After nearly six decades, India’s left-wing extremism (LWE) insurgency has been brought to the brink of extinction. On 31 March 2026, the government’s stipulated deadline for eliminating the insurgency, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) declared the country “Naxal-free” [1] . This marks a pivotal transformation as the country successfully mitigated the prolonged Naxalite insurgency that has long destabilised sizeable regions in India’s central and eastern regions [2] . From dominating a third of India’s territories (223 districts) in 2011–12, Maoist presence has today declined to just two districts [3] . The elimination and surrender of key Maoist leaders, effective security operations coordinated by the Centre and affected states, adroit use of technology in combat operations, impactful developmental initiatives, and improved local governance have, in recent years, played a significant role in neutralising the LWE movement. Chhattisgarh, particularly the Bastar region, which had remained the last stronghold of the Maoists, has also slipped out of their control [4] . By responding to the threat posed by the Naxals with swift and balanced security operations complemented with a developmental push and incentivised surrender deals for the rebels, India has effectively mitigated and weakened the insurgency. India’s effective, balanced, and time-bound approach in combating such a well-structured and deeply entrenched insurgency makes it a model for violence mitigation and conflict resolution. Indeed, India’s success testifies that committed leadership, strategic security interventions, institutional coordination, a holistic and sustained developmental push, and trust-building measures can collectively play a pivotal role in achieving long-term resolution in such severe conflicts. As such, it is imperative to closely examine the governmental policy India has adopted over the last decade to combat the Maoist insurgency.
India’s tryst with the Maoist insurgency has been one of the most enduring and complex internal conflicts of the postcolonial era. Emerging from the 1967 Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal, the movement quickly spread across central and eastern India, gaining traction in areas which were earlier marked by entrenched socioeconomic inequalities, tribal marginalisation, and exploitative land relations. Its persistence for over six decades reflects the insurgents’ ability to adapt, consolidate, and exploit deep-rooted grievances. Although the roots of LWE can be traced to the Telangana peasant uprising of 1946–51, the movement took serious shape in 1967. On 25 May that year, armed with sticks, bows, and arrows, peasants, landless labourers, and tribals launched violent raids on the grain stores of a landlord in Naxalbari village, protesting the exploitation by the feudal landed elite [5] . The police swiftly crushed the rebellion within days, yet it marked the birth of what became known as the Naxalite movement—named after the village—led by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and Jangal Santhal. Initially inspired by Mao Zedong’s strategies for seizing political power, Majumdar and Sanyal shaped what became known as LWE, rooted in far-left communist and Maoist ideologies that believed in radical means to overthrow the exploitative ‘capitalist and power elite’ [6] (6).
Following Majumdar’s arrest and death in police custody soon after, many observers proclaimed the end of the Naxalite movement. Yet, within a decade, it re-emerged in other parts of the country. A major resurgence came in the early 1980s when Kondapalli Seetharamaiah founded the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh. Dedicated to championing the rights of peasants and the landless, the PWG carried out a spate of high-profile attacks, assassinations, and bombings aimed at landlords, upper-caste elites, and political figures in the state. Although the Andhra Pradesh police forces dealt severe blows to the PWG, leading many to predict the insurgency’s demise, the movement once again defied such assumptions. In the early 2000s, it expanded deep into Central India, especially the rugged Dandakaranya region and adjoining areas spanning Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and parts of Maharashtra, collectively known as the ‘Red Corridor.’ A turning point came in 2004, when the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the PWG, the Maoist Communist Centre of India, and around 40 other armed factions united to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [7] . The 2004 unification of the two main Maoist factions proved a strategic impetus for the insurgency, enabling them to consolidate resources, expand their territorial reach, and strengthen their firepower.
At its height, the Naxalite presence spanned more than 200 districts, which led former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in April 2006 to describe the insurgency as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country” [8] . Alongside their territorial spread, the insurgents also rapidly upgraded their military capabilities, amassing more trained fighters, weapons, ammunition, funds, and tactical expertise. Within a relatively short span, their armed wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, built a force of about 20,000 full-time cadres, nearly half of whom were considered hardened fighters [9] . By the mid-2000s, they had developed extensive administrative and military infrastructure across several states in India and controlled large swathes of territory, creating what was often described as a “parallel state” [10] . The trajectory of violence has been uneven, with periods of rapid expansion followed by phases of containment. The insurgents relied on guerrilla warfare, sabotage of state infrastructure, and the mobilisation of tribal populations through ‘people’s courts’ and social justice campaigns. However, the past decade has marked a decisive decline of the insurgency. This contraction is not accidental; it reflects a recalibration of the State’s strategy in the last decade.
The central government set a clear multi-pronged strategy in 2015 to tackle the insurgency. Unlike earlier approaches dominated by militarisation, recent years have witnessed a shift toward a security–development nexus—where development programmes were rolled out in tandem with counterinsurgency operations, which has immensely helped in mitigating the insurgency-induced violence. India’s case resonates with global experiences. Insurgencies in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa reveal a recurring pattern: where the State relies exclusively on coercion, insurgencies may be suppressed temporarily but tend to resurface [11] . Durable peace emerges only when inclusive governance and development reforms address structural grievances [12] . Thus, India’s experience offers fertile ground for comparative lessons.
Theories of peacebuilding increasingly emphasise the role of development in mitigating armed insurgencies, including those based on extremist/radical ideologies. Following Johan Galtung’s notion of “positive peace,” scholars argue that sustainable peace requires addressing structural violence—poverty, exclusion, inequality—alongside ending armed hostilities [13] . Paul Collier’s “greed versus grievance” debate highlights how economic deprivation and lack of opportunities create fertile ground for rebellion. Similarly, scholars of post-conflict transitions stress that peace cannot be achieved through coercion alone; it requires embedding developmental aspirations into governance. India’s Maoist insurgency exemplifies this nexus. Historically marginalised tribal populations experienced structural exclusion from land rights, forest resources, and welfare schemes, creating grievances that insurgents mobilised. The State’s planned developmental interventions in the last decade can be seen as attempts to dismantle these structural conditions, thereby advancing peace-building objectives. Counterinsurgency theory underscores the principle that insurgencies are political struggles over legitimacy. Insurgents thrive not only through violence but also by offering governance alternatives in spaces where the State is absent or discredited. Successful counterinsurgency thus requires ‘winning hearts and minds’, not just battles. Developmentalism, in this sense, becomes a legitimacy-building tool: by delivering schools, healthcare, connectivity, and other welfare goods, the State signals its commitment to citizens, thereby eroding insurgent legitimacy. It is this delicate balance between security operations and developmental governance that the Indian state has achieved, which has played the most crucial role in ending left-wing extremism after decades of conflict.
A sustained welfare offensive in a historically marginalised region, augmented by enhanced Centre-state synergy in counterinsurgency operations and the restoration of local people’s confidence, exemplifies the Indian State’s pragmatic approach to violence abatement in protracted conflict theatres [14] . This approach warrants close study and analysis to understand how complex insurgency movements can be effectively addressed and how peace can be restored in violence-prone regions. In this context, this volume has been curated to take a deep dive into India’s multi-layered strategy that was instrumental in combating the insurgency, with perspectives from both practitioners and researchers. Beyond reflecting on the State’s approach to effectively combating the insurgency, this volume also examines post-insurgency governance dynamics in affected areas, particularly developmental issues, transitional justice, and tribal rights, which are instrumental to durable peace and prosperity in the region. The nine essays in this volume are divided into two parts covering three broad dimensions of India’s response to the LWE: effective security architecture, systematic institutional coordination, and responsive developmental governance. The first part presents practitioners’ perspectives from administrative and security officials who directly tackled the insurgency, reflecting on the ground strategies that helped mitigate it. The second part includes academic analyses from domain specialists and researchers who examine the key elements of India’s security and governance planning that helped end LWE. Finally, an appendix lists key central government policies focused on tackling LWE over the last decade.
The volume opens with an essay by Praveen Vashista, who underlines how India has successfully neutralised the LWE threat through sustained national effort combining security measures, development interventions, institutional reforms, capacity enhancements and political coordination under a clearly defined objective and timeline led by the MHA. Next, Sajid Farid Shapoo writes about how the government’s highly effective surrender and rehabilitation policy became a gamechanger in its counterinsurgency strategy and, over time, one of the most consequential tools for combating LWE. He further delves into the strategic logic of surrender that played a key role in the successful case studies from Odisha and Chhattisgarh. In the next essay, Karn Satyarthi writes on the three fundamental features of the Indian State that have been critical to the decisive push against the Naxals: deepening democracy through growth in electoral participation in the Red Corridor, focusing on the development of infrastructure and delivery of welfare programmes, and enacting and implementing progressive legislation. Uddipan Mukherjee, in his essay, drives home a crucial point: communist insurgencies are doomed to fail in the twenty-first century, especially in a sturdy and vibrant democracy such as India, as an outmoded ideology hardly stands a chance against India’s democratic structure, which has a robust representative governance architecture in place.
In the second part, Abhiram Ghadyalpatil’s opening essay notes that the Modi government has brought a fierce ideological and strategic coherence to the anti-LWE operations, making them truly multipronged beyond the banal binary of security versus development. It has built trust with local populations in Naxal-affected areas by investing in bespoke government schemes and relaxing norms to deliver development. Next, Soumya Awasthi writes on how India’s use of emerging technologies has contributed to the effectiveness of its counterinsurgency operations against the Maoists between 2010 and 2026. She reflects on the four key domains that have been crucial: aerial surveillance and unmanned systems, digital intelligence architecture, geospatial and satellite capabilities, and biometric and data-driven policing. Aradhrita Singh notes that the decline of Maoism in India testifies that insurgencies rooted in governance deficits cannot be defeated through force alone, but can be permanently eliminated only through institutions communities trust to represent their interests. Importantly, she highlights that governance initiatives did not supplement counterinsurgency strategy in India; rather, they became counterinsurgency's most decisive and sustainable part. Sarral Sharma, in his essay, focuses on the security-centric measures that mitigated LWE: sustained area domination, locally recruited forces, inter-agency coordination and technology-enabled operations, along with the importance of the non-security approaches in countering the insurgency. In the final essay, Niranjan Sahoo and Ambar Kumar Ghosh note that Centre-state cooperation played a crucial role in strengthening security and intelligence networks, improving police infrastructure, and establishing specialised combat training institutions, enabling security forces to respond more effectively to insurgent threats. They also note the crucial role of adequate financial assistance from the Centre, which has contributed to infrastructure development, improved delivery of essential services such as education, healthcare, and public distribution systems, along with enhanced telecommunications and road connectivity, which greatly facilitated the end of the insurgency.
The volume unpacks and closely examines India’s success in effectively combating LWE, which destabilised affected regions for a long time. The series emphasises India’s unique strategy of balancing security operations with a humane developmental approach, which helped strengthen local communities' trust in the state and supported the rehabilitation and mainstreaming of marginalised communities affected by the insurgency. This approach provides a model for conflict mitigation and peacebuilding in complex terrain, a strategy that needs close study and understanding. This volume is a crucial step in that direction, and further studies should build on the foundations laid down by this work.
[1] Shubomoy Sikdar, “ India is now free from Maoism, says Amit Shah at Bastar ,” The Hindu , May 19, 2026.
[2] Ministry of Home Affairs , Government of India.
[3] Ministry of Home Affairs , Government of India.
[4] Abhishek De, “ Why Amit Shah Chose a Conflict Zone to Announce Naxal-Free India, ” India Today, May 19, 2026.
[5] “ 1967 Naxalbari movement, ” Frontline , August 12, 2022.
[6] Ghanshyam Roy, “ The Uprisings and Implications of Left-Wing Extremism in India: Special Reference to Bihar, ” Indian Political Science Association, January-March 2018.
[7] Sumit Bhattacharjee, “ A Merger that Changed the Maoist Threat Perception, ” The Hindu, September 22, 2020.
[8] Rahi Gaikwad, “ Manmohan: Naxalis the Greatest Internal Threat, ” The Hindu , November 17, 2021.
[9] K. Srinivas Reddy, “ Formation of PLGA: A Turning Point in the Maoist Movement, ” The Hindu , December 4, 2021.
[10] Niranjan Sahoo, “Half A Century of India’s Maoist Insurgency: An Appraisal of State Response,” ORF Occasional Paper No. 198, June 2019, Observer Research Foundation, [11] .orfonline.org/research/half-a-century-of-india-s-maoist-insurgency-an-appraisal-of-state-response">https://www.orfonline.org/research/half-a-century-of-india-s-maoist-insurgency-an-appraisal-of-state-response.
[11] “ Why Nepal rejected Maoists ,” BBC , November 22, 2013.
[12] M.M. Fazil and M.A.M. Fowsar, “ The end of Srilanka’s civil war and the fall of the liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam LTTE: A critical analysis of the contributed factors to the defeat of the LTTE, ” Researchgate , October 2020.
[13] Viktor Savchenko, “ Johan Galtung’s Concept of positive and negative peace pathways for Europe in a Polycrisis, ” Researchgate, March 2026.
[14] Manish Gohil, “ Indian Counterinsurgency: The Decline of Naxalism, ” Encyclopedia Geopolitica, May 30, 2018.
Professor Harsh V. Pant is Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is a Professor of International Relations with King's India Institute at ...
Ambar Kumar Ghosh is an Associate Fellow under the Political Reforms and Governance Initiative at ORF Kolkata. His primary areas of research interest include studying ...
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