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The Last Maoist: What Next for India?

A victory that leaves governance deficits intact, rehabilitation frameworks underperforming, extractive interests empowered, and surveillance tools normalized is not a full resolution. 

On May 21, 2025, Indian security forces killed Nambala Keshava Rao, known as Basavaraju. He was the general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the forests of Chhattisgarh. By November, his top military commander Madvi Hidma had also been eliminated. Union Home Minister Amit Shah on March 30, 2026 said in Parliament that India had achieved a nearly Naxal-free India. Long a political ambition, this is now a genuine operational reality.

The numbers are striking. At its peak in 2011, the Maoist insurgency had touched 223 districts across 20 states. By April 2026, only two districts remained in the most affected category. According to Home Ministry figures, 706 Maoists were killed in encounters, 2,218 were arrested, and 4,839 surrendered between 2024 and 2026. This is a real achievement. It deserves to be recognized as such. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in sharing Shah’s address on social media, added, “We will keep focusing on furthering good governance and ensuring peace and prosperity for all.”

Nonetheless, there is one question that India needs to address. Has it ended an insurgency or resolved the conditions that made one possible? 

That discussion involves asking what actually produced this outcome. Why did the state succeed now and not earlier? Reading across the recent ORF Special Report “Left-Wing Extremism, its Rise and Fall, and India’s Future Imperatives,” there are four competing explanations that emerge. 

First, the political alignment between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the center and in Chhattisgarh from December 2023 onward produced operational synergy that earlier governments could not achieve. Second, technological improvements in the use of drone surveillance, AI-enabled intelligence, and cell phone triangulation were effective. Governments welfare schemes such as Jan Dhan, Aadhaar-linked direct transfers, and 4G connectivity reached previously inaccessible forest interiors. All of these quietly changed community calculations in ways that no security operation alone could. 

However, the most relevant explanation is that of the internal collapse of the organizational will that preceded and in fact enabled external military success rather than the other way around. This is most noteworthy because if the state accelerated a collapse already underway, then the confidence with which post-conflict planning is being approached deserves some tempering. 

This is a question India has been asking itself since independence without adequate answers.

The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution guarantees special protections for tribal communities in central and eastern India. These are the same communities that the red corridor runs through. These are resource rich, institutionally neglected areas caught between a movement that claimed to represent them and a state that failed to reach them. The Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act was passed in 1996 to fill this gap. Nearly 30 years later, only ten states so far have framed its rules of engagement. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, which was designed to correct historical injustices, has been facing the lacuna of ground-level implementation. This shows the structural reality in which the tribal regions suffer from resource curse where the governing elites have material incentives to maintain ambiguity over land and forest rights.

Chhattisgarh alone contributes 17 percent of India’s mineral output. The same geography that was the heart of the insurgency is now the frontier of post-conflict development. That development plan includes mining corridors, industrial projects, and infrastructure whose benefits do not automatically flow to the communities who live there.

Political scientists draw a distinction between territorial control, the actual exercise of state power, and legitimate authority – the sense among governed populations that the state’s presence is just and responsive. 

The Sri Lanka comparison is instructive. The LTTE was militarily eliminated in 2009. The military outcome was decisive, but fifteen years later, the Tamil political question remains structurally unresolved. Military termination and political resolution are not the same thing. 

While........

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