NEW DELHI, India — Suspected communist rebels bombarded a police post in the remote jungles of eastern India with gunfire, hand grenades and petrol bombs yesterday, killing at least 49 people in one of the bloodiest attacks of the decades-long insurgency, officials said.The pre-dawn assault was the latest in a series of brazen attacks by the rebels, who hold immense sway over a wide swath of grindingly poor forest communities and farming villages largely left out of India's economic boom.

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

Equipped with rifles, hand grenades and homemade petrol bombs, the Maoists surrounded a remote police post around 2.30 a.m. and appear to have caught the 79 officers there by surprise, said police officer N.K. Swarnkar. At least 49 were killed and another 12 wounded.

Before fleeing with weapons stolen from the post, the attackers scattered land mines around the area to stop the surviving officers from giving chase, Swarnkar said.

By midday, however, police reinforcements had reached the post and were fanning out into the jungle to search for the attackers.

The post is located near isolated village of Rani Bodli in the state of Chattisgarh, 930 miles southeast of New Delhi, and Swarnkar cautioned that it could be days before the full details of the attack emerge.

"There's no direct communication at all with the area yet," he said in a telephone interview from Ranchi, the state capital. "It's an extremely remote, heavily forested area."

The forests of central India have provided a haven for the rebels since the insurgency erupted in 1967 in the village of Naxalbari in eastern India.

The rebels quickly came to be known as the Naxalites, and their rallying cry of land and jobs resonated among the rural poor, especially central and eastern India's indigenous peoples, who have long lived on some of the country's richest mineral deposits and amid its largest timber reserves but rarely benefited from them.

After festering for decades with small attacks here and there, the insurgency is now spread across 13 of India's 28 states and the rebels are believed to have about 6,000 fighters in an increasingly well-armed force.

Nowadays, the Naxalites literally control the night in many isolated rural areas. Dissenters are murderously punished in so-called peoples' courts, taxes are clandestinely collected and villagers are often forced to attend propaganda rallies.

The fight, meanwhile, has become steadily more brutal over the past two years, with the insurgents relentlessly targeting police and officials, and an anti-Maoist militia created by the government helping the security forces hunt down the rebels.

Human rights groups say the militia, called the Salwa Judum, has helped the government push nearly 50,000 people from their villages into squalid tent camps.

The rights groups also say the rebels and the militia also routinely targeted civilians suspected of aiding the other side. The deadliest Naxalite attack to date came on Feb. 28, 2006, when they killed at least 50 people returning from a rally held by the anti-Maoist militia in Chattisgarh.

Two months later, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the rebellion as "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country."

A major reason behind the alarm raised by Singh and other officials is that India remains a long way from tackling the poverty at the root of the rebellion.

The economic boom here has created an immense amount of wealth, but most of it is concentrated among urbanites who have benefited from the capital- and skill-intensive industries that are thriving, such as the information technology an industry.

But those industries have created relatively few jobs — the IT industry, for example, employs only a few hundred thousand people in a country of 1.03 billion, two thirds of whom are peasants who depend on farming and remain stuck on the margins of Indian society.

Those peasants form the rebels' core constituency, and "there has to be response to the Naxalites that includes solving the genuine problems of these people," said Ajit Doval, a former top domestic intelligence official.

Still, there's little fear here that the Naxalites will anytime soon become a major threat to the state like their ideological brethren in neighbouring Nepal, who helped topple the country's dictatorial king last year before signing a peace deal.

Although there are believed to be limited links between the two groups and the rebellions were both rooted in poverty and a sense of disenfranchisement, the specific causes behind each were unrelated and the insurgencies have remained separate.