On Naxalism

Naxalism, or Maoism, or as the government calls it, Left-wing Extremism, is on the wane today. It is apposite to learn about it's origins, causes, effects and future and our response to it.

“To fail to exercise this legitimate coercive authority is, thus, not an act of non-violence or of abnegation; it is not a measure of our humanity or civilisation. It is, rather, an intellectual failure and an abdication of responsibility that randomises violence, alienating it from the institutional constraints of the State, and allowing it to pass into the hands of those who exercise it without the discrimination and the limitations of law that govern it's employment by the State.”

~KPS Gill

Image credits- Times of India

Left-wing extremism is a threat that the Indian Republic has struggled with since it's very inception. The first round of clashes happened as early as the late 1940's in the princely state of Hyderabad. But it was the second bout that started in the 1960's and which has since continued till date and has seriously threatened the very integrity of the Republic.

In the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, and the splintering of the communist party in India, Charu Majumdar wrote the Historic Eight Documents. These eight documents became the ideological foundation of the Naxal insurgency and call for spontaneous rebellion against the bourgeoisie in typical Maoist fashion. The insurgency itself was the direct result of the Naxalbari uprising of peasants against local landlords. The Naxal movement, although crushed in West Bengal by 1970 with the help of the military, quickly spread across a large portion of the country, calling for a protracted people's war to overthrow the Indian State.

At it's peak, the so-called Red corridor where these naxalite had spread to around 180 districts by the late 2000's with and across all eastern, central and southern states. It was the 'single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country' according to the then Prime Minister.

Among the various parties and militias that constitute the larger naxal movement, CPI(Maoist) is the largest of them all, responsible for about 80% of all the naxal violence in 2012, according to a PIB press release and has been outlawed by the govt. of India. Ideologically, it supports Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The unparalleled success of the guerrilla people’s war fought by the Chinese communists under the leadership of Mao Tse-Tsung against the mighty Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek had such an impact on Indian naxals that they proclaimed Mao as their intellectual leader and seek to follow his footsteps by bringing about an Indian mrevolution along the lines of the Chinese revolution. This is what the CPI(Maoist) calls the ‘new democratic revolution’. According to a press statement, if they manage to seize power, the countryside will remain the "centre of gravity" of the party's work, while urban work will only complement it. This is understandable since they are essentially rural peasant guerrillas and will primarily have agrarian programme. They say they will be against 'imperialism', feudalism and "comprador bureaucratic capitalism”. They also support the ‘struggle of the nationalities for self-determination, including the right to secession’ which basically means that they are sympathetic to the cause of the various separatist movements in India. They already have a history of working with various secessionist groups in India. Although the historic precedent set by both Lenin and Mao in this regard is to support the secessionists during the armed struggle phase and then do exactly the opposite after they come to power. For example, Maoist China captured Tibet, and Lenin too annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to capture territory west of Russia which led the Polish-Soviet war, leading to the formation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic(s) while also philosophizing about imperialism and right of nations to self-determine. Stalin too waged the Winter war against Finland, which the USSR lost. So unless they are fanatically zealous about implementing Maoist ‘theory’, naxals supporting secessionist movements across India is just a ploy to weaken the State and this policy will be discarded if they come to power. But given that they have stuck with Maoist theory and methods despite decades of failure purely out of their devotion to Mao rather than for any practical reasons (if such reasons exist, the naxals haven’t talked about them publicly for us to know them), there’s still a possibility that they really might end up doing something as asinine as that. They also promise to fight against 'untouchability' and 'casteism' and women’s rights. They view India as a ‘multi-national country’, consider Indian Independence fake and the ruling bourgeois as comprador, and that India is semi-colonial and semi-feudal.

Policy-wise, some of their demands and promises are actually quite similar to those made by the communist parties that take part in the Parliamentary process in India, and even some that the Indian govt. itself has adopted and implemented. This is not to say that they are the same as the Indian govt. or even the mainstream communist parties. There still exist major differences between them. Land reforms, fair wage for labour etc. are examples of these policies, it can even be argued that these policies were pivotal in countering naxalism. Naxalism has been justified by elaborate claims of peasant-landlord dynamics, poverty, gender and caste discrimination, landlessness, oppression by the State and security forces and in the name of social justice. Although claiming to fight for the people, the naxal movement has harmed common people like nothing else. Naxal activity has primarily (but not only) affected the eastern and southern states. Most of these states have lagged behind the other states economically and also perform terribly on educational, health and other important socio-economic indicators. They have thus been responsible for not only treason against the State, murders of civilian leaders, policemen, administrative officers and employees and attacks on security forces etc. But also, for betraying the just cause of the very people they claim to fight for. Maoists are well-renowned in naxalism-affected areas for extortions, stalling infrastructure projects and sexual exploitation of women (including their own female cadres). Abductions, sexual slavery, drug, arms and human trafficking, forceful recruitment of children as soldiers, informants and as human shields and running sham Kangaroo courts are other feathers in the cap of the Naxal. Quite weirdly, naxal commanders force their cadres to undergo vasectomies and abortions, it is as if they are nothing more than weapons to fight against the Indian State for them. They have also been reported to force marriage upon local tribal women and wife-swapping. They have tied up with the mafia and other terrorist groups. Responsible for killings of thousands of tribals, these self-styled defenders of peasants and tribals have become their bane.

The sheer amount of destruction, violence and death (of both civilians and security forces) unleashed by the naxals is not as surprising as it is harrowing, given the acceptance for violence for the attainment of their goals among the leftists. However, that doesn’t seem to explain the particularly high causalities in this long-drawn insurgency. It seems that the naxal has a relationship with violence that the extends beyond the scope of the needs of their unwanted revolution. Indeed, as Tilak D Gupta points out in Maoism in India: Ideology, Programme and Struggle, “the press statement as well as the CPI(Maoist) documents are keener to highlight the violent nature of it’s revolution than the revolutionary aims. This obsession with violence has birthed a vicious cycle where the naxal fighters increasingly rely on violence, brutality and fear to maintain their hold on the areas that they have captured and extract essential resources from the locals of those regions. The amount of losses incurred is truly staggering. More than 2500 security personnel and 4000 civilians. It is sad that a section of the Indian academia, media and civil society have decided to secretly or openly support and justify the actions of the naxals and then blamed the consequences on the Indian State as if it’s the right of the naxals to overthrow it. Such attempts at intellectually justifying naxalism through ouroboric logic should be seen and treated as high treason. It is seen that activists create much furore whenever an occasional allegation of human rights violations during anti-naxal operations surfaces, which is actually justified and the right thing to do, but they fail to produce noise at similar levels when naxals commit human rights violations, which should ideally have been the case for individuals who take the responsibility doing something about such excesses in their hands, especially in such sensitive matters. But the radio silence maintained by these champions of human rights and others in the media and ‘civil society’ etc. points towards political biases. Many of them would suggest that naxal fighters are a good enough replacement of the State. So at least in their eyes demands of holding the naxals responsible for their actions as much as they hold the Indian State should not come out as weird and silly. The truth however is not bounded by political biases and such glorification of naxal terrorism has led to ineffective action against them. This has led to the insurgency being drawn longer and longer. Such situations have made immense suffering of the tribals and other locals who were supposedly being liberated by these naxals to continue. Such conditions have forced the locals to form their own vigilante and self-protection groups, like the Salwa Judum, which they inevitably always do. The Salwa Judum was a spontaneous and self-initiated people’s resistance movement by the people of some 200 villages against the oppression of the Naxalites who were denying them basic rights like access to roads, forcing them to pay grain levies and stopping them from collecting Tendu leaves if they don’t pay extortion money. Salwa Judum was banned by the Supreme Court of India for human rights violations. Activists have long cried foul when innocent people were illegally and unjustly killed by certain criminal elements with the security forces by them in fake encounters by labelling them as Maoists but have nothing to say for the civilians who were killed by naxals and then labelled as informers of the police or other security forces. Clearly, the issue of human rights violations in these areas is very complex and can not be reduced to the meme of State committing oppression and violence on people of these regions, which is a cruel joke on the hapless victims of naxal terrorism. In fact, we can squarely blame these things on the naxals and their decision to wage war against the Indian State because those who go against the State monopoly of violence are traitors to the nation as the State is the will of the nation institutionalized. Violence against the State is violence against the people. So, it’s asinine to defend the actions of the naxals as a response to the oppression meted out by the Indian State, but the actions of the State should be seen as just and valid response to the bloodbath unleashed by the naxals in their sadist and murderous rampage. Of course, none of this justifies the human rights violations by the criminals in the State establishment or those in the contractor-moneylender-policeman-politician coterie, but it’s not even supposed to. What could have been solved by the protest and action limited within the confines of the democratic setup by the State ended up destroying the lives of lakhs, or indirectly, crores of people. If the security were full of criminal elements who committed excesses, then they were to be reformed, not destroyed, if the justice system was corrupt and inefficient it was to be reformed, not destroyed, if the State itself was corrupt or inefficient, then it was to be reformed, corrected and improved, not destroyed. It was asinine to seek to overthrow the govt. for things which could have been solved within the democratic process of the Republic, and if it was that these issues couldn’t have been solved without violent eruption of public anger, then it is also true that these issues haven’t been solved even now and judging from the past record of the naxals, they wouldn’t have been solved even if they have solved if they had managed to overthrow the govt. and capture power in India. Such fatuous beliefs are based on unfounded claims of the Indian State being discriminatory and exclusionary in nature. Destruction is easy but creation is difficult, especially when our standards are the absolute ideals. At the end, the State failures that they’ve represented as State policy have merely been excuses to do what the naxals did and to justify what they did. Though communists all over the world try to destroy their countries and create chaos so as to seize power amidst all the commotion, naxals have gone one step ahead by actively collaborating with foreign powers to wage war to literally bleed the country and people and then shamelessly hide behind the facade of human rights when it comes to facing the consequences of their actions.

Another important point to be noted is that although at various points in history the extent of naxal presence may have ranged geographically from the area around the LOC in Jammu and Kashmir in the north to Palakkad in Kerala in the south, the central theatre of naxal activity has been the eastern and central portion of the country. This region remains the most impoverished part of India and the states in this region perform terribly on educational, health and other important indicators. These states and have abysmal per capita incomes, lack ample basic infrastructure have very limited state capacity and presence. All this makes basic survival difficult and the breakdown of law and order more likely in these regions. Now those among the intelligentsia who justify naxalism blame the State for this poverty and material impoverishment of these regions and try to suggest that it is deliberate underdevelopment and intentional marginalisation by the State to keep these regions’ people poor and that naxalism is only a just and valid expression of the resentment that results from this economic discrimination and other forms of social discrimination within these regions. But this reasoning seems to be inconsistent and come from a place of bias and conviction instead of genuine observation. What explains the absence of naxal and/or other forms of left-wing extremism in other poor parts of the country, say rural Gujarat? These other parts are also equally socially stratified and discriminatory as the naxal-affected ones.What this means is that it is wrong to place the blame of naxal presence in these regions on just poverty and the prevailing social dynamics of the region, more so in today’s day and age. So, although poor material conditions indeed do contribute to rural Chattisgarh being the naxal base of operations and not rural Gujarat but it would be illogical to pin the blame on solely the poverty of Bastar. Thus, it will be wise to look at this from perspectives other than just economics or sociology of these places like Gupta seems to do when he says “struggles in Dandakaranya or those in the Jharkhand forests seek to combine class demands with that of self-identity, dignity and autonomy for the marginalised minority nationalities.” He’s wrong in both straight up declaring these marginalised communities as separate nationalities as well as in suggesting that this marginalisation is State-sponsored (which he does throughout his piece). Those communities are inextricably a part of the larger Indian national identity. This is wrongly pinning the blame on the State for the actions of certain elements within the State apparatus. It is erroneous and nonsensical to blame the State for their actions and project State failure as State policy. This is justifying the actions of the naxals in the name of discontent.

So, we must look for other factors which make the naxals choose these places to operate from, like geography. It is not a mere coincidence that the regions where the naxals have the most control and influence happen to be eastern and central India, which is covered in dense forests, hilly and remote and is difficult to access and move and navigate through. Naxals who often come from local communities have a relatively easy time travelling and hiding in these forests given their familiarity with the terrain and locations. All this and the State failure and incapacity to deliver in these areas and the resulting poverty which leads to discontent make these regions the ideal locations to set up their base of operations. The discontent of the locals is easily stirred up by the naxals and this makes them join the naxals, who also very often are forced by the naxals to join them when pursuance fails. These places in naxal parlance are called Compact Revolutionary Zone. The long-term strategy of the strategy as envisioned in the ‘Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution’ is to capture more and more rural areas and create more of the ‘base areas’ in the countryside and slowly encircle and capture urban areas through mass mobilisation. These base areas are also used as shelters for hiding after they’re done looting arms, munitions and other supplies from a police station or a security forces camp. This strategy appears to have been succeeding at one point when they had managed to hold sway in 180 districts, which was roughly 40% of India’s geography, spread across 12 states, affecting around 35% of the population and sitting on massive mineral reserves. They had also acquired tremendous support among the rural masses as was visible when CPI(Maoist) was briefly legalised and they organised a series of massive rallies between July to October 2004. The more well-read ones would notice that there is an uncanny similarity between this strategy of Indian naxals and that of the Chinese communists employed by them during the Chinese revolution. This again is no accident. The naxals really have forever wanted to do one thing, and that is to replicate the Chinese revolution in India, and here again they directly try to repeat what Mao did in China.

Mao introduced the concept of a Revolutionary base area, a local stronghold from where communist forces are to operate while they’re still in the early phases of their so-called ‘people’s war’. This base area should ideally be in a hilly or forested region where enemy forces are weak. Such an arrangement will help them exploit whatever small advantages they have as a small insurgency, like enjoying support from the local masses, bleeding the supply chain of the enemy and looting and capturing arms and other supplies from the enemy. This, according to Mao, would help a guerrilla force to fight successfully against a larger, more well-equipped enemy. This strategy was of paramount in making the communist forces the victors of the Chinese civil war. This strategy of creating and using base areas was adopted by the Vietnamese communists in Vietnam. But unlike the Chinese and the Vietnamese, the naxals never succeeded at gaining power through these methods.

Nevertheless, these ‘revolutionaries’ have time and again managed to halt infrastructure projects and stop economic development from reaching these remote areas. Often contractors signed up by the govt. to build roads and other essential infrastructure have their equipment and machinery burnt and destroyed if they fail to give the naxals extortion money for allowing construction. And these projects aren’t always massive mining or luxury projects by evil, greedy corporates that displaces the locals by the thousands as it is often depicted in the mainstream media when it comes to portraying such sensitive issues; more often than not, naxal attacks happen on things as basic as schools, hospitals, roads, railway properties and culverts. There is a deliberate attempt on the behalf of the naxals deny the people even the most basic of rights like education and health, cut off any attempts from the State to provide relief and render them vulnerable to poverty and starvation so as to create discontent among them. Business Standard reports, “Between 2001 and April 2014, Left-wing extremists unleashed numerous attacks on government buildings and infrastructure in several pockets of the state particularly in the stronghold, Bastar, destroying 113 schools, 75 panchayats and cultural buildings, four hospitals and 119 roads and culverts, as per documents from the local IB.” Not just this, often contractors sign deals with the govt. and then pay Maoists to burn their machinery. Academics like Gupta who softly suggest that the naxals are only fighting the oppression meted out by the ‘non-tribal contractor-trader-middleman clique that has oppressed and exploited the adivasis over the ages’ surprisingly have nothing to say about this contractor-Maoist clique that has kept these regions poor and underdeveloped and have made even basic sustenance difficult for many of the people living there. It needs to be pointed out again that they have conveniently misportrayed State inability as State policy. Probably, some of them would even dishonestly suggest that it is because of the demographics that these areas are being kept marginalised, i.e.- that because these places have large amounts of tribals and lower caste populations, the State policy is to keep them impoverished and underdeveloped and make them suffer. This is essentially the problem with such university academics and other naxal-sympathisers living in big cities who although are eager to question the State on it’s failures and wrongdoings simply turn a blind eye to the actions of the naxals that led to those situations and are seem to be mortally opposed to decisions or actions that can be taken upon any of the solutions necessary to break free of this cycle of violence started by the naxals. Their opposition to setting up of heavy industries and Tilak Gupta, for example, seems to be more offended at the fact that the govt. takes the ‘naxal menace’ as a serious threat, worries about 40% of the geographical area being affected by insurgency and aims to solve the ‘naxal problem’ using able security forces than at the fact that naxals have been responsible for the loss of the lives of several thousand Indian civilians, an example of which is the deaths of civilians caused by land mines planted by naxals because the naxals ‘help the adivasi peasantry or dalit labouring classes in some very backward regions to emerge as an independent political force freed from the influence of the affluent landowning classes’. It takes wilful ignorance to both not acknowledge the continuation of this sorry state of affairs for the locals who suffer socio-economically and improvement in the situation of the places with same background where naxalism never took place. The assumption here is the same that the naxals make, that the ‘system’ doesn’t fail to stop those wrongs from happening because of it’s inability and thus doesn’t need to be fixed but because it perpetuates those wrongs so it needs to be destroyed, and this ‘system’ was meant to be doing what it’s doing. Obviously, this assumption is wrong as we have seen above. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

To our fortune, the naxals have largely failed at accomplishing their goals, especially the one of overthrowing the Indian govt. It is very important to look at the reasons for the failure of the naxals to bring about this revolution of theirs and replicate Mao’s feat in India from the perspective of failure of Maoist thought in India and the success of the State. The biggest of them has to be the worldview of the naxals which is both fatuous and divorced from Indian reality. The way they look at the world is completely impractical and for this they have made up with blind zealotry. But obviously, fanaticism and can never fully replace rational solution of problems and diplomacy, the biggest example of this is picking up arms against the State and then justifying it in the name of imagined State-sponsored marginalisation and oppression within a democratic structure, and as if that was not enough, they have tried to establish relationship with enemy countries to help fight against the Indian State. Helping these countries like Pakistan and China that have long-standing territorial disputes and conflicts with India and that have committed human rights violations against Indian citizens is supposedly the Indian revolution which they want to bring. One example of this is that Charu Mazumdar, the man credited with starting the Naxalite movement along with his comrades Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, declared the urban workers bourgeoisie in his speeches! Another example and an even more startling one is that even Mao himself realised that Indian conditions are different and what Mao did in China cannot be fully replicated in India, more so than even the naxals themselves. Bappaditya Paul in his book ‘The First Naxal' mentions that Kanu Sanyal went to China for three months, to receive ideological and military training in Peking(modern-day Beijing) to bring about a communist revolution in India, between October and December 1967. Here Mao himself suggests these naxals to forget the strategies they learnt in China and instead make a plan according to India’s conditions. But after coming back from China, Sanyal launched the CPIML in the April of 1969. Talking about it, Haridwar Rai and KM Prasad write in Naxalism: A Challenge to the Proposition of Transition to Socialism that, “…the CPIML resolution set forth essentially the same analysis and conclusions which Mao Tse-tung had done in the Chinese context. According to it, the principal contradiction in India is peasant-landlord contradiction, and hence the chief task of the party is people's democratic revolution, whose main content is the agrarian revolution, the destruction of feudalism. In order to accomplish this, a worker-peasant alliance has to be forged under the leadership of the former. Here the peasants include even middle peasants. The strategy to be adopted by the alliance would be a protracted armed guerrilla struggle in the countryside so as to liberate villages, build red rural bases, and launch assault on the cities from there and finally capture them.”

It is this strategy that despite decades of failures and setbacks the naxals haven’t abandoned this strategy and remain committed to it, although in recent years they have finally decided to infiltrate urban areas and are seeking to get set foot into labour unions. In 2007, a 129-page Maoist document titled ‘Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution’ was found by security forces, stating: “Our presence today in key industries is extremely low. It is a pressing need that we enter key industries such as transport, communications, railways, ports, power, oil and gas and defence equipment. This is crucial for the success of our revolution.” The central committee of the CPI (Maoist) cleared the document in 2004. The year, 2004 is important. It was in this year that the MCCI and PWG came together to form the CPI(Maoist). Their war against the State intensified from this point and it is then that the policymakers came to realise the severity of the threat posed by them. It is in this context that the former Prime Minister’s made his famous comment about naxals being the biggest internal security challenge to India was made. So it has been roughly two decades since they have made this major shift in tactics although the larger strategy remains the same, to capture the countryside and then encircle the cities. Reporting on this, Snighdhendu Bhattacharya writes for Hindustan Times’ “The Maoists are carrying their fight against the Indian state into urban India. They plan to create industrial unrest, build an urban cadre base to reinforce armed operations in rural areas, and build a network of sympathisers for public, legal and logistics support.” The same news report mentions that the Maoists fear that violence in urban areas could scare away intellectuals and also an unnamed Intelligence officer who says that these Maoists are trying to infiltrate labour unions of political parties. So the threat potential from them is immense.

Next reason behind the naxal failure is their excessive reliance and in fact and almost psychopathic obsession with violence. This has sidelined not just intellectuals but also the tribals who have grown tired of the atmosphere of fear created by the naxals. While talking with Organiser Weekly for a Webinar titled Maoism in Asia and Human Rights Situation, Dr. Anshuman Behera, an associate professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies, explains that Maoists had been ‘very unfair to the local people’ and that the naxals tried to erase the pre-existing diversity of the local tribes and have tried to impose on them the singular identity of the ‘comrade’ overlooking their original tribal identity that they cherish and hold dear. He also mentions that Maoists have failed to exactly define what this new democracy is. This has led to a lot of factionalism within their ranks. Prafull Ketkar, the editor of Organiser adds in the same webinar that during his travels through Maoist belts around the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border, he couldn’t find a single forest-dweller who knows anything about Marx, Lenin or Mao and there issues are completely different, and that the Maoists are just ‘encashing their sentiments and misdirecting them towards the State’.

Rai and Prasad write, “Poverty, inequality, discontent and frustration of the people a favourable terrain are no doubt very important factors contributing success of a revolutionary guerrilla struggle. But the effective conduct of a guerrilla operation leading to victory of the revolution demands the fulfilment of a few more conditions. Mao Tse-Tsung in his writings on guerrilla warfare has outlined five conditions for it: (1) a sound mass base, (2) a first rate party organization (3) Red Army of adequate strength (4) a terrain favourable to military operations, and (5) economic strength sufficient for self-support.

Of these, the Naxalite guerrilla organization failed to satisfy several conditions, or all conditions in some measure. Thus, in most cases it got favourable terrain, but in some cases where the struggle took place in plains, the terrain was unsuited to guerrilla struggle. Then it did not satisfy the third condition - Red Army of adequate strength. The Naxalites no doubt organized peasants' militia, but judging it from the standpoint of organization, discipline, training and arms, it could not be regarded as an Army of "adequate strength". However, had prepared a "groundwork for the establishment of a people’s army”. As for the condition of building a “first rate” party organization, Naxalites no doubt set up the AICCCR and later the CPIML, but they were far from being a "first rate" party organization due to several reasons.” Indeed, a successful movement can’t be based on resentment alone. Dr. Behera also suggests similar reasons for their debacle.

We can safely and comfortably say that the naxals were pathetic failures and once the State developed the required political will and focused it’s attention on them, they were wiped out in a matter of years.

One final mistake on the behalf of the Maoists was that they pre-maturely started their revolutionary crusades. Mazumdar’s sudden call for an armed revolt surprised everyone, including Sanyal and other CPI-M leaders. Once again, it was the communist(or naxal) habit of living in their own fantasy world caused them massive setbacks. The necessary mass base that Mao talks about was never present in India, neither in 1967, nor in 2025.

Probably, we can say that since the Indian communist never fought a character-building war of liberation for his nation against foreign occupiers, he couldn’t develop a sense of ownership over their nation and love for it and in fact hates and mocks it at every opportunity he gets, the nation reciprocates back. They ended up become proxies, to be used by foreign powers against India. Killing your own countrymen and attacking your own nation do not satisfy the criterion for a war of liberation.

Now we must also look at the steps taken by the government to counter naxal terrorism.

As we have seen, by the mid-2000’s, then Indian govt. had recognised left wing extremism as a major threat and had started making plans to counter them. Indian Express reports, “It was under the Vajpayee-led NDA government that a coordination committee headed by the Union Home Secretary was set up to draw up an effective strategy to tackle the Maoist violence.

Later, under the UPA government, a comprehensive plan was drawn up by the Union Home Ministry under P Chidambaram, which involved a massive infusion of Central Armed Police Forces in Maoist districts of various states and allocation of funds for training and modernising of state police.”

The report further states, “A plan under the ‘clear, hold and develop’ policy was drawn up. As part of the policy, forces would enter Maoist bastions, engage them in gunfights, build camps to hold the area and eventually get the state administration to build roads, schools and hospitals. It’s the same policy that the Modi government has continued after coming to power in 2014, only with greater vigour.”

These steps have resulted in a visible change on the ground. The report further says, “the Modi government has assisted states in building 544 fortified police stations in LWE (Left Wing Extremism) areas, up from 66 built during the UPA’s term. The road network in these LWE areas went up from 2,900 KM between 2004 and 2014 to 14,400 km in the decade after. The present government has also set up 6,000 mobile towers in LWE areas.

Since 2019, the government has also established 280 new security camps in Maoist areas and 15 new Joint Task Forces, and deployed six CRPF battalions to assist the police in various states. According to the Union Home Ministry, only 38 districts in nine states are affected by LWE violence.”

So the dealing with the naxals with an iron fist, centre-state coordination, utilisation of both special police forces and paramilitary forces, political will, attractive surrender and rehabilitation policies and setting up of infrastructure to help in districts suffering from naxalism are among the most important measures taken by the govt. at tackling the insurgency.

According to senior officials, the idea was to “box the Maoists in a grid of camps, making their movement difficult”. Forward base camps of central paramilitary forces like the CRPF and state police forces, often situated in deep, remote areas forested help them to respond rapidly, besides helping them gain ground and area domination. These secluded areas once used to be haunted by naxal cadres and were used to convene party meetings and discuss strategies. These camps also help the locals in times of need, thus decreasing their reliance on the naxals and winning their trust. The locals now no longer have to suffer from naxal intervention into their daily lives and livelihoods.

Also, focus on improving both the numbers as well as the quality of schools in the regions have shown promising results. Imparting quality education is important to ensure that children see through the indoctrination of the naxals, get connected and included into the national mainstream and to ensure and grow up to become informed, independent and responsible citizens whose talent can be used to benefit the country and society, especially around them. The primary reason the Maoists attacked schools and individuals was to ensure this doesn’t because it is only when the people stop fearing the communists and relying on them, that they fear the people the most.

Apart from this, hospitals, thousands of post offices, hundreds of new bank branches and ATMs and dozens of new ITIs and skill development centres have been opened in just the last few years according to a recent answer by the Ministry of Home Affairs to a question in the Rajya Sabha. Swarajya reported in 2017 that, “There is a silent revolution happening in Bastar, and not what the Maoists had dreamt of. Roads and bridges are being built at a frenetic pace.” All of this will help in the integration of these previously cut off regions. It’s a shameful example of State failure and that the local people have been denied such basic facilities because of Naxalite terror. According to the aforementioned Indian Express report, ‘’Intelligence officers say state governments do their bit with outreach schemes. In Chhattisgarh, they say, there is an effort to educate people to “stop sheltering the insurgents”. In Telangana, efforts are on to keep the youth “who are vulnerable” away from Maoist literature.”

But this policy of winning over people has to be, and has been, backed up by hard power and brute force. In less than two months, 81 Maoists have been killed in Chhattisgarh alone. In Kerala, ‘sweeps have become common’. Over the last two decades, apart from the thousands of cadres, many high-ranking commanders and leaders of the party have been gunned down. This has led to the leadership of the Moist party shrinking. The politburo had 16 members in 2004, this number has come down to 4 in 2025. And it is not just the party that is shrinking, it is also the party itself that seems to be shrinking. Telangana intelligence officers say that there was zero recruitment from the state in 2024. Karnataka was recently declared Maoist free by it’s intelligence officers after it’s last naxal surrendered.

Such aggressive approach has been extremely effective in pushing back. A streak of surrenders, arrests and encounters have weakened the Maoists and sent them on a backfoot. It is now common to hear news about the security forces storming into naxal strongholds and freeing them unlike any time before in the history of the insurgency.

Map of Naxalism-affected districts in 2024

Here, the role of the states must be emphasised upon. Most states have set up specially armed and trained in their respective police departments. Maharashtra’s C-60, Andhra Pradesh’s Greyhounds are some forces that have been successful in instilling fear into the minds of the naxal cadres. Different states have adopted different approaches. While the Chhattisgarh police has utilised an iron-fist approach, Telangana has preferred a ‘humanitarian surrender policy’’ while other states have worked on a combination of both. This has resulted in the surrenders of over 10,000 naxals between 2015 and 2025, 475 of these were in 2024 alone. The number of naxal-affected states came down to 38 by April 2024.

The picture isn’t as rosy on the other side though. Surrendering is difficult for an average Maoist cadre. Although the govt. offers residence and ‘a decent amount of money for rehabilitation’, surrendering is a difficult choice for a Maoist. There are stories of Maoists attacking surrendered cadres. An ex-cadre says that the party turns against those who turn informers and harm the party. Another ex-cadre says that it is possible to leave the party but there’s a procedure for that. This procedure, however, lasts for months. And then the surrender itself is not easy, because they have to establish contact with governmental intelligence agencies by which time, they already get labelled as an informer by the party. That’s why many cadres prefer getting arrested over surrendering.

Dr. Behera also explains that the rapid decline in Maoism between 2015-2020 can be owed to the efforts of the then Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Ram in ensuring that tribals get the land registration documents for their land Pattas. This led the locals to slowly withdraw their support to the Maoists.

According to ex-Maoists, the way forward is to educate people about the redundancy of the party. An ex-Maoist says that the impression of the Maoist party being like any other political outfit needs to be dismantled. He emphasises that the message to people needs to be that it is ‘an armed outfit with a political aim’. It is quite surprising that even in 2025 their image among the local people is that of a political outfit with a violent aim given the sheer number of deaths they have led to.

To conclude, the government’s response to naxalism has been a major success. We have prevented them from toppling the government, we have pushed them back further inside the forests(where they’re still being hounded), we have liberated more than one hundred districts from naxal tyranny, we have prevented them from separating secessionist regions, we have built a huge amount of basic infrastructure in these areas, we are winning over the local people, most importantly, we have improved the lives of the people trapped first under naxal ‘gunarchy’ and then police-militant cross-fire. The ex-cadres who surrendered also are easily reintegrated easily back into society. One ex-Maoist says, “There is no stigma whatsoever. People are welcoming to those who surrender.”

This success has raised the hopes of the govt. and the Home Minister Amit Shah has declared that the country will become naxal free by March 31, 2026, which is roughly one year away from the date of publishing of this article. This is comforting and a welcome development.

Nevertheless, serious challenges threaten to hinder the progress in this direction. According to a Chhattisgarh police force, thousands of Maoist cadres still remain in Bijapur district alone. There are dozens of other districts that have significant naxal presence.

It’s also important to understand that movements are nothing without their leadership. Cadres can be made to surrender more easily if the leadership is stopped. The naxal leadership, although aging and depleting, hasn’t completely lost their traction yet. To destroy the leadership would mean wiping out the insurgency militarily, politically and ideologically.

An intelligence officer says, “As long as there are problems in the society, they (the Maoists) can pose as the solution to these problems.”

Naxals often try to project themselves as solutions to various social, political and economic issues. They first join and infiltrate a movement and try to use it for their own cause. Dr. Behera gives examples from his own where experiences during his extensive travels through Maoist-affected regions where Maoist approached people(but were rejected). In the 2007 document, ‘Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution’ has laid down elaborate agenda for the banned outfit to capitatalize on Dalit section and to turn them towards mass struggle. Times of India reports that the document stresses on the need to ‘initiate and lead the struggles against violence on Dalits’. Times of India reports, “A section of the security forces feel that Naxals are trying to provoke the Dalit to initiate mass struggle against the government and target its establishments and forces which is part of their national agenda.” In Naxalism in Bihar: A Historical Perspective, Jitendra Narayan writes, “Getting merged into the overall caste configuration of Bihar's politics, Naxalism has come to acquire a stable base in the state.” Apart from caste and gender-based mobilisation, naxals have also been accused of being involved in anti-industrial protests, calling strikes, environmental movements etc. organised by activists and sometimes genuine victims of displacement protesting against dams and illegally-operating factories like the Narmada Bachao movement. So, it’s clear that their modus operandi is to attach themselves to movements and protests against genuine problems faced by people within the society and then feed on them to draw a support base. This issue can only be tackled by socio-economic development, good communication between all the involved parties, providing just compensation, providing smooth and easy justice and ensuring that displacement and exploitation of people and environmental destruction don’t happen. Following governmental rules and procedures around these issues will ensure all of this, but they too have to be simplified and made easier to follow and the govt. has to ensure enforcement. The govt. has brought the Forest Rights Act, 2006, National Rehabilitation and Settlement Policy, 2007, Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Settlement Policy, 2013 to ensure this.

Another issue that arises out of these legitimate protests and movements is media and academia romanticisation and glorification that projects Maoists as compassionate and thoughtful saviours and emancipators of oppressed people fighting against social, governmental and corporate forces instead of violent extremists with a political programme and weapons. For example, the Maoist interference in elections is an ‘effort to help the Adivasi peasantry or dalit labouring classes in some very backward regions to emerge as an independent political force freed from the influence of the affluent landowning classes does represent a step forward in democratising Indian society’ according to Tilak D Gupta. He also believes that “no other political party in the country has taken up the cause of the rural poor with such single-minded zeal and devotion” as the CPI(Maoist). This is blatant legitimisation of naxal violence. A Delhi University committee had to recommend the removal of two books from it’s reading list because they “glorify Naxalism”, one of them was co-authored by Nandini Sundar, who had been accused of instigating Bastar villagers against the police. Ranajit Guha said in an interview, “Later, I became something of a Naxal intellectual. I still consider myself to have been inspired by Charu Mazumdar’s ideas, which, I think, contain a lot of validity. But Charu Mazumdar and his followers were weak in organizational capability, which resulted in the movement being crushed. I have elsewhere condemned the role of some intellectuals in Indira Gandhi’s period who supported her moves to crush the revolt…”. Alpa Shah would have had us believe that the locals had shunned democracy and taken to the path of armed insurrection.

Similarly, sympathisers in the media have done their own bit in defending and even glorifying naxal violence, subtly and sometimes overtly. Dr. Behera without taking names points out that a journalist spent 24 hours in Odisha and came up with a book. Naxal glorification is even more brazen in other forms of media like cinema and literature. There are multiple films that either try to glorify, romanticise and eulogise, or if not that, then at least justify the actions of the naxals. This is a disturbing trend which can be observed in like Chakravyuh, Newton, Shyam Singh Roy, Virata Parvam and in books like Walking with the Comrades, Hazaar Chaaurasi ki Maa, The Lowland etc.

Such glorification and romanticisation of naxalism normalizes in society and attracts the youth towards it. It’s widespread normalization is already showing it’s effects. Universities like Jadhavpur University, the infamous Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University etc. are known for mass producing a particular variety of far-left, Constitution-thumping activists, who although specialise in various fields like caste activism, gender activism and environmental activism etc., somehow have the exact same talking points and similar opinions over every issue. Their arguments are often emotionally-charged and they are standpoints are too radical to have come from a place of naïvety and not malice and spite. Over the years, numerous such students have been arrested from all over the country in suspicions of having links with naxals.

All of this still pales in comparison with the web of activist-NGO complex advocating for more or less the same things. Several such activists have been arrested on charges of collaboration with naxals. Stan Swamy’s death caused much uproar but it turns the NIA court found that he was indeed a member of the banned CPI(Maoist). 16 NGOs and civil rights outfits were banned in 2021 for having links with Maoists. In 2013, Mint reported that the government had identified 128 organizations that operated as front organizations for the CMPI(Maoist) across 16 states, including some that do not usually feature in the list of naxal-affected states. This cabal is an extremely well-networked one and brings out the real scale of latent threat from Maoists.

It's not surprising that the then Home Minister complained about intellectual support standing in the way of tackling naxals in 2010. Dr. Behera warns us and asks us not to take these intellectuals seriously because they’re ignorant about the ground reality.

There’ve also been allegations of Maoists colluding with Christian missionaries. Professor Sangit Ragi writes in his paper ‘Missionaries and the Naxal Movement in India’, “What is common between the missionaries, the Marxists and the Maoists is the denunciation of Hindutva as a backward conservative ideology. It suits the missionaries in their campaign against the native religions and fits into the scheme and rationale behind converting the indigenous population. It is interesting to see that while the Maoists have been quite vocal against the Hindu nationalists on the religious and cultural issues, they are silent and mute on the aggressive agenda of cultural and religious homogenisation of Christian missionaries and religious conversion of other sects into Christianity.” The missionaries are in a symbiotic relationship with the Maoists where one stops developmental work from reaching remote locations and the other uses the poverty caused by this to entice poor people into converting. For example, Stan Swamy, whom we talked about above, was also a Christian priest. Another case exhibits these dynamics even better. In 2008, Swami Laxmananand Saraswati, who worked against conversions of Hindus to Christianity was killed, Maoists claimed credit for this horrible crime. The authorities also found a letter which indicated that he was assassinated by the Maoists. Police sources said that by attacking Hindus the Maoists were trying to garner support among the region's poor tribes, many of whom had converted to Christianity. "There are instances where the rebels have threatened Hindu temples here," Satish Gajbhiye, a senior police official, added. Narayan Prasad Pokharel who was the president of the Nepal branch of the World Hindu Federation was died while attending a festival after being attacked by Nepalese Maoists. In 2009, two newly-appointed priests at the Pashupatinath Temple were attacked by Maoists in Nepal. In 2016, a Hindu activist was shot by naxals inside a temple. Other than violent physical attacks, the Maoists have also tried to rally people against what they call ‘Hindu fascist forces’. Naxal attempts at using caste fault lines are also known, they had almost formed an alliance with Ambedkarites. So, the Maoists clearly have problem with Hindus.

Another problem is that senior officials of the administration and the security forces are often not locals and have difficulty connecting with the locals, and not just linguistically. To counter this, locals must be preferred to lead security forces and help from supportive locals should be taken to communicate with people. Govt. bodies can hire locals to move around telling people about beneficial govt. schemes and policies.

Largely, the threat from naxals in the long-term boils down to three broad issues-

i) Survival of small naxal groups or individuals leading to revival of the insurgency

ii) Mistaking the nature of the insurgency and the ideology

iii) Naxal-influence seeping into urban areas

In the last stages of it’s stages of a dying insurgency, the insurgents often change their methods. Many insurgents often run away from the field of combat and mix into civilians. Major, centrally co-ordinated operations to grab territory are replaced by smaller surprise lone-wolf attacks to create fear and maximise the losses incurred by the enemy at minimal cost. There might soon come a time when we would probably see this with naxals. Insurgent elements often remain active even after the insurgency officially ends. We are seeing this in Bihar, which had been declared free of naxals in 2022 but still continues it’s anti-naxal operations regularly. There’s also a possibility that if the security forces are called back after the successful eradication of the naxals, whenever that happens, the naxals in hiding come out again and reignite the rebellion. The security forces must be kept stationed in their forward base camps for years, even decades if needed. This must be the case till these areas have been integrated well into the national economy and consciousness, financially and intellectually. Dr. Behera points out that it is a very bookish ideology and adds that they’re not in a hurry to win this ‘protracted people’s war’.

The insurgency must also not be misunderstood as a normal political movement that has gone violent and which can be talked back to sanity. It must be understood as a violent struggle that is willing to use brutal methods to obtain it’s desired results. A woman was skinned alive by them, two men’s throats were slit by the naxals. They use fear as a weapon. State institutions and employees have been their primary targets. These examples show that they cannot be seen as mere armed bandits or a law-and order problem. It is a political and ideological issue as much as it is a security issue. This issue has to be tackled not only militarily but also intellectually, so as to delegitimise it.

Lastly, there is the fear of the insurgency seeping into urban areas. We have already seen that there is an attempt by the naxals towards building a loyal support base in urban areas. Our biggest failure has been the normalisation of far-left talking points in public political life. The false dichotomy of the oppressor and the oppressed has gained acceptance in the mainstream of the society and is influencing politics. In ‘Naxalites’s Urban Push: Will They Succeed?’, R Venkataramani writes, “The focus of Naxalites in urban areas is to mobilize industrial workers, students, people from the lower strata of society, those who occupy lower positions in the government and private sectors and left leaning intellectuals and academics. Naxalites have been attempting to influence these sections of society covertly through their frontal organizations, by supporting the protests and demonstrations called by them against the ruling establishment.” He adds, “The Naxalite’s urban strategy, which is free of violence, is different from the strategies they follow in rural areas. However, it seems that in the medium to long run they are interested in replicating the strategies they follow in rural areas in the urban areas. This is evident from the fact that they had carried out a few attacks in the urban towns in Orissa and Bihar. Major General YK Gera(Retd) writes in Naxalism: A Threat to India’s Security, “The LWE in India poses a serious long term ideological threat through its potential to generate a serious rural-urban fault line. This fault line will become acute, once India’s demographic bulge acquires a critical mass because of rising unemployment.” Romanticisation of naxalism and issues like unemployment and inflation may create sympathy for the naxals even decades after they’ve been decimated. The govt. will have to formulate it’s plans and policies keeping these things in mind. The 2007 Maoist document Urban Perspective: Our Work in Urban Areas reads, “Working class leadership is the indispensable condition for the new Democratic Revolution (NDR) in India. Working class has to send its advanced detachments to rural areas.” The nature of the naxal insurgency is primarily rural but even they realise that they would need an urban base to succeed in their attempt at armed insurrection. In ‘Intellectuals and the Maoists’, Uddipan Mukherjee points out that the short-term goal of the naxals is to use their urban bases is to supply money and logistical and ideological support to the rural guerrilla zones and the long-term goal is to solidify their bases in urban areas through their front-organizations. He also says that they would surely strengthen their cyber-warfare strategy and that propaganda through student-worker organisations would be the mainstay of their strategy for now. This phenomenon of naxals receiving help from urban regions is called Urban naxalism and those who provide this help are called Urban naxals. This term is often used as a pejorative for the section of the intelligentsia who defend naxals and underground naxals. Arundhati Roy is a popular name belonging to this cabal. Mukherjee further adds, “The intellectual support to the Maoists to a large extent provides the financial backbone to the ultras. Funds/grants are generated in the urban areas for the Maoists. In order to counter it, the following needs to be emphasised:

1. Police espionage on frontal organisations of the Maoists.

2. Arrests of suspected leadership of those organisations.

3. Police espionage in college/university campuses, especially those with a history of a rebellious past, like Presidency College, Jadavpur University or institutes with potential radical ambience like JNU, Jamia Milia Islamia.

4. Police espionage in social media interactions of suspected/potential rebels in urban areas – in Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp and the like.”

He also suggests that the security forces should have strong public relations wings in urban areas that will cultivate anti-Maoist perceptions among the youth through seminars in colleges and universities etc. He also advises the intellectuals to restrain their verbosity. He says India needs what Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals’today. It goes without saying that these measures should not be used to harass innocents and common people.

For now, pro-active action has pushed the naxals back on the defensive and into rural areas which are their primary victims.

It is true that the naxal insurgency continues to threaten the stability and integrity of this country but it is also true that we have come a long way in decimating the naxal threat. Our focus now should be on inclusion and development and to end the threat for once and for all. We must take the offensive to deep inside the regions they currently hold while also preventing the absorption of their (active) cadres and ideologues and ideology into urban areas. It is the testament to our strength that we are moving towards victory, and surprisingly, this strength doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun but the love of the people towards their nation. It seems fitting to quote Lt. General JFR Jacob here who played an important role in Operation Steeplechase: This notwithstanding, the government (both at the central and state levels) as well as the armed forces, are not in favour of using the military to counter the Naxals, but are we prepared to let the situation escalate further?

Shakespeare's Hamlet is the tragedy of procrastination. Hamlet knew what he had to do, but kept on postponing it. Let future generations not say that we are the hamlets of our age.