Maoists must be pressurised to come forward for talks, says G.K.Pillai

New Delhi, June 29 (ANI): Former Home Secretary Gopal Krishna Pillai has urged the need to act tough on the Maoists, saying the ultras need to be "pressurised" into coming forward for discussions and to surrender.

Addressing a seminar on 'state's response to hostage situations' here on Thursday, Pillai said that current plan of action to tackle the Maoists would take another two years to reach the root of the problem.

" They (Maoists) will not come for talks till we put our act together, which is taking place but I think it will take another two to three years before they will be under pressure," Pillai said.

He said the Maoists would come to talk only under pressure.

"When the top leadership, almost one third or 40 percent of politburo, is either behind bars or killed, and they feel the pressure, they will come for talks. That's the experience we have seen. They are still not under pressure, you can expect again for the next few years violence to go up," Pillai warned.

Commenting on the recent hostage crisis, with Maoists kidnapping two Italian tourists and government officials, Pillai said the government should develop a hostage policy to deal with such threats.

"I must confess that we don't have a real policy unlike in the hijacking of an aircraft where we have a policy of what is to be done," he said.

He urged the need to send out tough messages to the Maoists resorting to taking people hostages.

" The clear message which has to go to Maoists is that if you ask for A, B, C to be released for releasing a district collector or something, they should be told that if something happens to the district collector, you have signed a death warrant for these other three too. The moment you give that message to them, they will not ask for anybody's release because they know these three people have been marked," Pillai said.

Former Madhya Pradesh chief secretary Nirmala Buch, who was the mediator for the release of Sukhna collector Alex Paul Menon, said that such hostage crisis and the overall Maoist crisis can only be subdued by good governance.

"I think it has to be dealt with better governance. Governance is an issue, governance is very wide term and people must be able to know where to go for their problems and the solutions," Buch said. (ANI)