Once described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the “gravest internal security threat”, Maoists in India, who banded together to form the CPI (Maoist) over 21 years ago, once had a presence in almost a third of the districts in India. But, sustained operational setbacks over the years — from surrenders of top leaders to the killings of many more, the latest being Madvi Hidma — have nearly decimated the leftwing rebels as the central and Chhattisgarh governments race towards eliminating Maoism by March 31, 2026, the deadline set by Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
The journey of the current iteration of the party began in the forests of central India on September 21, 2004, when the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), which was at the time active mostly in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the CPI Marxist-Leninist (People’s War), also known as the People’s War Group and then active in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh, merged to form the CPI (Maoist). With its cadre strength increasing, the party, which drew inspiration from the Naxalbari movement in West Bengal in the late 1960s, rapidly started consolidating itself as one of the most violent phases of the insurgency began.
The October 2004 note announcing the formation of the party made it clear that it stood apart from other Communist parties — CPI, CPI (M), and CPI (M-L) Liberation — on the question of parliamentary democracy. The Maoists aimed to carry out their revolution through “armed agrarian revolutionary war … with the armed seizure of power remaining as its central and principal task, encircling the cities from the countryside and finally capturing them”.
This objective drew directly from Mao Zedong’s theory of protracted people’s war. To this end, the party relied on sympathies in urban areas, as seen in the 1960s, when bright students from the elite colleges and universities in Kolkata (then Calcutta) joined it in droves. Author Dilip Simeon has mentioned how the Maoist movement is led by ideologues from the middle class who claim to represent the people. In a critique of the class and caste composition of the Maoist leadership, Professor Aditya Nigam has written, “The voice of the revolutionary is almost always that of a Brahmin/upper caste Ganapathy or Koteshwar Rao or their intellectual spokespersons. So we have a Maoist-aligned intelligentsia vicariously playing out their revolutionary fantasies through the lives of Adivasis, while the people actually dying in battles are almost all Adivasis.”
Following the emergence of CPI (Maoist), there was a sharp escalation of Maoist violence between 2005 and 2012. In response, the BJP government in Chhattisgarh, with the help of late Congress leader Mahendra Karma, launched the Salwa Judum movement, which existed from 2005 to 2009, that used tribal civilians to target the Maoists.
Then, as the Maoists sought to expand and had established a strong base in West Bengal’s Lalgarh, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram launched Operation Green Hunt in 2009 to take on the rebels in their forest bases in central India. On April 10, 2010, the Maoists ambushed and killed 75 CRPF jawans of the Alpha Company, 62nd battalion, in Dantewada, their deadliest attack to date, and effectively put a halt to Operation Green Hunt.
With the Maoist movement drawing its legitimacy from an administrative vacuum in which the party itself acted as a quasi-state, building roads, infrastructure, and other forms of development could become an effective tool against the rebels. In The Oxford Handbook of India’s National Security, Professor Shivaji Mukherjee of the University of Toronto notes that in 2013-15, the levels of violence actually dipped below the usual annual average of 400 deaths. One reason for this was road-building projects, the setting up of police stations in vulnerable areas, and MNREGA providing the tribal poor with better incomes. But the Maoists were still a potent force and in 2013 carried out a deadly attack on a Congress motorcade in Chhattisgarh, wiping out almost the entire state leadership of the party, from Vidya Charan Shukla to Karma.
While facing their steepest challenge yet, the Maoists were in a similar situation decades ago when the government responded strongly to the Naxal movement, which was curbed within 72 days. The crackdown, however, continued in the early 1970s. In After The Revolution, political scientist Partha Chatterjee writes how the police killed several hundreds in “fake encounters and thousands were put in prison”. The police arrested Charu Mazumdar, the Naxalbari movement’s leader, in 1972, and he died in Alipore jail.
Soon afterwards, the movement splintered due to ideological differences and four main factions emerged in subsequent years: Dakshin Desh, which went on to become the MCC in 1975, the PWG, CPI M-L (Party Unity), and the CPI (M-L) that is now known as CPI (M-L) Liberation.
The first three stuck to the path of armed struggle, while M-L in 1977 took to organising mass peasant movements, abjuring armed struggle and class annihilation. In 1982, it contested elections under the banner of the Indian People’s Front and won its first election in 1989 from Ara in Bihar, with Rameshwar Prasad becoming its first MP. Today, the party is a constituent of the INDIA bloc in Bihar, and its student wing, the All-India Students’ Association (AISA), founded in 1990, is a major force in several college and university campuses across the country.
The MCC became active in Bihar in the 1990s. “By 2002, it was active in six Naxalism-hit districts of Bihar and 14 districts in Jharkhand,” writes Mukherjee. Here, it got entangled with land conflicts in Bihar’s agrarian society, rallying Dalits and other landless people against the land-owning upper castes, particularly Bhumihars. The Ranveer Sena emerged as a Bhumihar private militia that carried out multiple massacres of Dalits, while the MCC was held responsible for the killings of the upper castes, including 34 people in Jehanabad’s Senai village in 1995.
The PWG, founded in 1980 by Kondapalli Sitaramaiah, developed strongholds in northern Telangana. In December 1999, it killed MP Transport Minister Likhiram Kavre; blew up an MP Police vehicle killing 23 policemen in Bastar in February 2000, and bombed the house of TDP MLA R Prakash Reddy in Warangal in 2002.
What likely helped these parties survive the years between the splinter and the 2004 unification was that the material conditions in the remote, backward areas where they functioned did not change much, coupled with an ideological clarity provided by leaders such as Kobad Ghandy, a member of the party’s Politburo who was arrested in Delhi in 2009 and spent a decade in prison.
However, with the presence of the Indian state expanding in these areas and the Maoists’ urban network largely destroyed, many don’t see that ideological glue holding together the party this time around. Deepak Kumar Nayak of the Institute of Conflict Management, Delhi, who specialises in studying leftwing extremism, said the Maoists lost the ideological battle much before the current military reverses. “After Kobad Ghandy, there is no ideological heft. It has been over a decade now. What remains is sectional and local, with elements of criminality rather than ideology,” he told The Indian Express.
