Red Retreat

India’s longest-running insurgency appears to have reached its end. The statement of Abhay, spokesman of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), who announced that his comrades would lay down their arms and observe a ceasefire, was a vindication of the steely efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and especially Home Minister, Amit Shah, who has vowed to eradicate left-wing extremism (LWE) in India by 2026.

The statement follows a string of setbacks for the extremists. Recently, three top Maoist commanders carrying a combined bounty of Rs. 1.35 crore were killed in Jharkhand while twelve militants, including five women, gave themselves up in Chhattisgarh. Two more died in clashes with security personnel in Bijapur and Gadchiroli. The rapid pace of these events signal that what was once called the ‘Red Corridor’ is fast collapsing.

It seems incredible, and almost surrealistic, to watch India’s longest and most violent insurgency, finally drawing to a close. Before PM Modi first came to power in 2014, the phenomenon seemed unthinkable.

At its peak, Maoist influence stretched across a quarter of India’s territory, disrupting roads, schooling, health care and investment. They controlled swathes of central and eastern India, enforced kangaroo courts, extracted ‘taxes’ from villagers and carried out devastating ambushes on police and paramilitary units. The massacre of 76 security personnel in Dantewada in 2010 epitomised their capacity for mayhem. Tribal grievances over land, mining and state neglect gave them local legitimacy.

Urban sympathisers - from NGOs to academics - further burnished the Maoists’ reputation abroad as social ‘revolutionaries’ rather than violent insurgents.

Then, Amit Shah boldly pledged in 2021 that Left-wing extremism would be eliminated from Indian soil by March 2026. Since then, the Modi government’s strategy has been clear-eyed and uncompromising. It paired relentless security operations with economic uplift. Elite units, better equipped and better coordinated than their predecessors, methodically targeted Maoist leaders. In May Basavaraju, the CPI(Maoist) general secretary, was gunned down by state commandos. Rank-and-file fighters, under pressure and cut off from supplies, began to surrender in droves. Simultaneously, massive development work carried out by the government eroded the Maoists’ claim to represent the marginalised.

Equally crucial was the dismantling of the insurgency’s urban support base. By curbing dubious NGOs and exposing intellectual fellow-travellers, the government cut off the moral and financial lifelines that had sustained the movement. Today, districts in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Maharashtra that were once synonymous with violence are slowly normalising. For millions of ordinary villagers, the state is no longer an abstraction but a presence.

Modi and Shah deserve credit for persistence and political will. To subdue a 60-year insurgency in a decade, without compromising the republic’s democratic fabric, is no small feat. Yet the fight is not wholly over. While Indian security forces have shattered the hammer and sickle that once stained its forests, the task now is to ensure the Red Scourge is not just defeated but extirpated.