The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) released its Global Terrorism Index 2023 on Tuesday. In its report, the organization listed the twenty most deadly terrorist organizations globally. 

It is pertinent to note that India’s Communist Party of India (CPI) made it to the list in 12th place. The IEP, in its report, claimed that in 2022, the CPI was responsible for 39 deaths and 61 attacks. It also alleged that the group also injured 30 people. Interestingly, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is below the CPI in the deadliest terror group 2022 list of the IEP.  LeT, a banned group in India, was responsible for the death of 8 people, injuring 38 people and carrying out six attacks in 2022.

According to the IEP, the list is topped by Islamic State (IS) which was allegedly responsible for the death of 1,045 people, and 410 attacks and injuring 644 people in 2022. 

According to GTI 2023 report, India ranks 13 on the list of nations with the impact of terrorism. India's score is 7.175, while Afghanistan which ranks no. 1 on the list, has a score of 8.822. On the other hand, Uruguay, South Africa, Rwanda and Bahrain are the least terrorism-affected countries, according to the IEP, with a score of 0.826 each.

The GTI is based on data from Dragonfly’s TerrorismTracker database and uses December 31, 2022 as the cut-off date. Incidents are only included in the dataset if they are consistent with TerrorismTracker’s definition of terrorism, which means recorded incidents may vary from other databases.

In a report, OpIndia stated that it is possible that IEP got confused with the banned communist parties, as the Communist Party of India is a political party. 

As per the Ministry of Home Affairs website, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) all its formations and front organizations and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), People’s War, All formations and front organizations were banned in India.  

The Election Commission of India recognizes the CPI as a National Party. In 2019, the ECI questioned the party’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha elections and warned that its national party status would be revoked if a similar performance is repeated. 

They were also warned in 2014, but ECI amended rules in 2019 allowing CPI and two other parties to retain national party status until after the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections. That means if the party fails to perform in Lok Sabha 2024 elections, it may no longer be deemed a national party.

Notably, in 2019, a US govt report on global terrorism ranked the Communist Party of India (Maoist) as the 6th most dangerous terror organisation in the world. In 2018, the US state department, based on the 2017 data, declared the Maoists as the world’s fourth-largest terror organisation.

Image courtesy: Vision of Humanity