A day before the second round of India’s national elections, Maoist rebels briefly hijacked a train with at least 300 people on board and drove it to a remote destination before fleeing into the forest.

About 200 rebels boarded a train in the insurgency-hit eastern Indian state of Jharkhand Wednesday morning and forced it to Latehar district before fleeing, local police officials said.

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The hijacking drama lasted a few hours and no one was injured in the attack. "All the passengers have been released and they are safe," Sarvendu Tathagat, a local government official in Jharkhand, told the AFP. "They (the rebels) left the train and fled into the jungle."

Latehar station is about 105 kilometres northwest from Jharkhand state’s capital Ranchi.

Reporting from New Delhi, FRANCE 24’s Sebastien Daguerressar said the latest attack was a show of force on the eve of the second phase of India’s staggered national elections.

“They were calling for a boycott of the elections,” said Daguerressar, referring to the Maoist rebels. “Since the first day of voting polls, they have carried out their threat to disrupt the election process by attacking polling booths.”

Latehar voted in the first phase on April 16, with further voting in the Jharkhand state set to take place on Thursday. The rebels have called for a general strike.

At least 16 people were killed in Maoist violence during the first phase of the national elections, including nine in Latehar district and five election officials in the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh.

“Naxalite” threat

India's been facing a Maoist insurgency since the late 1960s. The insurrection has been growing in recent years and is active in more than half of the country's 29 states.

“It is a group that has a fair amount of resources (which) has been obtaining local support for the last five or six years,” says Uday Bhaskar, security expert and former director of the New Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis.

Jharkhand is a densely forested, predominantly tribal area. Like other underdeveloped regions in central-eastern states of India, it has been hard hit by the Maoist insurgency.

The Maoist insurgency started as a peasant rebellion in the eastern Indian village of Naxalbari in 1967 and has now spread to a large swath in the central and eastern parts of the country. Across India, the movement is commonly referred to as the Naxalite insurgency

Their avowed aim was to help uplift the conditions of poor landless peasants and tribal peoples.

“This is linked to the kind of social economic deprivation and the fact that the Indian state has not been able to deliver social economic justice,” continues Bhaskar.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described Maoist violence as India's biggest internal security threat. Some 500 civilians and police were killed in insurgent clashes last year.