peasants who have joined the insurgents in their fiery calls for land and jobs.