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The Central Committee and Politburo of the CPI (Maoist), which had 21 members in early 2024, was reduced to no members by March 2026.
Home Minister Amit Shah speaking in Parliament. (Image: PTI)
On March 30, 2026 – a day before the Centre’s self-imposed deadline – Union Home Minister Amit Shah stood up in the Lok Sabha and spoke for nearly 90 minutes in what will probably be considered his most emotional, restrained and aggressive speech as an MP. By the time he sat down, he had claimed that few governments in Indian history had been able to carry out a decades-long, fanatically violent insurgency: Naxalism was dead.
The numbers he cited were hard to argue with. The Central Committee and Politburo of the CPI (Maoist), which had 21 members in early 2024, was reduced to no members by March 2026. All 37 state committee members from the Dandakaranya area – a Maoist stronghold – were killed, arrested, or surrendered. In 2014, Naxalism touched 126 districts. By 2025, only 11 districts reported any presence, and only three of them were classified as most affected. There was a 53 percent decline in violent incidents. There was a 73 percent reduction in deaths of security personnel. The civilian death rate had dropped by 70 percent.
But digging into the data doesn’t explain how one of India’s darkest insurgencies – once described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the country’s gravest internal security threat – came to an end. That story is more interesting, and considerably more complex.
jungle fighters
Start with a unit most people haven’t heard of. The Commando Battalion for Resolute Action – Cobra – was raised under the Central Reserve Police Force between 2008 and 2009, and from the beginning it was created for a specific purpose: guerrilla warfare in areas that had completely swamped traditional police operations.
Ten battalions, approximately 10,000 personnel. Training facilities in Belgaum and Koraput where CRPF jawans learned explosive tracking, bomb disposal, field engineering, fast-roping, intelligence gathering and how to survive in the dense forests of Bastar, Abujmar and tri-junction areas, where state borders breach and Maoists had been roaming freely for years. Since its inception, Cobra has conducted more than 39,000 operations, killed 636 Naxalites, arrested 3,992, and secured the surrender of 3,367 others. The forces recovered 1,858 weapons, over 64,000 rounds of ammunition and over 9,600 bombs and IEDs.
Many Cobra personnel died while performing this task. It’s worth sitting with for a moment.
locals changed the game
Specialized central forces can go to places where regular police cannot. But deeper success came from a different direction altogether – from people who already knew those forests because they grew up in them.
The District Reserve Guard (DRG) of Chhattisgarh, formed in 2008, consisted of direct recruits from local and tribal communities – mostly surrendered Nazals. The logic was simple: the Maoists had built their base among these communities and claimed to speak for them. The DRG put people from the same villages in uniform and gave them anti-insurgency training. By 2015, the force had expanded from its original two districts – Kanker and Narayanpur – to Bijapur, Bastar, Sukma, Kondagaon and Dantewada. Its approximately 3,500 employees knew these forests in a way that no outsider did.
Some of them knew more than this, because a large part of those recruited into DRG had been Naxalites themselves. After surrendering, they joined the constabulary and after some time on watch, some of them rose to the rank of Inspector. These were not merely symbolic gestures towards rehabilitation. Former Maoists provided accurate, detailed intelligence on bases, supply routes, command structures – which no external intelligence officer could generate on his own. In 2024 alone, 64 state committee members surrendered in Bastar. The area of influence of Maoists in that district reduced from 20,000 square kilometers to 4,000 square kilometers.
The DRG’s most critical moment came on May 21, 2025, when CPI (Maoist) general secretary and supreme leader of the movement Nambala Keshava Rao – known by his nom de guerre Basavaraju – was killed during an operation in the Abujhmad forest. His death effectively destroyed the command structure of the organization.
Nobody talks about intelligence overhaul
No operational success would be possible without quiet change happening in parallel.
The CRPF activated its intelligence wing to detect mass militia members, Revolutionary People’s Committees and Maoist support networks at the grassroots level. Each battalion was assigned a dedicated intelligence unit. Officers went to villages, built relationships and worked to convince cadres that there was another option. IPS officers began rotating between the state police, Intelligence Bureau, CRPF and the Intelligence Desk – creating a kind of institutional crossover that was conspicuously absent earlier.
Real-time intelligence flows changed the tasks that operations could perform. Precise attacks became more common. IED ambushes, which had killed many security personnel in earlier years, became difficult to carry out. When the Central Armed Police Forces were deployed the District SP exercised operational control, ensuring that the age-old problem of competing command structures was at least managed, if not completely eliminated.
Giving way out to Maoists
Running along the safety mission was arguably just as important: an exit ramp.
Chhattisgarh’s “Poona Margham: Rehabilitation to Rejuvenation” scheme offered cash incentives for surrender, bonuses on surrendering weapons, employment assistance and a path back into civilian society. The “Niyad Nellanar” scheme promised 25 basic amenities in villages within five kilometers of security camps, providing a solid argument that the government could actually deliver the things the Maoists had actively tried to hijack.
There was competition among the states regarding this. Odisha has set its reward rates 10 percent higher than Chhattisgarh. The numbers at the top of the Maoist hierarchy were staggering: surrendered Central Committee or Politburo members received Rs 1.10 crore; State committee members received Rs 55 lakh; Regional member Rs 33 lakh. Between November 2025 and February 2026, 45 cadres in Odisha alone surrendered, claiming benefits worth Rs 6.5 crore. In December 2025, 34 Naxalites with a total reward of Rs 84 lakh surrendered their arms in Bijapur.
Look at the trajectory: 376 surrenders in 2023. 881 in 2024. 2,337 in 2025 – a jump of 165 percent. There were 280 surrenders in the first quarter of 2025 alone, more than double the 124 from the same period a year earlier. At some point, a movement begins to collapse not because of military pressure alone, but because many of its members decide that the fight is not worth continuing.
Roads, Towers and Administrative Void
Shah’s broader strategy rested on a diagnosis that previous governments had either forgotten or not acted on: Naxalism could not survive in poverty alone. It survived due to administrative lack. In those places where the state was never visible.
The Aspirational Districts Programme, launched in January 2018, targeted 112 underdeveloped districts – 35 of them Naxal-affected – and tried to transform them using health, education, agriculture, financial inclusion and infrastructure as its levers. More concretely, the government sanctioned over Rs 20,000 crore for 17,000 km of roads in Left Wing Extremism affected areas in two road construction phases, of which over 12,000 km of road was actually built on the ground. It approved 8,527 4G towers, of which more than 5,000 are operational. Security forces created 586 fortified police stations, up from just 66 before 2014, and established 361 new security camps and forward operating bases since 2019.
Roads brought administrators, teachers and health workers to villages that were off the map. Mobile towers meant that communication was finally possible and within reach of ordinary people. The security camps meant that the state was there permanently, not just conducting occasional raids. After development came security and security remained because ultimately development was coming.
What changed in Chhattisgarh?
The BJP’s election victory in Chhattisgarh in December 2023 was, in retrospect, a turning point.
Under Bhupesh Baghel’s Congress government, coordination between the state and the Center was inconsistent. BJP’s stance is blunt: Naxalite incidents increased during Baghel’s tenure. The Dantewada attack of April 2023 – which killed 10 policemen and a civilian driver – made it impossible to soften the security situation.
When Vishnu Deva Sai took over, the “double engine” structure that Shah was advocating – the central and state governments aligning and coordinating – actually began to function as described. Between December 2023 and May 2025, security forces killed 401 Maoists, arrested 1,429 and secured the surrender of 1,355. In the first year itself, 2,619 Naxalites were killed, arrested or surrendered.
Shah had his own opinion about this: same state, same police, same central forces. One variable was political will and coordination. Operation Black Forest, which ran in the Karreguttalu hills from April 21 to May 11, 2025, demonstrated what that combination could yield – 31 Naxalites were killed without a single security casualty.
the man behind the mission
Amit Shah had implemented it from the day he took charge. On August 20, 2019, he called a meeting on rehabilitation and reintegration and gave himself a deadline: March 31, 2026. Then they worked backward.
He pressured states to rebuild their police forces. He improved intelligence protocols. They targeted the Maoist leadership at every level of the hierarchy. He directed operations in the Abujhmad area, the deepest stronghold of the Maoists, which had been effectively avoided for years. More symbolically, but not insignificantly, they demolished over 100 Maoist monuments, destroying the physical embodiment of Maoist control. And critically, he stressed that once areas have been cleared, development inputs should be followed immediately so that the void is not filled again.
Prime Minister Modi gave him permission to watch it. Shah used it.
When he stood in the Lok Sabha on Monday, the philosophy he expressed was clear: talks for those who lay down their arms, force for those who use them. He attributed the persistence of the rebellion not to poverty but to leftist ideology. He made political allegations – that opposition parties have expressed sympathy for the Naxalites while ignoring their victims. And he announced that India would be Naxal free by the next day.
The data, for once, supports the declaration.
What India ultimately created was not a single program or a single power. It was an architecture – specialized units that could operate in hostile territory, intelligence systems that actually shared information, surrender plans generous enough to be taken seriously, state police rebuilt on the basis of local knowledge, infrastructure that made governance possible where it had previously been absent, and political leadership prepared to treat the problem as something that could actually be solved. The Red Corridor did not become shorter because of a decisive battle. It collapsed because the state finally decided to remain present in the places it had taken decades to leave.
March 31, 2026, 13:14 IST
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