For decades, the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency was described as India’s gravest internal security problem. Grave enough that Manmohan Singh as prime minister called it the single biggest threat the country had ever faced from within. At its peak, the movement touched nearly 180 districts across a belt of central and eastern India that came to be called the Red Corridor.

By 2024, that number had fallen to 38.

But the forest heartland of Dandakaranya, straddling Chhattisgarh and parts of Odisha, remained the last redoubt, sheltering the bulk of the party’s Central Committee. 

This is the story of how that stronghold finally came apart.

The BJP government in Delhi had staked a public claim on the outcome. Through 2024 and 2025, Home Minister Amit Shah repeated the same deadline at event after event. Talks were ruled out. The only offer on the table was surrender. Whether the deadline was strategic pressure or electoral theatre, it concentrated resources on a single geography. How that deadline came to be declared met is more complicated than the government’s account suggests.

But to understand the collapse, you have to go back to the beginning. Because the insurgency in central India was never a spontaneous uprising like the other regions.

It learnt from failures

The........

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