Could India's decades-long jungle insurgency finally be approaching its end?

Last week, the country's most-wanted Maoist, Nambala Keshava Rao - popularly known as Basavaraju - was killed along with 26 others in a major security operation in the central state of Chhattisgarh. Home Minister Amit Shah called it "the most decisive strike" against the insurgency in three decades. One police officer also died in the encounter.

Basavaraju's death marks more than a tactical victory - it signals a breach in the Maoists' last line of defence in Bastar, the forested heartland where the group carved out its fiercest stronghold since the 1980s.

Maoists, also known as "Naxalites" after the 1967 uprising in Naxalbari village in West Bengal, have regrouped over the decades to carve out a "red corridor" across central and eastern India - stretching from Jharkhand in the east to Maharashtra in the west and spanning more than a third of the country's districts. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh had described the insurgency as India's "greatest internal security threat".

The armed struggle for Communist rule has claimed nearly 12,000 lives since 2000, according to the South Asian Terrorism Portal. The rebels say they fight for the rights of indigenous tribes and the rural poor, citing decades of state neglect and land dispossession.

The Maoist movement - officially known as Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) - took formal shape in 2004 with the merger of key Marxist-Leninist groups into the CPI (Maoist). This party traces its ideological roots to a 1946 peasant uprising in the southern state of Telangana.

Now, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government pledging to end Maoism by March 2026, the battle-hardened rebellion stands at a crossroads: could this truly be the end - or just another pause in its long, bloody arc?

"There will be a lull. But Marxist-Leninist movements have transcended such challenges when the top leadership of the Naxalites were killed in the 70s and yet we are talking about Naxalism," said N Venugopal, a journalist, social scientist and long-time observer of the movement, who is both a critic and sympathiser of the Maoists.

One of the senior-most officials in India's home ministry who........

© BBC