Gadhchiroli in Maharashtra occupies a place in India’s Maoist history no less significant than Naxalbari in West Bengal, where the first sparks of the movement were lit.

It was in April 2006, after Maoists blew up an armoured, landmine-proof vehicle in this district, that then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh famously described Naxalism as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.”

Barely a year and a half earlier, he had warned that large swathes of tribal territory from Andhra Pradesh in the south to the borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bengal in the north and east, respectively, had become “the hunting ground of left-wing extremists.”

Nineteen years later, the same Gadhchiroli........

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