Facing the heat in Chhattisgarh

The killing of CPI (Maoist) leader Nambala Keshav Rao in Chhattisgarh marks a significant blow to the insurgency, which now faces disintegration.

The killing of Nambala Keshav Rao, alias Basavaraju, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in a police action in Chhattisgarh is the biggest setback faced by the banned outfit in recent times. Reduced to a rump of armed guerillas and cornered by security forces in the jungles overlapping Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra, the CPI (Maoist) now faces disintegration. According to government data, 401 Naxalites have been killed in the State while 1,355 surrendered between December 1, 2023, and May 21, 2025.  The Vishnu Deo Sai government won office in Chhattisgarh in December 2023, and since then, there has been coordinated action from the Centre and the state government against Maoists in Chhattisgarh, reportedly their last bastion.  

Factors such as the deepening of electoral democracy, improved delivery of public goods and services, better economic prospects, especially since the 1991 economic reforms, and the decline in the appeal of radical Left ideologies since the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of capitalism, helped in building an environment that convinced many Maoists to leave a politics entirely defined by violence to join the mainstream (PTI)

After the Naga insurgency, the Maoist movement is the second-oldest armed rebellion against the Indian State since Independence. Guns fell  silent in Nagaland after the Centre and NSCN-IM signed a ceasefire in 1997. Many other home-grown armed rebellions — in Mizoram, Assam, Tripura, Manipur, and even in Jammu and Kashmir — ended with some of those involved signing peace accords with the Centre and joining the political mainstream; those that didn’t, dissipated fighting the security apparatus. The Maoist movement, born in 1967 following an ideological split in the CPI-M, survived despite multiple splits and police action to peak in the first decade of this century so much so that in 2009, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described it as the greatest internal threat to India.  

Interestingly, this phase saw Maoism shift its base from its original bases in Andhra Pradesh (Telangana), West Bengal, and Bihar, where it had attracted educated youth, peasants, and radical cadres of CPI-M, to tribal pockets in central India. This was after Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal countered Maoist violence by revamping State police infrastructure: Greyhounds, the special anti-Maoist forces of Andhra and Telangana police, forced the Maoists to retreat to the central India’s jungles. Factors such as the deepening of electoral democracy, improved delivery of public goods and services, better economic prospects, especially since the 1991 economic reforms, and the decline in the appeal of radical Left ideologies since the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of capitalism, helped in building an environment that convinced many Maoists to leave a politics entirely defined by violence to join the mainstream. Economic growth made it difficult for Maoists to find young recruits, especially from campuses.

This is why what is on view in Chhattisgarh now,  may well be the last embers of an armed insurgency that had exhausted itself politically long ago and refused to see the emancipatory potential in electoral democracy and welfare politics.