The Last Maoist: What Next for India?
On May 21, 2025, Indian security forces killed Nambala Keshava Rao, known as Basavaraju. He was the general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the forests of Chhattisgarh. By November, his top military commander Madvi Hidma had also been eliminated. Union Home Minister Amit Shah on March 30, 2026 said in Parliament that India had achieved a nearly Naxal-free India. Long a political ambition, this is now a genuine operational reality.
The numbers are striking. At its peak in 2011, the Maoist insurgency had touched 223 districts across 20 states. By April 2026, only two districts remained in the most affected category. According to Home Ministry figures, 706 Maoists were killed in encounters, 2,218 were arrested, and 4,839 surrendered between 2024 and 2026. This is a real achievement. It deserves to be recognized as such. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in sharing Shah’s address on social media, added, “We will keep focusing on furthering good governance and ensuring peace and prosperity for all.”
Nonetheless, there is one question that India needs to address. Has it ended an insurgency or resolved the conditions that made one possible?
That discussion involves asking what actually produced this outcome. Why did the state succeed now and not earlier? Reading across the recent ORF Special Report “Left-Wing Extremism, its Rise and Fall, and India’s Future Imperatives,” there are four competing explanations that emerge.
First, the political alignment between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the center and in Chhattisgarh from December 2023 onward produced operational synergy that earlier governments could not achieve. Second, technological improvements in the use of drone surveillance, AI-enabled intelligence, and cell phone triangulation were effective. Governments welfare schemes such as Jan Dhan, Aadhaar-linked direct transfers, and 4G connectivity reached previously inaccessible forest interiors. All of these quietly changed community calculations in ways that no security operation alone could.
However, the most relevant explanation is that of the internal collapse of the organizational will that preceded and in fact enabled external military success rather than the other way around. This is most noteworthy because if the state accelerated a collapse already underway, then the confidence with which post-conflict planning is being approached deserves some tempering.
This is a question India has been asking itself since independence without adequate answers.
The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution guarantees special protections for tribal communities in central and eastern India. These are the same communities that the red corridor runs 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 Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act was passed in 1996 to fill this gap. Nearly 30 years later, only ten states so far have framed its rules of engagement. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, which was designed to correct historical injustices, has been facing the lacuna of ground-level implementation. This shows the structural reality in which the tribal regions suffer from resource curse where the governing elites have material incentives to maintain ambiguity over land and forest rights.
Chhattisgarh alone contributes 17 percent of India’s mineral output. The same geography that was the heart of the insurgency is now the frontier of post-conflict development. That development plan includes mining corridors, industrial projects, and infrastructure whose benefits do not automatically flow to the communities who live there.
Political scientists draw a distinction between territorial control, the actual exercise of state power, and legitimate authority – the sense among governed populations that the state’s presence is just and responsive.
The Sri Lanka comparison is instructive. The LTTE was militarily eliminated in 2009. The military outcome was decisive, but fifteen years later, the Tamil political question remains structurally unresolved. Military termination and political resolution are not the same thing.
While India has achieved military termination in the red corridor, a comparable political settlement needs to be attempted seriously. The example of Assam’s Bodoland Territorial Region is worth noting, too. The Bodo separatist movement transitioned from armed confrontation to political negotiation through negotiated autonomy, extending the Sixth Schedule to plains tribes, creating genuine legislative and executive powers over 40 subjects, embedding cultural identity within a governance framework. Peace there emerged from negotiated legitimacy. The outcomes, while imperfect, are meaningfully more durable.
One often overlooked aspect is women. Women comprised roughly 40 percent of the CPI-Maoist cadre force. Journalist Sudha Ramachandran has documented the complex pathways through which women entered the movement. Forced conscription was one, women were also driven by attempts to escape domestic violence, the state’s ineffectiveness to deliver justice after sexual assault, and genuine ideological commitment to a movement that provided women more responsive dispute resolution than either the state judiciary or traditional community councils. The rehabilitation framework that is supposed to receive surrendered women is, by available accounts, not functioning as designed. Surrendered women cadres are being absorbed into pro-government militias rather than genuinely reintegrated. The post-conflict moment for women is not simply the end of violence. It is a new set of vulnerabilities in a context where the institutions that should protect them have a documented record 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-enabled intelligence infrastructure, cell phone triangulation capabilities, and social media monitoring systems are now part of the Indian state’s permanent institutional repertoire. Security architectures built for one context have a tendency to reshape the broader political environment in ways that outlast the original threat. This is evidenced by the normalization of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act as a counterinsurgency tool, the restrictions on journalist access to conflict zones, and the tendency to brand civil society activism as Maoist sympathy. These practices did not begin in the red corridor and they will not end there. The Naxal threat – real or imagined – is a way for the state to tar any protests by the locals. People in the area have started to show reluctance to participate in land rights movement for the fear of being labeled as Maoists. The armed insurgency is ending. The political constriction of legitimate dissent in these communities is not.
The ORF report, while comprising of 15 chapters, is silent when it comes to inclusion of Adivasi scholars or community representatives. The communities most affected by six decades of conflict remain objects of analysis rather than analytical voices. It is to be worth noting that future movements may not adopt the Maoist ideology but could take up the strategies and tactics of prior protracted conflict. The structural conditions that led to naxalism – economic inequality, technological displacement of labor, majoritarian electoral polarization – are only growing and not diminishing.
Organized dissent emerges from structural conditions. Eliminating one movement without addressing those conditions does not eliminate the possibility of the next one. It may simply change its form.
India’s achievement in ending six decades of Maoist insurgency is real. The combination of security operations, development delivery, and intelligence capability has produced results that seemed impossible a decade ago. But a victory that leaves governance deficits intact, rehabilitation frameworks underperforming, extractive interests empowered, and surveillance tools normalized is not a resolution.
The conversations that need to happen are on land and forest rights, genuine autonomy, and justice. These are the same questions that Naxalbari village first brought to widespread attention in 1967. March 2026 may mark the end of armed resistance, but whether it marks the beginning of genuine post-conflict justice is a different question entirely.
