3 March 1967: By any historical yardstick, the date carries weight. On this date, a peasant uprising in Naxalbari lit a fuse that burned through India’s internal security landscape for nearly five decades. On 3 March 2026, that fuse is finally sputtering out, as it is set to be consigned to the flames of Holika Dahan. Forty-nine years on, India stands on the verge of eradicating Naxalism – not by drift or accident, but by the force of political will, clarity of doctrine, and relentless execution under PM Narendra Modi and HM Amit Shah.

This has been a long war-ideological, kinetic, and moral – waged across jungles and courtrooms alike. Its endgame tells a story of what happens when a state finally decides to call terror by its name. What began as an armed agrarian revolt transformed into a militant insurgency with a pan-Indian footprint by the late 1990s. The merger of extremist streams under the banner of CPI (Maoist) in 2004 created a vertically integrated terror apparatus- complete with area committees, people’s militias, extortion networks, and propaganda wings. The Red Corridor expanded exponentially as governance retreated. Yet the decisive inflection point was not merely the insurgents’ brutality. It was the state’s ambivalence. The United Progressive Alliance years saw Naxalism peak – in violence, geography, and confidence. The toll is seared into memory.

In April 2010, the Dantewada massacre wiped out 76 security personnel in a single ambush, exposing lethal gaps in intelligence and leadership. Three years later, in May 2013, the Darbha Valley attack in Chhattisgarh murdered senior Congress leaders and party workers, shattering the myth that appeasement buys immunity. And yet, the response remained curiously constrained. The UPA refrained from defining Naxalism unequivocally........

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