"WE WILL FREE INDIA OF THE NAXAL THREAT BY MARCH 2026"

When Amit Shah took over as the Union Minister of Home in 2019, Left-wing Extremism was considered an even bigger threat than Jammu and Kashmir.

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On a Sunday afternoon, just as the India-Pakistan match began in Dubai, Shah sat down with Group Editorial Director Raj Chengappa and Senior Associate Editor Rahul Noronha in the drawing room of his Krishna Menon Marg residence in Delhi and gave his most detailed interview on how the Modi government is combating the Naxal threat. Over the course of the next one hour, without once glancing at the TV to check the score, Shah methodically outlined his government’s multipronged strategy to entirely eliminate the threat of Naxals in India by March 2026. Asked what gave him the confidence to set such a stiff deadline for an issue festering for over five decades, Shah shot back, “Confidence by itself doesn’t eliminate Naxalism. I made the statement based on the work already done.” Excerpts:

Q. When you took over as the Union home minister in 2019, what was your assessment of the threat from Naxals or Left-wing Extremism (LWE) and what strategy did you devise to eliminate it in the country?

After taking over as Union home minister in 2019, I was told that the Naxal or LWE issue was even bigger than Kashmir. In a way, the disgruntlement over the lack of development could be seen as a cause of Naxalism. Since Independence until the 1990s, our nation suffered a paucity of resources. Systemic development was not possible and, as a result, these regions remained laggards in terms of progress. The vaampanthi vichaardhara (Naxalite ideology) found these regions fertile ground to plant the idea that violence could lead to development. And they incited people in these areas to resort to violence. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we broadly devised a four-pronged strategy to replace weapons and violence with development and trust in the so-called Red Corridor that extended from Pashupatinath in Nepal to Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh.