The Pulse | Security | South Asia

India’s 59-Year Maoist Insurgency Collapses

The government appears to have met its March 31, 2026, deadline for ending the Maoist insurgency. But it is too early to celebrate.

A Central Reserve Police Force policeman on a search operation against Maoists in Jharkhand, India.

On April 3, one of India’s most stalwart Maoist leaders died in jail after nearly five years of incarceration. Prashanta Bose was in his early 80s. His health had broken several years ago. But, of late, his heart must have broken, too.

Bose was one of India’s earliest Maoist organizers. He joined the movement when the Maoists declared a war against the Indian state in 1967 and started forming guerrilla units to capture State power. Over the next four decades, Bose helped India’s Maoist insurgency attain such strength that, in 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Maoists “India’s biggest internal security threat.”

However, in the past 10 months, from the confinement of his prison cell, Bose must have got the series of bad news that summed up the collapse of the Maoists’ military campaigns in India. The top political and military leaders of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or the CPI (Maoist), were all gone. Its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), had broken down.

On March 30, four days before Bose’s death, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah told parliament that the CPI (Maoist) had lost almost all its central leadership. This was a day before the deadline he had given the Indian security forces roughly two years ago to make the country Maoist-free.

“Our goal was a Naxal-free India by March 31, [2026]. The country will be informed once the entire process is formally completed, but I can say that we have become Naxal-free,” Shah said. Naxal is the Indian name for Maoists.

The Maoists — who executed many daring ambushes and offensives on security forces and top politicians — had been facing a setback since 2012-13. The losses accelerated in 2024 onward. They suffered two back-to-back blows in April-May 2025 — the complete destruction of their “unified central command” in the densely forested Karegutta hills was followed by the elimination of general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavraj, along with 27 members of the guerrilla platoon protecting him.

The rest of the collapse happened rather fast. Security operations in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha systematically wiped out guerrilla platoons, one after another. Hundreds surrendered their weapons. Among the top leaders, some surrendered and the rest were killed.

The surrender of Tippiri Tirupati alias “Devuji,” head of the party’s Central Military Commission, in the last week of February, drove the last nail in the coffin. All armed units had surrendered or disintegrated by the end of March 2026.

“It is not just India’s Maoist movement, Maoism itself has no future left,” author and journalist Sumanta Banerjee told The Diplomat. Since the publication of his 1980 book, “In the Wake of Naxalbari,” he has been writing about the movement.

According to Banerjee, the primary reason for the collapse of the Naxalite movement in India was its alienation from the masses.

“They had become completely cut off from the people. They were absent from various broad-based mass movements. Their entire existence became dependent on isolated squads. Can one really sustain a movement with such a strategy?” he asked.

The Maoist doctrine of capturing state power through protracted guerrilla warfare and area-wide seizure of power first caught the imagination of the Indian communists in the mid-1940s. When the erstwhile Radio Peking announced the advent of Maoism in India in 1967, the Maoist ideology had attained popularity far beyond Asia.

Mao’s influence was so profound that, in 1966, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard began production of his renowned film, La Chinoise (The Chinese), a cinematic exploration of Maoism. In 1968 — the year Prashant Bose, then in his mid-20s, left his job as a chemist and joined the Maoist revolutionary initiatives — students in Paris were carrying copies of a compilation of Mao’s quotations called the Red Book. They clashed with the cops. Mao’s dictum “To rebel is justified” gained popularity among students in France, Germany, and Italy.

However, its most profound impact was felt in countries such as India, Peru, Colombia, the Philippines, and Albania, where rural armed struggles were initiated. Even after Mao’s death in 1976 — when China itself started abandoning Maoist politics and charted a different course — Maoist ideology continued to spread across vast rural tracts of Asia.

In India, this movement exerted its influence across large swathes of the central, eastern, and southern regions. It maintained a presence — in one form or another — in at least ten of the nation’s 28 states.

However, over the past decade or so, all Maoist guerrilla movements in the world have become cornered, teetering on the brink of extinction — the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army,  the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), the Communist Party of Turkey (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Nepali Maoists joining the political mainstream in 2008 was a major blow to the Indian Maoists, as their plan for building an international corridor through Nepal suffered.

In India, the movement remained predominantly jungle-centric for the past two decades. They held no presence whatsoever in the plains. Whatever public support they garnered was rooted primarily in the struggle to protect “water, forests, and land.” Forest rights had, in fact, become the very life force of the movement.

As a research paper points out, the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s resulted in an increase in investments to mine the mineral-rich tribal belts, causing major upheavals. By customary laws, the land, forests and forest resources were seen as belonging to the tribals. But on paper, land and resources belong to the government.

“Mining by private and public enterprises, thus became a source of conflict and manifested into a simmering insurgency across a large swath of territory of India,” said the 2025 paper.

In an April 2026 interview, political scientist G. Haragopal echoed the views. “Liberalization intensified mining and resource extraction, especially in tribal areas rich in minerals. This created a direct conflict between corporate interests and local communities,” he said.

From the perspective of military strategy, the Maoist confinement within the forested tracts allowed the security forces to begin encircling their units, region by region. Over the past decade, the security forces have been armed with modern surveillance technologies and weapons. Allocation of huge amounts of money for anti-Maoist operations helped the forces develop an extensive source network among the local population and offer incentives for Maoists to surrender.

Last October, after politburo and central military commission member Mallojula Venugopal Rao surrendered along with five dozen guerrilla fighters, the remaining leaders — led by Devuji — denounced him as a traitor and vowed to mete out appropriate punishment. Yet, just four months later, the surrender of Devuji and his associates demonstrated that the Maoist party’s vitality had, in truth, completely ebbed away.

As of the first week of April, the 76-year-old former general secretary Muppala Lakshmana Rao alias Ganapathi, politburo member Mishir Besra (67) and central committee member Asim Mandal alias Akash (60), are the last three seasoned organizers yet to be neutralized. However, they do not have any military strength and are probably hiding in some urban area, security forces believe.

In a recent interview, Venugopal Rao attributed his surrender to the realization that an armed movement in the country was not feasible anymore “because the underlying situations have changed drastically all across the world, including India.”

As the central, eastern and southern India’s forested tracts have been freed from the Maoists, many journalists, human rights activists and business observers expect the government’s mining initiatives in these areas to accelerate.

However, disregard for the rights of the forest dwellers can create conditions for new unrest. Haragopal cautioned that the conditions that gave the movement its roots—tribal resistance, land dispossession, and economic development contradictions—still persist.

One of Mao’s oft-quoted remarks may not have lost relevance yet: “Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.”

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On April 3, one of India’s most stalwart Maoist leaders died in jail after nearly five years of incarceration. Prashanta Bose was in his early 80s. His health had broken several years ago. But, of late, his heart must have broken, too.

Bose was one of India’s earliest Maoist organizers. He joined the movement when the Maoists declared a war against the Indian state in 1967 and started forming guerrilla units to capture State power. Over the next four decades, Bose helped India’s Maoist insurgency attain such strength that, in 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Maoists “India’s biggest internal security threat.”

However, in the past 10 months, from the confinement of his prison cell, Bose must have got the series of bad news that summed up the collapse of the Maoists’ military campaigns in India. The top political and military leaders of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or the CPI (Maoist), were all gone. Its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), had broken down.

On March 30, four days before Bose’s death, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah told parliament that the CPI (Maoist) had lost almost all its central leadership. This was a day before the deadline he had given the Indian security forces roughly two years ago to make the country Maoist-free.

“Our goal was a Naxal-free India by March 31, [2026]. The country will be informed once the entire process is formally completed, but I can say that we have become Naxal-free,” Shah said. Naxal is the Indian name for Maoists.

The Maoists — who executed many daring ambushes and offensives on security forces and top politicians — had been facing a setback since 2012-13. The losses accelerated in 2024 onward. They suffered two back-to-back blows in April-May 2025 — the complete destruction of their “unified central command” in the densely forested Karegutta hills was followed by the elimination of general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavraj, along with 27 members of the guerrilla platoon protecting him.

The rest of the collapse happened rather fast. Security operations in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha systematically wiped out guerrilla platoons, one after another. Hundreds surrendered their weapons. Among the top leaders, some surrendered and the rest were killed.

The surrender of Tippiri Tirupati alias “Devuji,” head of the party’s Central Military Commission, in the last week of February, drove the last nail in the coffin. All armed units had surrendered or disintegrated by the end of March 2026.

“It is not just India’s Maoist movement, Maoism itself has no future left,” author and journalist Sumanta Banerjee told The Diplomat. Since the publication of his 1980 book, “In the Wake of Naxalbari,” he has been writing about the movement.

According to Banerjee, the primary reason for the collapse of the Naxalite movement in India was its alienation from the masses.

“They had become completely cut off from the people. They were absent from various broad-based mass movements. Their entire existence became dependent on isolated squads. Can one really sustain a movement with such a strategy?” he asked.

The Maoist doctrine of capturing state power through protracted guerrilla warfare and area-wide seizure of power first caught the imagination of the Indian communists in the mid-1940s. When the erstwhile Radio Peking announced the advent of Maoism in India in 1967, the Maoist ideology had attained popularity far beyond Asia.

Mao’s influence was so profound that, in 1966, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard began production of his renowned film, La Chinoise (The Chinese), a cinematic exploration of Maoism. In 1968 — the year Prashant Bose, then in his mid-20s, left his job as a chemist and joined the Maoist revolutionary initiatives — students in Paris were carrying copies of a compilation of Mao’s quotations called the Red Book. They clashed with the cops. Mao’s dictum “To rebel is justified” gained popularity among students in France, Germany, and Italy.

However, its most profound impact was felt in countries such as India, Peru, Colombia, the Philippines, and Albania, where rural armed struggles were initiated. Even after Mao’s death in 1976 — when China itself started abandoning Maoist politics and charted a different course — Maoist ideology continued to spread across vast rural tracts of Asia.

In India, this movement exerted its influence across large swathes of the central, eastern, and southern regions. It maintained a presence — in one form or another — in at least ten of the nation’s 28 states.

However, over the past decade or so, all Maoist guerrilla movements in the world have become cornered, teetering on the brink of extinction — the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army,  the Militarized Communist Party of Peru (MPCP), the Communist Party of Turkey (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Nepali Maoists joining the political mainstream in 2008 was a major blow to the Indian Maoists, as their plan for building an international corridor through Nepal suffered.

In India, the movement remained predominantly jungle-centric for the past two decades. They held no presence whatsoever in the plains. Whatever public support they garnered was rooted primarily in the struggle to protect “water, forests, and land.” Forest rights had, in fact, become the very life force of the movement.

As a research paper points out, the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s resulted in an increase in investments to mine the mineral-rich tribal belts, causing major upheavals. By customary laws, the land, forests and forest resources were seen as belonging to the tribals. But on paper, land and resources belong to the government.

“Mining by private and public enterprises, thus became a source of conflict and manifested into a simmering insurgency across a large swath of territory of India,” said the 2025 paper.

In an April 2026 interview, political scientist G. Haragopal echoed the views. “Liberalization intensified mining and resource extraction, especially in tribal areas rich in minerals. This created a direct conflict between corporate interests and local communities,” he said.

From the perspective of military strategy, the Maoist confinement within the forested tracts allowed the security forces to begin encircling their units, region by region. Over the past decade, the security forces have been armed with modern surveillance technologies and weapons. Allocation of huge amounts of money for anti-Maoist operations helped the forces develop an extensive source network among the local population and offer incentives for Maoists to surrender.

Last October, after politburo and central military commission member Mallojula Venugopal Rao surrendered along with five dozen guerrilla fighters, the remaining leaders — led by Devuji — denounced him as a traitor and vowed to mete out appropriate punishment. Yet, just four months later, the surrender of Devuji and his associates demonstrated that the Maoist party’s vitality had, in truth, completely ebbed away.

As of the first week of April, the 76-year-old former general secretary Muppala Lakshmana Rao alias Ganapathi, politburo member Mishir Besra (67) and central committee member Asim Mandal alias Akash (60), are the last three seasoned organizers yet to be neutralized. However, they do not have any military strength and are probably hiding in some urban area, security forces believe.

In a recent interview, Venugopal Rao attributed his surrender to the realization that an armed movement in the country was not feasible anymore “because the underlying situations have changed drastically all across the world, including India.”

As the central, eastern and southern India’s forested tracts have been freed from the Maoists, many journalists, human rights activists and business observers expect the government’s mining initiatives in these areas to accelerate.

However, disregard for the rights of the forest dwellers can create conditions for new unrest. Haragopal cautioned that the conditions that gave the movement its roots—tribal resistance, land dispossession, and economic development contradictions—still persist.

One of Mao’s oft-quoted remarks may not have lost relevance yet: “Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.”

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, the author of two non-fiction books on India’s ultra-Left and the Hindu right, writes and comments on India’s politics, environment, human rights and culture.

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