This Word Means: Maoist

This comes amid a recent intensification in operations, after Union Home Minister Amit Shah set a March 2026 deadline for ending the decades long Naxal insurgency in central and eastern India.

Who are the Maoists?

The term Maoist specifically refers to members of the CPI (Maoist): a party which aims to capture state power through a people’s war, inspired by the political and military strategy of China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.

“The immediate aim of the party is to accomplish the New Democratic Revolution in India by overthrowing imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism only through the Protracted People’s War… The ultimate aim of the party is to bring about communism,” according to the party constitution.

Their ultimate aim aside, at the ground level, Maoists have long cultivated support among adivasis and other marginalised communities in India due to (legitimate) deep-seated suspicions and grievances these people have with the state and the social order.

Both CPI (Maoists), and its armed wing the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), are banned in India.

What is the story of the Maoist insurgency in India?

Although the party has gone through multiple transformations over the decades, CPI (Maoist) traces its origins to a peasant rebellion in Naxalbari (hence the “Naxal” tag) in West Bengal’s Siliguri district in 1967. 

This rebellion sparked a decades-long insurgency that has waxxed and waned over the years. At its peak in the mid-2000s, this insurgency affected some 180 districts in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh (including present-day Telangana), and West Bengal. 

Tens of thousands of people — Maoist fighters, security personnel, and innocent civilians — have lost their lives in the insurgency. Both the government and Maoist insurgents have been accused of committing human rights violations.

Today, counter-insurgency operations by security forces have significantly weakened the movement which is now largely restricted to the jungles of a few districts in southern and central Chhattisgarh, and its neighbouring regions.

Why ‘Maoist’?

Mao emerged as a communist leader in early 20th century China when much of the wealth (read: land) in feudal Chinese society was concentrated in the hands of a minority of elites. Inspired by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Mao sought to adapt the principles of Marxism in the Chinese context.

In doing so, he formulated a communist ideology that resonated in peasant societies around the world, from Peru to India. Unlike the likes of Marx and Lenin, who saw the urban working class as the vanguards of the communist revolution, Mao’s communism had a more rural bent with with the peasantry being the revolution’s primary driver.

Mao also held that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. This requires mobilising large sections of rural populations against established institutions by engaging in guerilla warfare, and “surrounding the cities from the countryside”.

These principles, and more importantly Mao’s vocabulary, have guided Maoist revolutionaries in India and beyond. That said all Naxals do not hold the same ideology, and there are indeed many key differences on a variety of issues that have long defined the course of the insurgency.