The Last Days of Naxalism: How India Quietly Broke the Maoist Insurgency

India's Maoist insurgency once controlled 200 districts across ten states, with varying degrees of fear or allegiance. It now has control of only seven. Over 12,000 people died in Naxal-related violence between 2000 and 2019. In 2024, that number was 290, which is still significant, but a fraction of what it was before. Reports indicate that no new cadres have been recruited since 2019. 

Illustration by The Geostrata

To truly grasp the reality of a Naxal cleanup, one must go to Jagdalpur, in Chhattisgarh's Bastar division, and order a coffee.

On any given morning, The Pandum cafe looks like any other small-town cafe. What the menu doesn’t mention is that until recently, the people serving there were wanted criminals with active bounties on their heads. If there is any doubt about the state’s Naxal rehabilitation and reintegration policy, Pandum Cafe provides the definitive answer.

India has a target date. Home Minister Amit Shah has declared that by March 31, 2026, Naxalism will be finished. This is an intent made public. The numbers also favour them. A movement which was referred to as India's  greatest internal security threat is now on a terminal decline

WALK IN, HAND IT OVER

The mechanics of surrendering are less formal than most people imagine. There is no single protocol, no standard procedure that applies uniformly across Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Jharkhand, and the other states where the movement still operates. In most cases,contact is made through an intermediary, this can be a journalist, a local politician or even a police officer. Sometimes, cadres simply walk into a local police station carrying their weapon and ask to speak to an officer.

What happens next depends on the state and rank of the cadre surrendering, and also what they are willing to offer. A low-level cadre with no intelligence will be processed through the rehabilitation scheme, given their grant, and enrolled in vocational training. A senior figure with operational knowledge, names, supply routes, and the locations of safe houses is a different matter entirely. They will be debriefed. What they provide will feed directly into ongoing operations.

Every senior surrender produces intelligence. That intelligence enables operations. Those operations produce more surrenders. The loop has been running hard since 2023, and its effects are visible in the weakening of the Maoist command structure.

The Central government's rehabilitation scheme, in its current form, provides an immediate cash grant of Rs 1.5 lakh, a monthly stipend of Rs 2,000 for three years, and access to vocational training programmes. Incentives are scaled to the weapons surrendered and the rank of the cadre. Those who subsequently assist the state in operations have a possibility of getting a government job in the police force. Chhattisgarh offers skill training, the hotel management programme, mobile repair courses, and agricultural training.

THE MAN WHO WAS ALMOST IN CHARGE

In February 2026, a 58-year-old man named Thippiri Tirupathi walked into the Telangana police headquarters and surrendered. Inside the Maoist movement, he was known as Devuji. He had been there for forty years.

Over four decades, he rose through every level of the organisation: the Gadchiroli divisional committee, the Central Military Commission, which he eventually led, and finally the Politburo, to which he was inducted in 2023. When Basavaraju, Nambala Keshava Rao, general secretary of CPI (Maoist) since 2018, was killed in Narayanpur's forests in May 2025, Devuji was the most senior surviving figure and was considered the man who would lead the ones left.

He chose not to. When he walked out, he told the officials that he had decided to work within the legal framework and remain at the people's side. Telangana's Director General of Police described the organisation Devuji had left behind as headless, rudderless, and leaderless.

What Devuji does next is an open question. Former senior leaders who surrender rarely disappear. Mallojula Venugopal Rao, who surrendered in October 2025 with sixty PLGA members, has been publicly appealing to remaining cadres to lay down arms, appearing on social media platforms and also the ones the government arranged, arguing that changed ground realities have made the armed struggle impractical. Whether Devuji will be asked to play the role of the government's most credible spokesperson to whatever remains of the Maoist movement. Whether he agrees is another matter.

HOW THE GOVERNMENT BROKE IT

The temptation is to read the Naxal cleanup as a straightforward military victory. It is more complicated than that. The military dimension is worth understanding in detail because the government did not simply overpower the movement. It dismantled it methodically, operation by operation, over fifteen years.

The foundation was laid under Operation Green Hunt, launched in 2009 under the Congress-led UPA government, which deployed 80,000 central paramilitary personnel, CRPF, CoBRA units, and state police into the Red Corridor in a coordinated attack that had no precedent in scale.

It produced mixed results initially. A 2010 ambush in Dantewada killed 76 CRPF personnel in a single attack, exposing how badly security forces understood the terrain. But it established the infrastructure.

By 2024, the situation had changed dramatically. The Kanker clash in April 2024 killed 29 Maoists and was described as one of the most successful anti-Naxal engagements in years. The Abujhmarh clash in October 2024, in a 4,000 square kilometre dense forest that had been a Maoist stronghold for over three decades, killed 38 cadres and resulted in the near-elimination of the Maoists' Partapur area committee. The fact that armed forces could operate inside Abujhmarh was a signal of how much the balance had shifted.

Then came Operation Kagar, 2024-25, the umbrella under which the most recent anti-Naxal activity has been conducted. What distinguishes Kagar from earlier campaigns is its use of drone surveillance, satellite imagery, and AI-assisted intelligence tools that allow forces to operate with a precision that the forest terrain previously denied them. 

SURRENDER IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING SPARED

The most consequential question that the rehabilitation policy does not cleanly answer is also the most important one. What happens to the criminal cases?

Almost every cadre who surrenders carries pending charges. A low-ranking recruit might have two or three cases filed against them. Kotehonda Ravindra, who surrendered in Karnataka in early 2025 after 18 years in the movement, had 27 cases registered against him across three states.

Someone like Devuji, who was wanted across five states and connected to the deaths of police officers and civilians over four decades, the number of pending cases is not small. The Central rehabilitation scheme clearly spells out benefits and stipends. But on criminal liability, it says very little.

The practical answer varies entirely by state, by political will, and by how useful the surrendered cadre proves to be. In Chhattisgarh, the government took a notable step in December 2025, when the cabinet approved a formal process for reviewing and withdrawing criminal cases against surrendered Naxalites.

The mechanism works in stages. A district-level committee examines each case first, forwards its findings to police headquarters, which passes them to the law department, which places them before a cabinet subcommittee, which then sends recommendations to the full cabinet for a final decision. For cases under Central Acts or involving Union government jurisdiction, separate permission from Delhi must be obtained. 

This is a significant development. The cases are reviewed through a bureaucratic process, with the outcome contingent on continued cooperation. A surrendered cadre lives in legal limbo for months or even years, their status unresolved, their freedom contingent on performing a role the state has assigned them. The policy provides cover. It does not provide certainty.

The Karnataka experience is the starkest illustration of what happens when the legal promise is not kept. Nilaguli Padmanabh surrendered in 2016. Eight years later, he still had six pending cases and had received no legal aid despite explicit government promises at the time of his surrender. 'I have been made to spend my entire time fighting these cases,' he said. The state's Naxal Surrender and Rehabilitation Committee proposed setting up special fast-track courts to deal specifically with surrendered cadres' cases. The government rejected the proposal on technical grounds and promised instead that regular courts would handle the cases speedily. 

The picture that emerges is of a policy that is generous on paper and uneven in practice. Cooperate fully, assist actively, maintain good conduct, and the state may eventually clear your cases. Fall short of any of those conditions, and the cases remain.

WHAT MARCH 31 CAN'T SETTLE

Finishing the organisation does not finish the argument it was making. The government knows this, which is why even after declaring Naxalism over, it has kept 31 districts under continued special security and development attention, formally called Legacy Thrust Districts. These are areas where the movement was once strongest: Gadchiroli, Balaghat, and Badradri Kothagundem, among them.

The designation exists because the government understands that a region which spent decades under Maoist influence does not stabilise overnight simply because the cadres have surrendered or been killed. The ideology and the conditions that produced it do not come with a surrender date.

Those conditions, displacement from forests, land taken for mining, and Adivasi communities with no say over their own land, remain unresolved. The roads into Bastar that dried up recruitment are the same roads that mining trucks now use. There is no armed resistance left to slow them down.

In Jagdalpur, the cafe staff are learning to make cappuccinos. They made a calculation and they are managing. Whether the state has actually addressed what drove people into the jungle, or simply waited them out, is the question that will outlast every operation and every surrender.

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BY LAKSHYA

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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