Neither Law nor Liberation: Maoism in Adivasi India

In 2009, the then Prime Minister of India termed Maoism as the “greatest internal (security) threat. The movement, more formally designated as Left-Wing Extremism (LWE), traces its origins to the uprising in Naxalbari, a village in northern West Bengal, in 1967. What began as a peasant’s revolt inspired by Mao Zedong’s “New Democratic Revolution”, and articulated in India by Charu Majumdar’s “Eight Historic Documents”, was initially brutally crushed by the Indira Gandhi government. Crushed in the village, the movement found a new leverage in the cities- especially in Kolkata, when the urban intelligentsia and the university students strengthened their support for Maoism. As Gary J. Bass in his “The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan” remarks, “Calcutta was flooded with Maoist literature. Mao Tse Tung, Liu Shao Chi, Marx, Lenin. The city was Red”. (Bass, 2014 pg. 44) P.N. Haskar, the principal strategist of Indira Gandhi, knew that there were  “some ten thousand young people in jail in West Bengal” under the notorious Preventive Detention Act. And “from October 1969 to the middle of 1971… the back of the Naxalite revolt” was broken,” remembers Lieutenant General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, then a major general and the chief of staff of the army’s Eastern Command. (ibid.)

But the movement was far from disappearing. Although the Maoist parties splintered post-1972, after Charu Majumdar was put to custodial death, the splintered groups reorganised throughout the 1980s and 1990s, eventually merging in 2004 to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). By the late 2000s, the insurgency had expanded to nearly one-third of India’s districts, leaving its footprint in the resource- and mineral-rich regions of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh, which came to be known as the “Red Corridor”. A seemingly crushed movement was once again resurgent inside the resource heartland of India, with guns, barrels, and bullets.

The “Troika” of Maoist Assertion in India

The CPI (Maoist) publicly condemned elections as a sham, which brings no real change to the Indian toiling masses. Since then, the Maoists in the Red Corridor (which they called the “liberated zones”) have conducted a systemic boycott of elections. Their motives were threefold: (i) overthrow the Government of India through a “protracted people’s war”, (ii) establish a Maoist regime in India, and (iii) to destroy the state machinery and establish the Indian People’s Democratic Federative Republic. (Myrdal, 2014, pp. 183-184) By the late 2000s, the Maoists reached their highest point in military operations. 

Three different incidents were instrumental in their assertion across three different years after various splintered warring Maoist factions united themselves under the banner of CPI (Maoist) in 2004. The first major incident unfolded in 2008 when the Maoists, then led by Mallojula Koteswara Rao (alias Kishenji), attempted to assassinate the then-sitting Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), through a landmine blast in the West Midnapore district of West Bengal, in opposition to the proposed Jindal Steel and Power plant. This was directly correlated to the 2007 Nandigram agitations against the CPI(M) government, where violent resistance to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) project- marked by significant Maoist mobilisation- ultimately forced the CPI(M) led Left Front government to abandon its land acquisition plan.

The second, and the most significant assertion of the Maoists unfolded through the 2010 Dantewada ambush in Chattisgarh which left as many as 76 personnel of the Central Police Reserve Forces (CRPF) dead. Widely regarded as the deadliest Maoist attack on the Indian security forces, the ambush underscored the Maoists’ operational capacity and exposed significant vulnerabilities in the state’s counterinsurgency framework, prompting heightened alarm within the state. This was followed by the derailment of Jnaneswari Express in West Midnapore of West Bengal on 28th May at about 1 a.m., which killed nearly 148 civilians. This incident occurred 90 minutes after the CPI (Maoist) declared a four-day bandh in the area. Although the debate around the perpetrators persists till now, it is clear that there was involvement of the Maoist-affiliated Police Santras Birodhi Janosadharan Committee (PCPA), active in Lalgarh against alleged police atrocities in the area. It was alleged that Mamata Banerjee, then the Railway Minister, backed pro-Maoist groups like the PCPA in her political battles against Buddhadeb’s CPI(M).

A period of intermission followed between 2010 and 2013, when Kishenji was encountered by the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) in Lalgarh, West Bengal, in 2011, sending shockwaves throughout the country. Seen as the “face of Maoism in India”, Kishenji’s death attracted intense debates amongst the intelligentsia, human rights activists, and his family members who alleged that Kishenji was first captured and then tortured to death, given his post-mortem findings. This was in contrast to the official position of the state forces, which claimed he was killed in action. Sitaram Yechuri, who was at the helm of the CPI(M) back then, refrained from passing any comments surrounding Kishenji’s death.

Yet this ‘intermission’ was short-lived, as the Maoists reorganised themselves. By then, counterinsurgency operations were both formalised through Operation Green Hunt and operated through illegal local militias in Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, like the Salwa Judum. The state government (notably the Congress governments) illegally handed the local adivasis guns and used child soldiers to deal with the Maoists in their region. A primary survey evaluated by the Forum for Fact-finding Documentation and Advocacy determined that over 12,000 minors were being used by Salwa Judum in the southern district of Dantewada and that the Chhattisgarh government had recruited 4,200 Special Police Officers (SPOs), many of them easily identifiable as minors. The Supreme Court banned all the operations of Salwa Judum in 2011, and their leader, as well as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Chhattisgarh from the Congress, Mahendra Karma, was assassinated by the Maoists on 25th May 2013. This was the third assertion by the Maoists when their ambush in the Darbha Valley killed Karma along with 31 others. In a statement put up by the Maoists, they claimed that they specifically targeted Karma, who had been stabbed multiple times by a group of women Maoists.

This was followed by numerous low-profile attacks. Sukma in 2017 and 2018, which killed nearly twenty-five and nine personnel of the CRPF, respectively, Gadchiroli (2018)- killing fifteen policemen, an inconclusive ambush in Sukma-Bijapur (2021), and a third attack in Dantewada (2023), which killed ten policemen while they were returning from a counterinsurgency operation. According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP), between 2004 and 2023, the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency left 8,800+ dead, including state forces, civilians, and insurgents of the CPI (Maoist) themselves.

The Intensification of Counterinsurgency Operations: Fall or “Tactical Retreat”?

However, there was a drastic change in the fate of the Maoists from 2024. Till then, all the parliamentary left parties have already extended their support in the counterinsurgency operations by the Government of India. Although they had raised scepticism about the nature of the operation, they didn’t oppose the counterinsurgency operations per se. In 2025, with the declaration of Operation Black Forest and Operation Kagar, the Home Minister Amit Shah vowed to “end Naxalism by 31st March 2026”. Given the trajectory and the success of counter-inurgency operations, it seems like Shah’s words are turning into a reality. With Nambala Keshava Rao (alias Basavraj), the General Secretary and Hidma, the central face as well as the youngest member of the Central Military Commission of the CPI (Maoist), neutralised in 2025, and the subsequent surrenders by Mallojula Venugopal Rao (alias Sonu), the younger brother of the legendary Maoist Kishenji, and Thippiri Tirupathi (alias Devuji). Moreover, Sonu appealed to all the Maoist cadres still operating in the jungles to lay down arms and surrender. He urged everyone to return to the “mainstream” and work among the people. After 2023, nearly 2000 Maoist cadres had surrendered after the counterinsurgency intensified, with many “Maoist sympathisers” jailed under the Unlawful Prevention (Activities) Act.

But this retreat isn’t a very new phenomenon for the Maoists in their history of insurgency. As discussed earlier, Naxalite-Maoists were greatly suppressed in the 1970s, and the death of Charu Majumder resulted in countless splinters of the Maoist parties. Activity was at its lowest point in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Maoists instead focused upon reorganising themselves. Therefore, between the two major peaks of the Maoists in the 1970s and the 2010s, there was a long phase of consolidation. Critics claimed that the Maoists are deluded in a postcolonial nostalgia, uprooted from the actual contemporary realities of the Indian state, and are thus bound to fail in the globalised world. But on the contrary, globalisation provided a new force to the Maoist movement in India. The 2010s, which were one of the peak times for the Maoist was also the period of “high globalisation”. This resulted in hyper-dispossession of the marginalised regions of India- areas which easily came under the Maoist control. Therefore, that Maoism is a relic of the 1950s-60s was essentially disproved by the support Maoists garnered within the regions where the Indian state presence remained weak. In 2026, the Indian Express reports that an estimated 300-350 cadres are still active and operating across states, mostly in Chhattisgarh.

A Deeper Question: Absence of Justice, and Adivasis as Collateral Damage

If Maoism represented a rejection of the Indian state, the counterinsurgency that followed has forced us to confront a deeper discomfort: what happens when a democracy fights its own margins as if they were hostile territories?

If justice is the normative axis through which this conflict is evaluated, then both the Maoists and the Indian state stand implicated in its distortion. The adivasi belt of central India did not merely turn into zones of violence; they became regions where due process, accountability, and constitutional guarantees were repeatedly suspended- sometimes by the insurgent fiat, sometimes by the state decree.

One of the least romanticised yet central features of Maoist governance in the so-called “liberated zones” was the operation of parallel judicial mechanisms- popularly called the jan adalat (people’s court). In the remote districts of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and parts of Odisha, these assemblies were presented as an alternative for revolutionary justice. The Maoists justified them as corrective alternatives to a distant, corrupt, and inaccessible state judiciary. For these villages, formal courts were geographically unreachable. The Maoists capitalised on this.

However, the normative problem lay in procedure and coercion. The people’s court frequently operated without evidentiary standards, legal representation, or safeguards against majoritarian pressure. Accusations of being a police informer, of collaborating with the paramilitary forces, of moral transgression could culminate in swift sentencing. Asim Chatterjee, a former Maoist, in one of his interviews, claimed that the current Maoists have abandoned Maoism and have resorted to individual terrorism. They were “socialism in name, terrorism in nature.” He provided the Maoists with the name of “social terrorists”, as public executions were sometimes carried out to signal deterrence. In effect, the Maoists monopolised adjudication in areas under their influence, collapsing executive, legislative, and judicial authority into a single armed hierarchy.

In conflict zones, “encounter killings” became a recurrent feature of counterinsurgency discourse. Official narratives described it as armed exchanges in which the Maoists were neutralised. However, varying human rights reports time and again alleged cases where adivasis were killed on mere suspicion of insurgent affiliation. This evidentiary asymmetry is structural: remote forest encounters left little room for independent verification, and in such circumstances, the line between the civilians and combatants was blurred. Adivasi rights activist Soni Sori was branded a Maoist in 2011, which followed a period of imprisonment- a tactic to discipline these Adivasis. In her recent testimony, she has called Operation Kagar, the military deadline for “eliminating Maoists” by March 2026, a ruse for eliminating Adivasi claims to land and dignity. She further adds, “everyday five or ten Adivasis are arrested; fake encounters are carried out. The main objective behind this is to end the lives of Adivasis. Whoever fights in Bastar…is branded Naxalites and crushed.”

What inevitably followed was a politics of suspicion. For the Maoist, the “informer” tag became lethal; for the state forces, the tag of “collaborator” was its counterpart. In this image of a mutually reinforcing regime of paranoia, adivasis were rendered perpetually suspect. The Maoists conducted the people’s courts, while the Indian state heavily relied on legal frameworks such as the UAPA, allowing prolonged detention and police harassment. Caught between the insurgent violence and counterinsurgency operations, villagers could easily be reduced to what Agambem (1995) called zoe – bare life – on little more than an accusation of passing information. For many adivasis (like Hidma from Sukma), joining the Maoists was a resistance against the dispossession of land and extractive exploitation of natural resources. For others, enlistment in the police or paramilitary forces represented one of the few viable avenues of economic survival. Although these trajectories appeared ideologically opposed, they were often underwritten by a shared aspiration: the pursuit of dignity long denied by structural marginalisation. In the end, the question of who truly represented the dispossessed adivasis devolved into a contest of political legitimacy between the insurgent and the state, rather than substantive commitment to justice.

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References

1. Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. Penguin Random House India Private Limited.
2. Myrdal, J. (2014). Red Star over India: As the Wretched of the Earth are Rising : Impressions, Reflections, and Preliminary Inferences.