Two hundred rupees, one bedsheet and a dhoti: Later, Gouthu Latchanna would tell the villagers at a People’s Court that the police had paid him to guide them to a hideout near Kummarikunta one winter night. The six Maoist insurgents police had captured, he said, were marched a short distance and then shot in the back. Two guns, a bag of bombs and a radio were displayed as recoveries; 10 others escaped into the darkness. “The cadre are getting frustrated and are scared,” a Maoist squad commander wrote in his diary after the killings. “Even I am scared. To give others courage, I do not show my fear.”
Earlier this week, the Lok Sabha received a stark accounting of the near-collapse of the once-powerful Maoist insurgency: since 2019, 1,106 cadres have been killed, 7,311 arrested and 5,571 surrendered. Fewer than 10 insurgents remain in the southern Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh zone where hundreds once operated, police say.
Home Minister Amit Shah has vowed that India will be free of Maoists by March 2026—similar promises have been made many times before, only to wither away.
The upcoming New Year will mark 75 years since the Communist Party of India withdrew from the Telangana insurgency in 1951. Latchanna’s 1969 “encounter” marked the collapse of a second Maoist wave. After the 1976 conviction of over 100 Maoist leaders, India Today magazine declared the Naxalite movement over, “its leaders dead or jailed, its followers disillusioned.” Andhra Pradesh claimed to have destroyed Maoism in 2004; West Bengal crushed the Jangalmahal uprising a decade later.
Yet, there’s a hole at the centre of India’s long war with the Maoists—a hole no number of dead bodies seems to fill.
Banner rising
The Naxalite revolution’s squads entered the Srikakulam mountains in the mid-1960s, armed with scissors, combs and new clothing. Maoist cadres believed it was important to demonstrate that Gonds and Koyas were, in every sense, like everyone else. Local customs, like celebrations involving drinking, were sternly discouraged. Women, who traditionally wore few clothes, were urged to cover up. Men were compelled to comb and cut their long hair. Political scientist Shanta Sinha has written that non-compliance often led to encounters with a large pair of gardening shears.
Little imagination is needed to understand why the Sangham, or Maoist squad, was welcomed into the alien Adivasi milieu. The uprising had been driven by the brutalities of the Nizam’s rule, Communist leader Puchalapalli Sundaraiah has written. Dalits were bound by vetti—forced labour demanded from each family. Landlords claimed a portion of the toddy, the cloth produced by weavers, and the labour of carpenters and ironsmiths. Members of landlord families were carried across villages on the backs of Dalits in palanquins.
Communal tensions sharpened the conflict. “The Nizam and his mullahs tried to instil a feeling that the Muslims were the ruling class,” Sundaraiah wrote. In response, Hindu business interests and Arya Samaj activists rallied the so-called “Hindu masses” against “Muslim oppressors.”
Arming themselves with traditional muzzle-loading hunting guns and modern weapons looted from police, the Communist Party of India began a guerrilla war against the Nizam, his Razakar militia, and the landlords supporting the regime. Razakars retaliated by massacring villagers, Communist leader Ravi Narayan Reddy recorded, burning settlements, executing suspects, and burying people alive. In one incident, more than 50 young men were lined up and shot.
Following growing tensions on the border in 1948—with Razakars raiding Indian Army patrols in Nanaj, Khare Takli, and Yelsangi—Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru acted to compel the Nizam to accede to India. Led by Major-General JN Chaudhuri, SN Prasad’s official history of the operation records, the Indian Army overthrew the Nizam’s forces in five days. To legitimise the accession, the Nizam was retained as Rajpramukh, or Governor—an act that angered many who had suffered under his rule.
The defeat of the Nizam led seamlessly on to war against the CPI’s Sanghams. The government of India, Prasad has written, feared the “explosive possibilities of this situation, reminiscent of Russia before the Revolution.”
Army units herded Adivasi villages into camps to cut them off from guerrillas. Torture and extrajudicial killings were widespread, contemporaries like Ravi Reddy have written. A 1951 Military Intelligence report warned of severe shortages of food and water in the camps. The historians Sunil Purushotham and Jonathan Kennedy record that illness and hunger were rampant. The Congress leader Swami Tirtha warned that Adivasis were “seething with unrest.”
The Army’s campaign did, however, severely weaken the CPI’s insurgency. Leaders like Ravi Reddy told the party leadership that many supporters welcomed the birth of the new Republic and wanted reforms, not war. The CPI formally ended the rebellion in 1951 and entered electoral politics.
Left stage
For many Adivasis, though, independence brought little relief. Corrupt officials and moneylenders replaced the Nizam’s structures of exploitation. Local representatives of Adivasi communities often served forest contractors. Traditional Adivasi princes who had prospered under the Nizam continued to speak for Adivasis in the Legislative Assembly—though, as Ravi Reddy observed, they had “not the remotest connection with tribal problems.” Land seizures and Adivasi strikes rose again in the 1960s.
The momentum of the insurgent Left also grew in West Bengal, where a rebellion would break out among tea workers in the village of Naxalbari in 1967. The leader Charu Majumdar sought to consolidate the rebellion by calling for the annihilation of so-called class enemies, blithely ignoring questions of organisation, training and tactics. “The people,” he vowed, “will fight the war devil with nails and teeth. A revolutionary cyclone will visit India. By the end of 1975, the people will complete writing the epic of liberation.”
For a moment, it seemed possible. In 1968, 300 Adivasis led by Kunnikkal Narayanan attacked police stations in northern Kerala. In Srikakulam, armed Adivasis targeted landlords and moneylenders. Eight hundred Adivasis even defeated police seeking a Maoist leader in the forests around Eguvaballerugudem.
But as in Telangana, the insurgents lacked the resources to face the state. By 1970, two CRPF battalions, Sinha writes, eight companies of Andhra Police, and six platoons of District Armed Reserve forces had choked the Maoist ranks to less than 30, down from hundreds. Former Intelligence Bureau officer Amiya Samanta has shown that the West Bengal insurgency also disintegrated in the face of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign.
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No final act
Learning from this defeat, five Maoist factions united under Kondapalli Seetharamaiah to form the People’s War Group (PWG), abandoning indiscriminate killings in favour of mass mobilisation. Local political circumstances helped this restructured Maoist challenge. Former movie star and would-be Chief Minister NT Rama Rao and his Telugu Desam Party courted the Maoists, calling them “true patriots misunderstood by ruling classes.” The Congress, in turn, later sought Maoist support in the 1989 elections.
Andhra Pradesh’s collapse reached its climax under Chief Minister Chenna Reddy in 1990, who allowed Maoist groups to operate freely. This masterly inactivity succeeded in subverting the insurgency, scholar Ajai Sahni observes, because it exposed greed and corruption in the Maoist ranks. The PWG was largely ground down by 2003, though its leadership retreated to the forests of Bastar, as well as remote regions in Maharashtra, Odisha, Bihar, and Jharkhand.
For the fourth time, Maoists succeeded in protecting their insurgency from complete annihilation. The new CPI (Maoist) re-emerged from the surviving guerrilla factions in 2004. The government struggled to address an insurgency that operated in some of the country’s least-accessible regions, with poor or non-existent road access.
Among other things, the government armed a local militia, Salwa Judum, and relocated Adivasi communities to villages built along the roads. These measures fuelled feuds, encouraged criminality and often strengthened Maoist legitimacy. The village relocation programme, for its part, ceded control of the interior to the Maoists.
Even though central and state police suffered catastrophic losses, the buildup of a mass of counter-insurgency forces capable of operating deep in the forests began to tell. The killings of civilians and security forces slowly began to decline after 2010-2011.
There will be a time when security forces withdraw, though, and the landscape they leave behind will be much as it has always been. Weak governance, corruption and poverty continue to define Adivasi life. The introduction of industrial and mining projects has benefited contractors, politicians and officials more than Adivasis. The demographer Pankhuree Dube has shown that Adivasis have been permanently migrating out of Bastar ever since Independence.
Two hundred rupees, one bedsheet and a dhoti: Each generation learns that the value of human life has barely changed in India’s Adivasi heartland. There is no doubt India is on the cusp of victory in the fourth Maoist war —but it is a victory that is shrouded in darkness.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)