WINNING THE WAR

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MODI GOVERNMENT'S DETERMINED BID TO END THE NAXAL THREAT, INDIA'S GREATEST INTERNAL SECURITY CHALLENGE

- RAJ CHENGAPPA and RAHUL NORONHA

It is early March, spring is in the air and the mahua trees are in full bloom, their reddish hue a striking contrast to the luminescent green of the sal forest in the Bastar region of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. From the window of the BSF (Border Security Force) chopper hovering above, the river Indravati looks like a blue ribbon wrapped around a brilliant tapestry of nature. The serenity, though, is deceptive. In the forbidding jungles below, central and state armed police forces are engaged in a grim, bloody battle against a determined band of violent left-wing extremists (LWE), or Naxals, who posed the biggest internal security challenge in India for the past six decades.

It is a war that has exacted a dismaying toll. In the past 20 years, 2,344 security personnel have lost their lives fighting Naxals—more than four times the number of Indian army personnel killed in the 1999 Kargil War. In fact, more armed personnel have died fighting Naxals than battling terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir, which till recently was the country’s other big internal security threat. The civilian toll is extremely high, too—6,258 people have been killed in Naxal attacks in the past two decades alone.

At its peak, the Naxal threat impacted 80 million people, mainly tribals. It straddled 10 states along a narrow Red Corridor running across Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telan gana, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Or from Pashu pati in Nepal to Tirupati in Andhra, as Union home minister Amit Shah put it. The tide has been turning, though, in the past one year or so as the Modi government gains the upper hand in the fight against the arch-enemy of the Indian State, shrinking the threat to a much smaller amoebic blob of red confined largely to the Bastar region, where the fiercest battles are still on.