For the first time in decades, the CPI (Maoist) is losing its top leaders in rapid succession. Madvi Hidma, the elusive commander of Battalion No 1 and the key strategist behind the 2021 Chhattisgarh ambush that killed 22 security personnel, was neutralised last week near the Telangana–Chhattisgarh border. Only weeks earlier, Nambala Keshava Rao (Basavaraju), a politburo member and head of the Central Military Commission, was gunned down deep inside Abujhmad. Since 2020, as many as 18 central committee members have been eliminated.
The BJP-led Union government has every reason to claim success—Operation Kagar, which commenced earlier this year, fortified security camps at 10-km intervals, and a flood of drone-backed intelligence turned the once-impenetrable forests into hostile terrain for Maoist squads. Yet history should temper any triumphalism. The Maoist movement did not begin with weapons but with land rights, at its ideological cradle in Bengal’s Naxalbari. The uprising was brutally suppressed, but the spark spread—to Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, Mushahari in Bihar, and eventually even to Nepal’s Pashupati. Wherever tribal communities faced dispossession and state neglect, the Maoist message struck roots.
Half a century later, those roots remain disturbingly intact. In the regions where Hidma operated—Dantewada, Bijapur, Gadchiroli—Adivasis continue to lose land to miners. Job-scheme payments are delayed or siphoned off. The state’s primary response has been policing, not redress. Roads are laid through dense forests but are mostly used for troop movement. Schools and health centres inside security camps remain inaccessible to villagers, who are often treated as potential informers.
Crackdowns can kill leaders; they seldom kill a movement. Every time the state believed it had delivered a ‘final blow’—in 1971, 2005–09, and 2015–17—the movement revived because the underlying grievances remained. The Centre recently pointed out that districts reporting Naxalite violence have fallen from 126 in 2013 to just 18 by March 2025, with only six classified as ‘most affected’. The tactical advantage is evident, but not the strategic or moral ones.
Unless New Delhi and the states shift from domination to delivery—by punishing land-grabbers, restoring rights, and ensuring employment, healthcare and education for forest communities—the red flag might rise again. The jungle may once more hear the cry of the deprived if the festering socio-economic wounds are not addressed.