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........

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