Over May 17 and 18, hundreds of Indian security forces began encircling Gundekot village in the hilly and densely forested Abujmarh region of central India’s Chhattisgarh state. A group of 35 Maoist guerillas, including the top leader of India’s largest outlawed organization, was camping there. Security forces were accompanied by some of the rebels who had surrendered in recent weeks and had knowledge of the difficult terrain.
Gun fights started from the morning of May 19. The guerillas tried to break the encirclement throughout May 20. But the number of security forces only increased. While the guerrillas started running out of resources, Indian Air Force choppers kept the security forces supplied with food and other resources.
One team of seven guerrillas managed to break the security encirclement and escaped. But heavy shelling pinned down the rest. By the morning of May 21, all of the remaining fighters were killed.
The same day, Indian security forces announced that among the dead was Nambala Keshava Rao, alias Basavaraj, on whose head India’s premier anti-terror body, the National Investigation Agency, had announced its highest cash reward.
As the general secretary of the outlawed Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist), India’s largest insurgent group, 71-year-old Rao had been leading India’s left-wing insurgency since 2018. Before that, he had helmed the CPI-Maoist’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA), since its inception in 2004.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Rao’s death a “remarkable success,” reiterating his government’s commitment “to eliminating the menace of Maoism.”
In the words of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, this was a “landmark achievement,” as Rao was “the backbone of the Naxal movement.” Naxal is the Indian lingo for Maoists, as the movement inspired by Chinese Communist icon Mao Zedong took off in India from a place called Naxalbari in West Bengal, an eastern state.
Abujmarh, at the core of Dandakaranya forests, has long been the heartland for India’s Maoists. The expansive hilly and forested tract occupying large parts of central India and parts of eastern, western, and southern India was so out of bounds for the state that hundreds of villages remained outside revenue records and free from any police presence until a few years ago.
Amid this isolation and neglect, Dandakaranya has emerged as the heartland of India’s biggest internal war – the one against left-wing extremists – over the past four decades. It is there that India’s left-wing insurgents created their military base and formed “revolutionary people’s governments.”
Now India is in the midst of a concerted operation to remove the Maoists from the area once and for all.
Rao’s killing came nine days after the security forces announced that they had dismantled the CPI-Maoist “headquarters” in a 21-day operation from April 21 to May 11 at Karregutta hills, roughly 200 kilometers south of Abujmarh. Karregutta was considered impenetrable until a few years ago. During this operation, security forces claim to have killed 31 Maoists.
Shah said that the Karregutta hills served as “the unified headquarters” of different departments of the Maoist party, including arms manufacturing and training, all of which were destroyed. He called it “the biggest ever operation against Naxalism” and a “historic breakthrough.”
After both operations, Shah said that the government is “resolved to eliminate” the Maoists by March 2026, a goal he has repeated since last year.
A Big Blow
Over the past two decades, CPI-Maoist has been one of the world’s deadliest left-wing armed organizations. It has enjoyed an influential presence in large swathes of central, eastern, and southern India, where it has carried out major attacks on Indian security forces and resisted major development projects, including mining and infrastructure. At different times, it has impacted parts of about 10 of India’s 28 states.
For years, security personnel dreaded postings in Maoist-influenced areas. India has lost more security personnel in the anti-Maoist operations than in the separatist movements in north India’s Kashmir and the northeastern states. Some of the Maoists’ operations involved forces of up to 1,000 troops. In 2005, then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called them the “single-largest threat to India’s internal security.”
But the tide appears to be turning.
According to government statistics, Maoist violence reached its peak in 2010 with 1,936 incidents that claimed the lives of 1,005 civilians and security personnel. By 2024, this had fallen to only 374 incidents causing 150 deaths. The number of Maoist-affected districts has similarly dropped from 126 in 2010 to 38 in 2024.
“Rao’s killing will make cadres down the line demotivated,” R.K. Vij, former director general of Chhattisgarh police, told The Diplomat.
He said that since the general secretary enjoyed additional security cover, the breaching of his protection would unnerve others. Maoists will also have to reorganize themselves and rethink their strategy.
Maoists have, indeed, been reformulating their strategy over the past couple of years as they faced a series of setbacks.
In a statement issued in September 2024 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the party’s founding, the CPI-Maoist acknowledged that their public base and areas of movement had shrunk and they were facing “an unprecedented encirclement-elimination war in Operation Kagaar.”
The government launched Operation Kagaar in January 2024.
Data that the Maoists presented in that statement, which The Diplomat has read, speaks for itself.
In the 669 “guerrilla war actions” taken up from 2021 to July 2024, the CPI-Maoist said that 261 policemen were “wiped out,” 516 were injured, and 25 arms were “seized.” During this same period, Maoists lost “439 utmost valuable comrades of the Party, PLGA, and United Front and 215 weapons.” Of these, 218 have died in the previous year alone.
The Maoists wrote that India’s major security operations involve 1,500 to 3,000 or even more “Special Police, Commando, Paramilitary and Army personnel.” They said that 20 to 25 villages or stretches of 10-12 kilometers were being covered in each operation following a “cordon, search, and kill method.”
Given the situation, party units “must be ready to resist the enemy offensive at any time as a part of tactics of active self-defense,” the CPI-Maoist statement said. The party urged its forces to retreat from their positions at the first opportunity.
According to a Chhattisgarh-based security personnel who spoke on condition of anonymity, Rao, too, tried to retreat with his team, “but the security forces had far outnumbered them.”
High Human Cost
The killing of Rao came at a a cost: Dandakaranya has turned into a war zone with Indian security forces’ massive crackdown over the past few months. While the top leader’s killing exemplified security forces’ success, critics raise concerns about the high number of deaths in security operations.
The death counts reached into the double digits in several such incidents since the start of the year. The security forces gunned down 18 people on January 16, 14 on January 21, 31 on February 9, 30 on March 20, 18 on March 29, 13 on April 2, 10 on April 30, 31 between April 21 and May 11, and 27 on May 21. There were over 50 more total casualties when adding up individual encounters where three to nine persons were killed.
Some are alleging that the government is out to eliminate entire populations of tribal villages in their bid to destroy the Maoist insurgency. Security forces have been accused of gross human rights violations, and there have been allegations that innocent villagers were killed in staged encounters.
Some allege that the government is trying to free the area to launch mega-mining projects that would require the clearing of vast tracts of forests.
Three major mainstream communist parties – the CPI, the CPI-Marxist, and the CPI-Marxist-Leninist-Liberation – that participate in elections have condemned the killings, calling them “extra-judicial murder.” They have demanded a judicial probe into the operation.
According to Mohammad Salim, a politburo member of the CPI-Marxist, India’s largest mainstream left party, the government’s deployment of security forces on an unprecedentedly massive scale seems to have an economic dimension..
“The region is rich in mineral resources and there are many mining interests. Besides, the government is looking to monetize land, whereas big corporate houses are trying to convert surplus money into land properties,” Salim told The Diplomat.
In order to monetize the resources of the area, the land must freed from encumbrances, he added.
“There is no transparency. So many people are being killed and the government is calling all of them Maoists. We don’t know if ordinary villagers are also being killed and being branded as Maoists,” Salim said.
All these parties demand that the government accepts the Maoists’ appeal for peace talks.
The security-centric approach has repeatedly faced criticism from the members of civil society and human rights defenders.
In 2008, a government-appointed committee submitted in its report that the official policy documents recognize the direct correlation between what is termed extremism and poverty, drawing attention to ineffective or faulty implementation of development schemes, the deep relationship between tribals and forests, and the indigenous people’s undue suffering from displacement.
However, Indian governments have in practice treated unrest merely as a law and order problem, the report said.
Down But Not Out
Chhattisgarh-based author and journalist Subhranshu Choudhary, who has met several top Maoist leaders, does not see a future for the movement in Chhattisgarh.
He feels that the movement in Chhattisgarh was more about resistance to local injustice – unlike states like eastern India’s West Bengal and Bihar and southern India’s Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, where the Maoist movement had significant communist ideological underpinnings. Besides, the atrocities of state-backed vigilante groups, committed in a bid to check Maoist activities, simply pushed more tribal people toward the Maoists.
However, over the past few years, the state has been able to win over a section of the tribals with improved service delivery and infrastructural projects. This is why the government’s intelligence and informant network has strengthened. “That’s a key game-changer, apart from the technological advances that the security forces have at their disposal,” Choudhary said.
He pointed out that Maoists chose Chhattisgarh as a “rear area” for their ideological movement in Andhra Pradesh so that they could retreat there when facing security operations in Andhra. Because of the very low level of education and socio-political awareness among the people of Dandakaranya, Maoists never considered it the heartland of their revolution.
“Even after three decades of their activities in Chhattisgarh, there is little ideological influence on their cadres force here,” Choudhary said. “They can barely tell what Maoism is.”
He pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the Maoist cadres base comes from tribal people, especially women, but their leadership positions are almost always occupied by educated non-tribal men, mostly from Andhra and some from Bengal.
“Once these ideologues leave Chhattisgarh in search of safe shelter, there will be no glue left to stick the cadres force together,” he said.
However, Vij, the former Chhattisgarh police director general, feels otherwise. “At present, Maoists are not in a position to attack security forces. But it would be wrong to consider them already finished,” he said.
He added that the Maoist army’s battalion formations may come down to company size and companies may reduce to platoon strength but they still have about a dozen Central Committee members and roughly 20 members of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee who are active.
Vij believes the Maoists currently have two options. They can either bring in new people to fill the vacant leadership positions and try to continue what they have been doing or they can announce a unilateral ceasefire, retreat for the time being, and engage in peace talks.
According to him, a senior Politburo member like Mallojula Venugopal Rao or Tippiri Tirupathi may be chosen as the new general secretary.
“If the Maoists opt for a temporary retreat, it needs to be seen what approach the government takes – going for peace talks or asking security forces to pursue the remaining armed formations,” he said.