Last August, Amit Shah announced that the Naxalite insurgency in the tribal heart of India would be wiped out by March 31 this year. And a day ahead of that self-imposed deadline, in an extraordinary tough-guy speech in Parliament, the Home Minister declared mission accomplished, going on to certify it as the biggest achievement of the Narendra Modi government since 2014.
Between 2024 and 2026, a total of 706 Naxalites were killed in ‘encounters’ or by extra-judicial means across 12 states, in addition to 2,217 arrested and 4,839 pressured to surrender. Of the 21 members in the Central Committee of CPI (Maoist), all but two have been ‘neutralised — meaning killed or made to surrender. Naxalite fighting units in Dandakaranya, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh have been obliterated by allowing the police to operate with impunity. With its leadership captured or killed and its Central Military Commission wiped out, the CPI (Maoist) is no longer a threat to the Indian state. The number of districts affected by left-wing extremism (LWE) has come down from 126 in 2014 to just two now.
What the Home Minister did not acknowledge in his speech is the fact that this war has cost the lives of 5,000 police personnel and thousands of innocent non-combatants as well. While celebrating the ‘victory’, he blamed a whole range of actors for allegedly fostering the insurgency for 55 years, including past governments, Rahul Gandhi, intellectuals, academics, journalists, human rights activists — and even Supreme Court judge B Sudarshan Reddy for giving an adverse judgment on police methods. The Home Minister’s pique seemed to stem from these actors’ objections to the use of extra-judicial methods by state agencies and the atmosphere of impunity afforded to the police and paramilitary forces.
With the Naxalites removed as an obstacle, the state believes development can now proceed with pace in the LWE-affected districts. As the Home Minister said, roads and mobile telephone towers and hospitals have to be built, and per capita incomes have to be raised. But the more immediate and more difficult task is to persuade the police to return to lawful law enforcement without the protective shield of impunity that they have had until now.
Internationally, wherever insurgencies have been beaten back through extra-judicial means, police did not voluntarily stand down from using non-legal methods once the war was over. This led to continued human rights abuses and a collapse of the civil order in those areas. When security agencies are allowed to operate with impunity, normal law enforcement stands compromised for a long time. In countries like Mexico, deployment of the military for policing segued into a reign of terror by local units and complaints of police excesses rose tenfold. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte indulged the police during his ‘war on drugs’, which later transitioned into summary killings of suspects and systematic falsification of police reports.
The police and paramilitary forces in Bastar and Dandakaranya have become accustomed to a no-questions-asked system in which judges and civil society felt deterred from insisting on due process. They are likely to remain in a national security mode for years to come, sticking to area domination methods, looking out for old IEDs, relying on paid informers rather than investigation. Persuading them to scale back to normal policing is the real challenge the Home Minister must pay attention to.