Security personnel with Maoist cadres who have surrendered in recent times, along with the huge cache of arms recovered from the Left-wing extremists.
India's hard-won victory over Red rebellion faces governance test
The dismantling of the Maoist bastions marks a historic internal security triumph, but the State still has wok to do win the peace
India might be facing concerns at the moment over an external event, a tumultuous and bloody US-Israel war on Iran, its “biggest internal security threat” seems all but over.
As the March 31, 2026, deadline—a timeline set in 2024 by the Union Home Minister Amit Shah to eradicate the Maoist insurgency—came to an end, there was a sense of jubilation in the central and state governments over staying the course with the target.
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At least 43 Maoists, among the last ones with arms, surrendered in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra on the final day of the deadline. They also handed over about seven kilograms of gold and Rs 3 crore in cash and came overground.
Events were held in Bijapur, Dantewada, and Sukma districts of Chhattisgarh, one of the country's major Maoist-disturbed states, on Tuesday (March 31) to welcome the newly surrendered cadres, marking the formal declaration of the unravelling of the rebellion.
Amit Shah's long address on deadline eve
Shah spoke on the matter in detail in Parliament on Monday (March 30), whereby he praised the government's stern action against Left-wing extremism (LWE) and accused the Opposition, including the Congress and the Left, of encouraging it over the years.
Barring two top leaders of the banned CPI (Maoist)—founder chief Mupalla Lakshamana Rao alias Ganapathy and Misir Besra alias Sagar—the rest have either been neutralised or surrendered. Ganapathy and Besra are old and reportedly ailing.
A senior security official inspects arms recovered from surrendering Left-wing extremists along with other officers as India deals a devastating blow to its Maoist insurgency, the deadline of which was March 26.
With the extremist group's central leadership dismantled, its politburo neutralised, and its armed strength reduced to a residual presence in a handful of forested pockets, Shah indicated that only fragments of insurgency remain.
Bijapur in south Bastar in Chhattisgarh has some armed Maoist cadres still, but the local police said they too would fall in line soon or get neutralised.
States such as Odisha, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana have declared themselves free from the red rebels. Jharkhand has some, but they have considerably weakened.
In Maharashtra, Maoist insurgency was limited to two districts—Gondia and Gadchiroli. But in the past four years, the active armed cadres were either killed or they surrendered. Last month, the state government wrote to the Centre to withdraw the two districts from the list of LWE-affected areas.
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The home ministry subsequently reclassified them as legacy and thrust (L&T) districts, an official way to confirm that the districts are free from the red menace, but where the government needs to consolidate its position for further development and ensure that the insurgency doesn't revive. The same is expected to happen in other districts of the country that are coming out of the shadow of the Maoists.
A slow collapse
However, appears today as a sudden end of the threat has, in fact, been a slow, grinding collapse.
As the security and intelligence gaps got filled up with the erection of mobile towers, better road connectivity, and the delivery of welfare in the tribal hinterland of central India, including Bastar, where the Maoists enjoyed a free rein for decades, the movement got systematically hollowed out. Its top leadership—men who once commanded entire regions across what was called the “Red Corridor”— were killed, captured, or pushed into isolation. Mass support waned.
In 2009, when the Operation Green Hunt was launched, the Maoists had a decisive upper hand and could strike at the security forces anywhere at will. Seventeen years later, it's the State which has prevailed over them, displaying an iron will.
Two major operations last summer—one that led to the killing of the CPI(Maoist) general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju in Abujh Madh in Chhattisgarh, and the other that lasted over a month in the Karregutta Hills bordering Bijapur in Bastar and Telangana—signalled a devastating last blow to the banned outfit.
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What followed in the months was the neutralisation of top leaders like Madvi Hidma, Ganesh Uikey, Satyanarayana Reddy alias Kosa, and Ramchandra Reddu alias Chalapati, besides surrender of high-profile leaders such as Mallojula Venugopal Rao (Sonu or Bhupathi), Barse Deva and Thippiri Tirupathi (Devuji).
The writing was on the wall—loud and clear.
On the ground, the change is starker. Security officials estimate that the armed strength of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, the armed wing of the CPI (Maoist), which once ran into several thousands, has shrunk to a few dozen at most, scattered across different states, sans any leadership. The last big leader in south Bastar, named Pappa Rao, came out with his team of 17 cadres on March 29.
Surrender and rehabilitation policies across different states have played a decisive role.
In Chhattisgarh alone, hundreds of cadres —some of them mid-level commanders —have laid down arms over the past few years, drawn by a mix of pressure and policy: cash incentives, housing, and the promise of a life outside the forest.
Ditto for Maharashtra, Odisha, Andhra and Telangana.
The State’s strategy has been clear: isolate the leadership, fragment the ranks, and offer the foot soldiers a way out. It worked, even as the pressure of security operations built up. Central India currently is one of the most militarised regions of the country, with about a hundred forward operating bases right in the heart of Abujh Madh, a once impregnable hilly citadel of the Maoists.
The war that was
To understand the significance of this moment, one must return to the scale of what is ending.
The Maoist insurgency—rooted in the Naxalite uprising of 1967 (from West Bengal's Naxalbari) and consolidated with the formation of CPI (Maoist) in 2004—was never a peripheral disturbance. It was, at its peak, India’s most widespread internal conflict, stretching across more than 200 districts.
Since 2000 alone, over 12,000 people have been killed in Maoist-related violence—civilians, security personnel, and insurgents, according to the data maintained by security watch, South Asia Terrorism Portal. That includes over 4,000 civilians, 2,700 security personnel and nearly 5,000 Maoists.
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Government figures suggest that more than 5,000 security personnel lost their lives over the decades since the Naxalite uprising in the 1960-70s. There was a time not long ago when the Maoists ran 'Janatana Sarkar' (people's government) in what they called liberated zones.
In places like Bastar or Gadchiroli, the conflict was not an abstraction. It was embedded in everyday life: in the fear of stepping out after dusk, in the knowledge that a road could be mined, in the silence that followed an encounter. Tribal villages were caught in a brutal in-between—suspected by both sides, punished by both. The insurgency drew strength from long-standing grievances: land alienation, forest rights, state neglect, and the violence of extraction economies. But it also imposed its own regime—of control, coercion, and, often, retribution.
Why the State prevailed
The state’s eventual dominance rests on a convergence of strategies.
As The Federal reported comprehensively in June 2025 that a combination of strategies was at play, particularly in Bastar region, where the last nail was put in the coffin.
First, the forces targeted the banned outfit’s leadership. Earlier approaches often focused on area domination—holding territory, running patrols. In recent years, highly specific intelligence-led operations took down top leaders, disrupting command chains and creating internal disarray.
Second, a lucrative surrender-and-rehabilitation policy was refined and aggressively implemented. The aim was to disarm the movement and hence, there was a big incentive to give up sophisticated arms and reveal the buried ammunition. By creating a clear exit route for lower and middle-rung cadres, the state thinned the insurgency from within. The cadres could return once they laid down arms.
Except for a few jarring exceptions, most states maintained a very high credibility with their surrender policy. The cadres and leaders were not neutralised when they wanted to come out.
Third, there has been a visible expansion of infrastructure and welfare in previously inaccessible areas, though the political and administrative vacuum still persists.
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Roads have cut into forest interiors; mobile towers have followed; ration shops, health centres, and schools—however uneven—have marked the State’s arrival. In places like Abujh Madh, miles and miles of new roads have revolutionised both mobility and surveillance.
Then, the shrinking geography of the insurgency mattered. What was once a broad corridor shrunk to a few pockets. Containment made concentration—and therefore targeting—easier.
Finally, there was a vertical split in the movement over its future, as indicated by the letter written to his comrades last August by Mallojula Venugopal Rao. He declared the protracted war had no future left, and that it was better to surrender and continue to work for the masses within the constitutional framework. Months later, he surrendered before the police in Gadchiroli police after spending five decades in the forests, marking the end of an era.
Not a clean end still
Yet, to call this a clean end would be misleading.
A section of security officials thinks the insurgency will not disappear, and it has just retreated and adapted. The troops will need to be watchful of the residue formation, who rely on improvised explosive devices, smaller units, and localised actions rather than large-scale confrontations.
More importantly, the conditions that fed the insurgency have not entirely vanished.
In many tribal regions, questions of land, forest rights, displacement, and access to justice remain unresolved. The expansion of mining and infrastructure projects—now likely to accelerate in the absence of armed resistance—could crack open old fault lines.
There is also the question of memory. Communities that lived through decades of violence—caught between Maoists and the State—carry scars that do not fade with the lowering of a gun.
Central India’s forests— the whole of the mythical Dandakaranya spanning Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and contiguous forests of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh— would not be the same again. The vacuum left by perhaps the longest of the country’s internal insurgencies, which was never secessionist, would take a few decades to fill up.
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What replaces an uprising is often as important as how it ends. The Maoists had mobilised close to 10 million people in central India, mostly tribals and primitive vulnerable groups.
In several Maoist-affected areas, the rebels had, over time, built parallel systems such as 'janatana sarkars', informal courts, and mechanisms (however coercive) for dispute resolution. Their withdrawal leaves a governance vacuum. The state now faces a different challenge: not of defeating an armed enemy, but of establishing legitimacy.
Will roads be followed by functioning schools and hospitals? Will forest rights claims be settled with fairness? Will local communities have a meaningful say in decisions that affect their land? Gadchiroli and some other districts provide a template, but will the states such as Chhattisgarh follow that template? And do they have the political will and social legitimacy to do that?
Questions on reintegration
There is also the delicate task of reintegration. Thousands of former cadres and top Maoists who have laid down their arms must find a place in society—jobs, acceptance, a future that does not pull them back into the forests or leave them isolated or aggrieved.
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And there is the risk—seen in other conflict zones—that a purely security-driven approach could persist even after the threat has receded, leaving behind a heavily militarised landscape without a corresponding deepening of democracy. The Indian State can, with some justification, claim that it has won the war.
But what comes next will determine whether it wins something harder: the peace.
