Urban Insurgency

The quiet unravelling of the Bhima Koregaon–Elgaar Parishad case in India’s courts tells an uncomfortable story. With the Bombay High Court granting bail to former Delhi University professor Hany Babu, only three of the 16 accused remain behind bars. For most of the rest, freedom has come not through acquittal, but through the slow erosion of a prosecution unable to bring a complex national-security case to trial after seven long years.

To mistake this judicial rebuke of prosecutorial delay for an exoneration of the wider ecosystem these cases point to would be dangerously naïve. The Elgaar Parishad prosecutions were not conceived in a vacuum. They rest on the State’s contention, still untested at trial, that an urban support network exists for India’s most persistent internal insurgency: Maoist violence. The documents may be contested, the forensics disputed and the letters derided as hearsay. But the strategic problem they seek to address has not vanished with each bail order.

This is where the contrast with reality in the jungles is most jarring. While courts in Mumbai debate discharge pleas, security forces under the Union Home Ministry continue to dismantle the armed Maoist leadership with grim efficiency. The recent death of commanders such as Madvi Hidma and the steady territorial contraction of the insurgency point to the Indian state at last regaining the upper hand. The government has set itself the ambitious target of a Naxal-free India by March 2026 which now looks eminently achievable.

In the cities, however, the battle is messier. Urban Naxal networks operate not with rifles but under the cloak of cultural fronts and the language of rights. This was most evident in the recent ‘anti-pollution’ demonstrations in Delhi, in which radical student groups allegedly glorified Maoist violence and clashed with police.

The State’s failure has been in translating its suspicions about the urban front into watertight prosecutions. To cry ‘Urban Naxal’ without securing convictions is to hand propaganda victories to those who thrive on claims of victimhood. Maharashtra, where many of these cases are anchored, bears a particular responsibility. Given that urban fronts for insurgent groups do exist, the State government must prove it with professional policing, credible digital forensics and swift trials. Endless custody is not a strategy nor is litigation that collapses under its own weight.

Each bail order secured by default strengthens the belief among sympathisers and sceptics alike that the State either overreaches or underperforms. Meanwhile, those who openly lionise slain Maoist commanders or justify attacks on police under the banner of resistance test the patience of a democratic order already stretched by polarisation.

India’s war against left-wing extremism is being won in the jungles. But it risks being fumbled in the seminar rooms, protest sites and courtrooms of its cities. Victory there will not come from rhetoric about urban conspiracies but only when the State learns to prosecute its invisible enemies as decisively as it confronts the armed ones.