When Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated aboard INS Vikrant that India was “on the verge of eradicating Naxal-Maoist terror", the declaration carried historical significance. It marked the near culmination of a six-decade struggle against one of independent India’s most enduring internal security challenges.

What began in 1967 in the small village of Naxalbari as a peasant uprising inspired by Maoist ideology eventually engulfed vast stretches of central and eastern India, forming what came to be known as the “Red Corridor." For decades, this insurgency exposed deep fissures in India’s development trajectory.

A decisive transformation began in 2015 with the Government of India’s adoption of the National Policy and Action Plan to Address Left Wing Extremism (LWE). The framework moved beyond ad-hoc policing responses to a calibrated and institutional approach that integrated security operations with development, rights-based empowerment, and local participation. The policy recognised that insurgency could not be defeated solely by coercive means. It had to be met with the restoration of governance and the delivery of justice in areas where the state had historically been absent.

This integrated doctrine rested on five pillars. The first was the strengthening of security capacity through actionable intelligence, modern equipment, and specialised forces such as the Greyhounds, the COBRA battalions, and the Bastariya Battalion. The second was the infrastructure push that followed territorial reclamation, with road and bridge construction under the Road Connectivity Project for LWE Areas and thousands of fortified police stations ensuring a permanent state presence.

The third was financial inclusion, achieved through the opening of over a thousand bank branches, hundreds of ATMs, and the deployment of nearly 40,000 banking correspondents in previously unbanked regions. The fourth was human development, anchored in new Industrial Training........

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