On May 21, 2025, Indian security forces killed Nambala Keshava Rao, known as Basavaraju. He was the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) banned in the forests of Chhattisgarh. In November, its top military commander, Madvi Hidma, was also eliminated. Union Home Minister Amit Shah on March 30, 2026 said in Parliament that India had achieved a virtually Naxal-free India. Long a political ambition, it now constitutes a real operational reality.
The numbers are striking. At its peak in 2011, the Maoist insurgency had affected 223 districts across 20 states. As of April 2026, only two districts remain in the worst-affected category. According to Figures from the Ministry of the Interior, 706 Maoists were killed in clashes, 2,218 were arrested and 4,839 surrendered between 2024 and 2026. It’s a real success. He deserves to be recognized as such. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sharing Shah’s speech on social media, added, “We will continue to focus on promoting good governance and ensuring peace and prosperity for all. »
However, there remains a question that India must answer. Did it end an insurrection or resolve the conditions that made it possible?
This discussion involves asking what actually produced this result. Why did the state succeed now and not earlier? By reading the recent ORF special report “Left-wing extremism, its rise and fall, and India’s future imperatives,” four competing explanations emerge.
First, the political alignment between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the Center and in Chhattisgarh from December 2023 has produced an operational synergy that previous governments had not been able to achieve. Second, technological improvements in the use of drone surveillance, AI-based intelligence, and cell phone triangulation have been effective. Government welfare schemes such as Jan Dhan, Aadhaar-linked direct transfers and 4G connectivity have reached previously inaccessible interior forests. All of these events have quietly shifted the community’s calculations in ways that no single security operation could.
However, the more relevant explanation is that of the internal breakdown of organizational will that preceded and in fact enabled external military success, rather than the reverse. This is all the more remarkable given that if the state has accelerated a collapse already underway, the confidence with which post-conflict planning is approached needs to be tempered.
This is a question that India has asked itself since its independence without providing adequate answers.
The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution guarantees special protections to tribal communities in central and eastern India. These are the same communities that the red corridor passes through. These are resource-rich, institutionally neglected areas, caught between a movement that claimed to represent them and a state that failed to reach them. The Extension of Panchayats to Scheduled Areas Act was passed in 1996 to fill this gap. Nearly 30 years later, only ten states until now, have defined its rules of engagement. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, designed to correct historical injustices, faces gaps in its implementation on the ground. This shows the structural reality in which tribal regions suffer from the resource curse, where ruling elites have material incentives to maintain ambiguity over land and forest rights.
Chhattisgarh alone contributes 17 percent of India’s mineral production. The same geography that was at the heart of the insurgency is today the frontier of post-conflict development. This development plan includes mining corridors, industrial projects and infrastructure whose benefits do not automatically benefit the communities who live there.
Political scientists distinguish between territorial control, the effective exercise of state power, and legitimate authority – the feeling among governed populations that the state’s presence is just and responsive.
The comparison with Sri Lanka is instructive. The LTTE was militarily eliminated in 2009. The military result was decisive, but fifteen years later, the Tamil political question remains structurally unresolved. Military cessation and political resolution are not the same thing.
While India has managed to end its military operations in the red corridor, a comparable political settlement must be seriously attempted. The example of the Bodoland territorial region in Assam is also worth mentioning. The Bodo separatist movement moved from armed confrontation to political negotiation through negotiated autonomy, extending the Sixth Schedule to the plains tribes, creating real legislative and executive powers over 40 subjects, integrating cultural identity into a governance framework. Peace there comes from negotiated legitimacy. The results, although imperfect, are significantly more lasting.
One aspect that is often overlooked is that of women. Women represented approximately 40 percent of the CPI-Maoist cadre force. Journalist Sudha Ramachandran documented the complex paths by which women entered the movement. Forced conscription was one, women were also motivated by their attempts to escape domestic violence, by the state’s ineffectiveness in providing justice after sexual assault, and by a genuine ideological commitment to a movement that offered women more responsive dispute resolution than the state court system or traditional community councils. According to available testimonies, the rehabilitation framework supposed to accommodate the delivered women is not working as planned. Women cadres who surrendered are absorbed into pro-government militias rather than truly reintegrated. The post-conflict moment for women does not simply mean the end of violence. This is a new set of vulnerabilities in a context where the institutions that should protect them have a documented history of failing to do so.
Ultimately, the tools developed over two decades of counterinsurgency will not disappear when the last Maoist surrenders.
Drone surveillance networks, AI-based intelligence infrastructure, mobile phone triangulation capabilities, and social media surveillance systems have become part of the permanent institutional repertoire of the Indian state. Security architectures built for a given context tend to reshape the broader policy environment in ways that survive the initial threat. This is evidenced by the normalization of the Prevention of Unlawful Activities Act as a counterinsurgency tool, restrictions on journalists’ access to conflict zones, and the tendency to characterize civil society activism as Maoist sympathy. These practices did not start in the red corridor and will not stop there. The Naxal threat – real or imagined – is a way for the state to curb any protests by the local population. People in the region became reluctant to participate in the land rights movement for fear of being labeled Maoists. The armed insurrection is coming to an end. Political restriction of legitimate dissent in these communities is not.
The ORF report, although comprising 15 chapters, remains silent when it comes to including Adivasi scholars or community representatives. The communities most affected by six decades of conflict remain objects of analysis rather than analytical voices. It should be noted that future movements may not adopt Maoist ideology but may adopt strategies and tactics from a previous protracted conflict. The structural conditions that led to Naxalism – economic inequality, technological displacement of the workforce, majority electoral polarization – are only increasing, not decreasing.
Organized dissent emerges from structural conditions. Eliminating one move without meeting these conditions does not eliminate the possibility of the next one. It can simply change shape.
India’s success in ending six decades of Maoist insurgency is real. The combination of security operations, development and intelligence capabilities has produced results that seemed impossible a decade ago. But a victory that leaves governance deficits, underperforming rehabilitation frameworks, empowered extractive interests, and standardized surveillance tools intact is not a resolution.
The discussions that need to take place focus on land and forest rights, true autonomy and justice. These are the same questions that the village of Naxalbari first brought to the attention of the general public in 1967. March 2026 may mark the end of armed resistance, but whether it will mark the beginning of true post-conflict justice is another question entirely.