Insurgency at its End

Determined efforts by the central and state governments led to the Naxalbari revolt fizzling out soon. But the movement spread to states like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh in the next two decades. Around that time, a split in the Communist Party of Nepal led to the creation of the CPN (Maoist) and it launched an armed rebellion in 1996. By the turn of the 21st century, the Maoists started boasting about their “liberation war” from “Pashupathi to Tirupati”.

One important feature of Maoism — or Naxalism, as it became popularly known in India — until that time was that it essentially remained a violent political and ideological struggle, with its bases in urban academic centres and remote rural areas. It called itself the “people’s war” group and succeeded in building an urban support base of academics, journalists and a few public personalities, who later acquired notoriety as “urban Naxals”. For the states, the movement largely remained a law-and-order challenge. In the 1980s and ’90s, successive governments in Andhra Pradesh used effective policing measures like large-scale arrests and neutralisation of “dalams”, the underground groups of armed rebels, to crush the movement. The Greyhounds, a special police force created by Andhra Pradesh in 1989, played a phenomenal role in eliminating the Naxal menace from the state in just a decade.

The effective counter-terror capability of the state forced the movement’s leadership to change its tactics in the early 2000s. In 2004, two prominent Naxal groups — People’s War and Maoist Communist Centre — decided to join hands to form CPI-Maoist. From a radical political movement, Naxalism was transformed into a military movement. Platoons, companies and battalions of well-trained armed guerillas replaced small and localised “dalams” targeting so-called “class enemies” like government servants and politicians. Area domination, or “liberated zones”, became its new tactic and it started engaging with security forces directly.

The Dandakaranya region, a densely forested area covering almost half of the newly created state of Chhattisgarh, and parts of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra became the Maoists’ bastion. At its peak in 2010, the Maoist movement controlled almost 20,000 sq km of territory. With weapons and money flowing from neighbouring countries and domestic loot and extortion, the movement grew into the second-most lethal challenge to the Indian state after terrorism in J&K. The first two decades of the new century saw Maoist terror claiming more than 10,000 lives.

The UPA government realised the enormity of the challenge but it lacked the will to tackle it militarily. After the Modi government came to power in 2014, things changed drastically. The three-pronged approach it adopted – strong counterterror measures, effective Centre-state coordination, and a push to developmental activities in Maoist-controlled areas – has yielded major success. Maoist violence has come down by 73 per cent as its influence reduced from 126 districts across 10 states in 2013 to 38 districts in 2024.

More than 30 battalions (30,000 personnel) of police and paramilitary forces are engaged in counter-terror operations in Bastar today. Dozens of forward operating bases (FOBs) came up inside the difficult jungle terrain and reduced Maoist control to less than 5,000 sq. km. The Modi government has infused more than Rs 3,000 crore for anti-Maoist operations providing access to the latest weapons and technology. FOBs are helping take roads and other infrastructure inside Maoist-controlled areas, forcing the guerillas to retreat further. Unable to withstand the pressure or enticed by the rewards offered by the state, more than 2,000 Maoist cadres have surrendered in the last decade.

PM Manmohan Singh once called Maoism “the single biggest internal security threat”. Today, it has become considerably feeble, waiting to be knocked out completely through determined state action. It took just a couple of decades for communist extremism to capture state power in Russia and China. However, in India, five decades of armed struggle did not bring the Maoists anywhere close to that objective. The failure of communist ideology globally, coupled with the failure of their operational tactics in India, is causing disillusionment within Maoist ranks.

Having succeeded in the Northeast and J&K in eliminating terrorism, Amit Shahwill continue to push for the eradication of Maoism. It is sure to fade away. But “vigilance” should be the watchword.