End of Indian Maoists?

Five months to go, since the Home Minister Amit Shah, commonly known among hardcore BJP loyalists in Delhi as Modi's Chanakya, promised the nation that by March 2026 India would be completely free from Maoist terror. It was not an offhand remark but a calibrated assertion—one that echoed through the ranks of India's paramilitary forces and state police units spread across the dense jungles of Bastar, Bijapur, and Sukma.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

The claim has since been repeated with ritualistic certainty in official briefings, as if the eradication of a 60-year-old insurgency could be reduced to a deadline. Meanwhile, last week brought a remarkable spectacle in Maharashtra: over two hundred Maoists, many with heavy bounties on their heads, surrendered in a choreographed display of contrition, their weapons neatly arrayed before television cameras. These men and women, once fugitives of the state, are now set to be redeployed—ironically—as auxiliaries to help vanquish those who refuse to yield. India's long war with itself is entering its most paradoxical phase.

The story of the Maoist movement once grandly envisioned as the "protracted people's war" is as much a chronicle of rebellion as of betrayal. What began in 1967 in Naxalbari, a small village in West Bengal, as an agrarian uprising inspired by Mao Zedong's revolutionary template, metastasised over the decades into a vast subterranean network stretching from Andhra Pradesh to Bihar.

For much of the 2000s, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) exercised de facto control over territories larger than some European states, levying taxes, running kangaroo courts, and filling the vacuum left by indifferent governance. By 2010, the movement had reached its zenith—over 2,000 violent incidents were recorded that year, and more than a thousand lives were lost. The Indian state, in turn, responded with its own brand of counterinsurgency-part developmental, part punitive, and often extrajudicial.