Opinion | End Of Naxalism: How Amit Shah Dismantled China’s Ideological Export |
Opinion | End Of Naxalism: How Amit Shah Dismantled China’s Ideological Export
What India has accomplished is not simply the suppression of a domestic insurgency. It is the refutation of a model
On March 30, 2026, a day before the government’s own deadline, Union Home Minister Amit Shah stood in the Lok Sabha and declared that India had become, in all but formal terms, Naxal-free. The Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) had been dismantled. Twelve of its central committee leaders had been killed in operations and talks were underway with the sole remaining absconding figure.
A 27-member state committee in one key affected state had been effectively wiped out, eleven killed, with negotiations begun with others. The armed cadre count, which had stood at over 2,000 as recently as 2024, had collapsed to roughly 220 by early 2026. In Odisha, once a significant theatre of Maoist violence, the number of active cadres had reportedly fallen to as low as fifteen.
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The numbers are extraordinary. But to understand what India has actually achieved, one must return to a single moment in the summer of 1967.
Spring Thunder Over India
The date was May 25, 1967. In Naxalbari, a small settlement tucked into West Bengal’s Terai flatlands, a group of Santhal tribal peasants clashed with police over a land dispute that, on its face, looked like dozens of others across rural India. It wasn’t. Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, two ideologues already primed for revolutionary action, seized on it immediately. They declared it the first shot of an Indian insurrection built consciously on the Maoist template.
Six weeks later, on July 5, 1967, the People’s Daily obliged them with the endorsement they wanted. The Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece announced that “a peal of spring thunder has fallen over India", and that the Indian revolution “must take the road" Mao had charted, surrounding the cities from the countryside, as China itself had done in 1949.
It was not just rhetoric. Radio Peking followed on June 10, 1967, with a broadcast calling for “relentless armed struggle" to overthrow the Indian government. Sanyal crossed into China in 1967 and again in 1968. The intellectual narratives left little room for ambiguity: Mazumdar’s slogan was “China’s chairman is our chairman; China’s path is our path".
Beijing, convulsed at the time by the Cultural Revolution, was actively hunting for places where Maoism might take root beyond its own borders. The Naxalbari incident gave it a ready-made uprising to celebrate, encourage, and supply.
It is important to know this for what follows. Mao’s China showcased itself as the alternative pole of global revolution, exporting insurgency models to Burma, Indonesia, and across the developing world’s agrarian societies. India was its crown jewel. With 500 million people, and the majority of them peasants, it was, in Beijing’s own words, the country where Mao’s path could produce its most consequential vindication outside China itself.
The Devastating Decades
By the 2000s, the insurgency had spread from its origins in West Bengal across 12 states. The Red Corridor stretched from Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh to the Pashupatinath temple in Nepal and encompassed 17 per cent of India’s territory. It cast its shadow over 120 million people.
In this vast belt, Maoists constructed a parallel state with kangaroo courts, armed enforcement units, shadow taxation levied on contractors and villagers alike, and systematic recruitment of children, all 15,000 of them, according to Shah’s account to Parliament. Over five decades of violence, nearly 20,000 people died, among them 5,000 security personnel.
New Delhi’s response, across the decades that followed, never quite matched the scale of the problem. Operations were launched and abandoned. States pursued their own approaches, often at cross-purposes with central agencies. Intelligence was rarely shared. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Naxalism India’s most serious internal security threat, and while he was absolutely right, there was neither the coordination nor the development investment required to address it. And the insurgency continued to refill its ranks from the same reservoir of dispossession that had always fed it.
That changed after 2014, and changed more sharply still from 2019. The change was not just a change in security posture but of doctrine itself. For the first time, under the Narendra Modi government, the Centre imposed a single unified command structure, bridging central and state security forces. It broke the intelligence silos that had long allowed Maoist networks to exploit jurisdictional gaps.
Operations were given names, Octopus in Jharkhand, Thunderstorm across the central corridor, Chakra in Bihar, Black Forest in the Chhattisgarh districts. The operative logic was kept consistent: persistent, intelligence-led pressure combined with the physical denial of logistics. After 2019, over 90 per cent of the Maoist arms supply chain was reportedly severed.
The results had gained a surgical effect in a way that earlier operations had not. A 21-day operation on a strategic hill straddling the Telangana-Chhattisgarh border dismantled a permanent Maoist camp stocked with five years’ worth of food and supplies.
The effect of these surgical strikes on the morale was profound. Surrendered leaders even acknowledged that the conditions sustaining armed struggle had ceased to exist. A domino effect took place, senior commanders surrendered, and lower cadres saw little rationale for continuing. In the last three years, 4,839 Maoists surrendered, 2,218 were arrested, and 706 were neutralised in encounters.
The Other Half of the Strategy
Military pressure, however well-targeted, cannot on its own end an insurgency that feeds on real deprivation. The Maoists understood this better than most of their opponents did. They operated in districts where the Indian state had been conspicuously absent. No roads, no healthcare, no formal banking, no schools worth the name. Land reforms had stalled or reversed. Tribal communities had been systematically excluded from the economy that surrounded them.
So, as long as those conditions persisted, the movement could always recruit. Between 2014 and 2024, roughly 12,000 kilometres of roads were laid in LWE-affected states. Budgets were sanctioned for a further 17,500.
The Niyad Nellanar scheme in Chhattisgarh—its name translating roughly as “your good village"—combined Ayushman Bharat health coverage, Aadhaar enrolment, food ration access, and local infrastructure construction in a single administrative package aimed at communities that Maoists had kept in deliberate isolation.
It was, in essence, an attempt to make the Indian state legible and present in places where it had been invisible. And it worked, as Chhatisgarh’s deputy CM Vijay Sharma recently declared the state Maoist-free.
China’s Project, India’s Answer
Viewed in this light, what India has accomplished is not simply the suppression of a domestic insurgency. It is the refutation of a model. The Maoist theory of revolution held that the Indian state was inherently incapable of reaching its most marginalised citizens—that the structural contradictions of a semi-colonial system would continuously reproduce the conditions for armed revolt. The insurgency could not be governed out of existence, only perpetuated by the state’s own failures.
India has disproved this thesis. Not through military force alone, which never succeeded on its own, but through the combination of sustained pressure and genuine developmental outreach that finally reached communities long abandoned. The slogan “China’s path is our path" has been answered, quietly but conclusively, by the extension of a ration shop, a health centre, a school, and a mobile signal tower into the places where that slogan once found its most willing audience.
Mao’s People’s Daily declared in 1967 that the Indian revolution would march on a “radiant path illuminated by Chairman Mao". That path has been extinguished not by repression alone, but by the more durable instrument of democratic governance doing—finally—what it had promised. The spring thunder that so excited Beijing nearly 60 years ago has, at last, gone silent.