Raipur, Sep 26 (IANS) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Baliram Kashyap’s two sons were shot by suspected Maoists in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district Saturday, killing one of them, police said.
“Maoists fired several rounds at Kashyap’s sons, Dinesh and Tansen, when they were at a temple performing Mahashtami Durga Puja in their ancestral village Gharguda in Bastar district,” a top police official told IANS.

The site of the attack lies 300 km south of here.

Four Maoists, described by eyewitnesses as minors, opened fire minutes after Kashyap’s another son Kedar, a state cabinet minister, left the temple with his security guards.

“The attackers managed to escape. We have alerted police stations across the Bastar district and launched a massive search to apprehend them,” T.J. Longkumer, inspector general of police of Bastar range, told reporters.

According to a family source: “The two were rushed to Maharani Hospital in Jagdalpur with multiple bullet wounds, where Tansen succumbed to his injuries. Dinesh is reportedly out of danger after an operation.”

Veteran tribal leader Kashyap, a four-term MP who was also a state minister in undivided Madhya Pradesh, and his family members have been on the hit-list of the Maoists for years, mainly for their open support to a controversial government-backed civil militia movement Salwa Judum.

Salwa Judum, launched in June 2005, aims to flush out the Maoists from the state’s mineral rich Bastar region where the Leftist radicals have held sway since the late 1980s.