Naxalism Is being erased – But India cannot afford amnesia

For half a century, the word “Naxal” evoked a chilling image: ambushed convoys, torched schools, kangaroo courts in forest clearings, and entire districts where the Indian state existed only on paper. Today, that image is collapsing at unprecedented speed. What was once called the “Red Corridor” is now a shrinking archipelago of violence, boxed into a few pockets, hunted on a war footing, and steadily replaced by roads, mobile towers and police posts.

This is not rhetoric. It is data.

According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, districts affected by Left Wing Extremism (LWE) have fallen from 126 across 10 states in 2013 to just 38 in 2024, a nearly 70% contraction in geographical spread. Violent incidents are down 73% from the 2010 peak, and deaths of civilians and security personnel have plunged by 86%, from an all-time high of 1,005 in 2010 to just 138 in 2023. By 2025, analysts describe Naxalism as being in its “final phase”, with more than 1,500 cadres surrendering in 2025 alone.

After decades of drift, India is dismantling its most entrenched internal security threat piece by piece.

From romantic revolt to ruthless terror

The movement did not begin as roadside bombings and extortion rackets. Naxalism traces its roots to the 1967 peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal, born out of genuine grievances around landlessness, caste oppression and state neglect. Over time, various splinter groups evolved and merged, most notably in 2004 when People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre fused into the CPI (Maoist), giving the insurgency a national command and a hardened Leninist-Maoist frame.

But what was marketed as a “people’s war” quickly degenerated into a war on the people. Naxal outfits ran kangaroo courts, carried out beheadings and public executions, and used minors as couriers and fighters. They systematically targeted school buildings, road contractors and polling booths to prevent the state from gaining a foothold.

Between 2009 and 2016 alone, India recorded over 12,000 LWE-related violent incidents and 4,154 deaths, more than 500 deaths a year at the height of the insurgency. The victims were overwhelmingly Adivasi villagers, low-level panchayat leaders, teachers and constables, precisely the people whom Maoist propaganda claimed to fight for.

By the early 2010s, Naxalism was no longer a protest against injustice. It had become a militarised criminal enterprise, funded by extortion from contractors, mining outfits and local businesses, enforced by the barrel of a gun.

The strategic shift: policy, not just police

The real inflection point came with the National Policy and Action Plan to address LWE, approved in 2015. Unlike the earlier piecemeal approach, this framework explicitly recognised that you cannot “kill an idea” with bullets alone. It laid out a multi-pronged strategy:

Relentless security operations to deny Maoists safe havens.

Big-ticket development – roads, telecom, banking, schools, health centres – in LWE districts.

Rights and entitlements for local communities, including forest rights and social welfare.

The results are stark. The number of districts under the Security Related Expenditure (SRE) scheme, which supports anti-Naxal operations, dropped from 126 to 70 between 2010 and 2021. Affected districts overall fell to 38 by April 2024; 60 districts have been freed from the menace of LWE in just the last five years.

Critically, the number of police stations reporting LWE violence has collapsed, from 465 in 2010 to just 89 by mid-2024, according to Home Ministry data placed before Parliament. That is what a boxed-in insurgency looks like.

War footing on the ground: big blows in Bastar and beyond

If the policy was the blueprint, the last three years have been the demolition drive.

Take Chhattisgarh’s Bastar division, the epicentre of Naxal violence for decades. On 16 April 2024, security forces launched what has been described as one of the biggest anti-Maoist operations in the state’s history in Kanker district. In a prolonged gun battle near Kalpar and Hapatola villages, at least 29 Naxalites, including several women and reportedly a top commander, were neutralised. Three security personnel were injured.

In 2025, a 21-day operation across the Karregutta hill range, 60 km of dense, insurgent-dominated forest, saw at least 31 Naxals killed, including 16 women, many from the technical and warfare units of the PLGA (People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army). This was not just a routine encounter; it was the systematic dismantling of a hardened militant ecosystem that had entrenched itself over two and a half years.

Chhattisgarh’s Chief Minister has publicly vowed to eliminate Maoism from Bastar by March 31, 2026. He isn’t speaking in the abstract. Since December 2023, more than 450 Maoists have been neutralised and nearly 1,600 arrested in the state. Schools have reopened, electricity has returned to remote villages, and banking and healthcare facilities are slowly replacing the “fear tax” once collected by Maoist squads.

Zoom out further. A 2025 investigation into the ongoing crackdown notes that active Maoist fighters are now estimated at barely 500, down from several thousand at the peak. It highlights “Operation Kagar,” a massive security push launched in 2024 with tens of thousands of personnel and advanced surveillance systems, which made 2024 the bloodiest year for Maoist cadres in over a decade, around 344 insurgents killed.

Alongside the body count is the quieter metric that hurts any underground movement more: surrenders. Recent analysis of MHA data shows that more than 1,500 cadres have surrendered in 2025 alone, reflecting growing disillusionment inside the ranks and the pull of rehabilitation packages. In August 2025, four Maoists carrying rewards of up to ₹8 lakh each, including a couple involved in serious attacks on security forces and civilians, laid down arms in Kondagaon, Bastar. They cited sustained pressure, internal rifts and a desire to return to mainstream life.

When commanders with bounties on their heads decide that the state is now the safer bet, the insurgency is in existential trouble.

The map tells the story

Perhaps the most telling indicator is the shrinking list of “most affected” districts. The Union Home Ministry’s data shows that these high-intensity districts have come down from 12 a few years ago to just six, four in Chhattisgarh (Bijapur, Kanker, Narayanpur, Sukma), one in Jharkhand (West Singhbhum) and one in Maharashtra (Gadchiroli).

More recent reporting suggests an even sharper contraction: as of October 2025, only three districts, Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh, remain in the “most affected” category. In other words, what was once a corridor cutting across multiple states is now a cluster of forested pockets in one region.

It is no accident that the Union government has set 2026 as the target year to eliminate Left Wing Extremism. For once, the deadline does not sound like a hollow slogan. The trend lines are already pointing there.

Why the crackdown is working

Three things have changed decisively in the last decade.

First, the security architecture has been localised and professionalised. Forces like the District Reserve Guard (DRG) in Chhattisgarh, recruited from local youth including surrendered Maoists, know the terrain and the language. Combined teams of state police, CRPF, BSF and specialised units now operate with better intelligence, drones, night-vision equipment and road access.

Second, development is no longer a brochure word. The same MHA data that tracks falling violence also tracks the expansion of roads, bridges, mobile towers and bank branches in LWE districts. Every kilometre of blacktop, every new school building, every functional health centre chips away at the Maoists’ claim that “the state has abandoned you.”

Third, the money pipeline has been squeezed. Stronger enforcement of UAPA, NIA investigations, and financial intelligence have hit the urban overground network that funnelled funds, propaganda and recruits to jungle squads. The romanticisation of Naxalism in some activist and academic circles now faces hard questions, as data shows the insurgency systematically targeted precisely the poorest and most vulnerable communities it claimed to liberate.

In short: boots on the ground, roads in the forest, and law in the cities. That combination is finally working.

Victory is in sight – but so is the temptation to forget

It is tempting, at this point, to declare a clean victory and move on. That would be a mistake.

Even critical reporting on the current crackdown has raised hard questions: allegations of fake encounters, arbitrary arrests, and displacement in mineral-rich tribal areas, all in the name of “security”. Human rights concerns cannot be shrugged off as mere “anti-national noise”; they are guardrails that prevent the state from becoming indistinguishable from the very violence it seeks to defeat.

More importantly, the original fault lines that fed Naxalism, land alienation, caste oppression, predatory local elites, corrupt contractors, have not magically vanished. If new roads only bring in mining trucks and not fair compensation, jobs and justice, another wave of resentment will inevitably build.

The war against Naxalism is being won on the battlefield. The war against the conditions that produced Naxalism will be won or lost in the panchayat office, the courtroom and the ration shop.

India is on the brink of erasing one of the world’s longest-running Maoist insurgencies. That is a historic achievement, bought with the blood of thousands of civilians and security personnel and the courage of communities that refused to be permanent hostages in their own forests.

But the real test of a “Naxal-free India” will not be the number of encounters or surrenders. It will be whether the state that finally returned to the red corridor chooses to stay only as a uniform, or also as a schoolteacher, a nurse, a forest officer who listens, a judge who delivers, and a government that remembers why the first shot in Naxalbari was fired in the first place.

Erase the insurgency by all means. Just don’t erase the lessons.