NAINITAL: A government vehicle was set on fire at Dhari village of Nainital district early on Wednesday morning by persons suspected to have Maoist leanings. Posters and banners were also found in the area warning voters to boycott the upcoming state assembly elections and exhorting them to “wage war against corrupt regimes”.“Such elements get active around election time to get attention. People with Maoist leanings are very few in number here and don’t have the organizational network to influence elections. The matter is being investigated,” Uttarakhand DGP M A Ganapathy told TOI.Girish Chandra Arya, a homeguard on duty at the Dhari tehsil building noticed suspicious activities by some persons on Tuesday night, which he informed about to tehsildar Nawazish Khalik."I saw some people writing objectionable slogans on a wall at around 9.30pm after which I informed senior officials. The culprits were behaving in a threatening manner. Later, at about 2:30 am, a vehicle was set ablaze by them," said Arya.The incident triggered a flurry of activity by the administration and police. Deputy inspector-general of police, along with the district magistrate and other officials rushed to the spot. Combing operations in the region are in full swing and heavy police force has been deployed at sensitive spots. The DM has issued a show cause notice to the tehsildar asking why no action was taking despite the home guard’s warning.The posters and banners were put up by Communist Party of India (Maoist) which is considered as an insurgent communist party in India and aims to overthrow the government of the country through ‘people's war’.Written in Hindi with red paint on the walls of various government buildings including the tehsil office, a veterinary hospital, irrigation department building and many private shops and houses, the slogans allegedly appealed to the people to wage war against the “rich, corrupt and affluent”. Many slogans like ‘Janyudh me shamil ho’ (Participate in people’s war), ‘Shoshak shasak ko maar bhagane ka ek hi raasta, janyudh ka rasta’ (People’s war is the only way to eliminate the exploitative ruling class), ‘Ameeron ki jaagir nahi ye jal jungle hamara hai’ (Forests and water belong to us, not the rich) were written on the walls, banners and posters which were later taken down by the police and the administration.Maoist activities had been noticed in the state since year 2004. In 2005, the state police had reportedly unearthed a training camp in the forest of Lalkuan in Nainital district in 2005. In 2010, UP police had arrested Rajendra Fulara, a Maoist leader, who was trained in Uttarakhand in 2005. In April 2015, some posters were found in Someshwar and Almora towns slamming the Modi government. In May 2014, the police held four persons of ‘ Krantikari Janwadi Morcha ’, a Maoist frontal organization in Almora district.In 2008, the then chief minister, BC Khanduri, expressed his concerns over Maoist activities along the Uttarakhand-Nepal border in relation with the Pancheswar dam project.