For decades, the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency was described as India’s gravest internal security problem. Grave enough that Manmohan Singh as prime minister called it the single biggest threat the country had ever faced from within. At its peak in the late 2000s, the movement touched nearly 180 districts across a belt of central and eastern India that came to be called the Red Corridor.
By 2024, that number had fallen to 38.
But the forest heartland of Dandakaranya, straddling Chhattisgarh and parts of Odisha, remained the last redoubt, sheltering the bulk of the party’s Central Committee.
This is the story of how that stronghold finally came apart.
The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Delhi had staked a public claim on the outcome. Through 2024 and 2025, Home Minister Amit Shah repeated the same deadline of March 31, 2026, at event after event. Talks were ruled out. The only offer on the table was surrender. Whether the deadline was strategic pressure or electoral theatre, it concentrated resources on a single geography. How that deadline came to be met is more complicated than the government’s account suggests.
But to understand the collapse, you have to go back to the beginning. Because the insurgency in central India was never a spontaneous uprising like the other regions.
The movements in Bengal, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh were, at their core, anti-landlord rebellions. Their leadership was drawn from educated, urban, middle-class communists, but those regions also produced organic tribal leaders. In Naxalbari, the movement that lent its name to all that followed included Adivasi figures like Jangal Santhal alongside Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal.
The Naxalbari uprising began in 1967 but was crushed by the police within five years. In 1977, survivors gathered for a reckoning. The central question on the table was stark: We believed we had found the correct line in 1967. How did it all end so quickly?
The Maoist presence in central India’s tribal belt grew from the other failures. That review in 1977 produced the “Rear Area Document”. Drawing on Mao’s doctrine, it argued that the party needed a sanctuary, a rear area where fighters could regroup during difficult periods and return to the struggle once conditions improved. Dandakaranya, the forested heartland of central India, was chosen as that sanctuary. The Maoists established a presence there in 1980.
For the first decade, they operated less like a revolutionary vanguard. They challenged the Forest Department’s exploitation of tribal communities, secured fairer prices for tendu leaves and other forest produce, and sought to stop the sexual harassment of tribal women by government officials.
By 1990, when the situation in other states had not improved, the Maoists sent to Dandakaranya for shelter made a decisive break. They declared they would work for the revolution from within Dandakaranya itself, and argued that the party’s assumption that local tribals lacked political consciousness was simply wrong.
Unlike in other regions, Dandakaranya had no landlords and no landless labourers. The conditions that typically ignite Maoist movements were absent. What fueled their growth here was, ironically, the State itself.
The first catalyst came in the 1990s, when the BJP government launched what it called the Jan Jagran Abhiyan – the “Public Awakening Movement” – which became a tool to harass anyone who had assisted Maoists over the previous decade. Adivasi leaders, operating through the collective decision-making that is central to their culture, addressed their communities: These people helped us for 10 years. Those of you who can no longer return home because of Jan Jagran are welcome to join the party.
That was how the Maoist movement in Dandakaranya truly began.
The second catalyst came in 2005, when the government launched Salwa Judum, roughly translated from Gondi as “peace march,” though it was anything but. It was a State-sponsored militia campaign that forced Adivasis to either join government camps or face violence. Thousands joined the Maoists simply because it was the only alternative to abandoning their homes. The party swelled.
Between 2005 and 2015, the Maoists were at the height of their power in Dandakaranya, executing several large-scale attacks. But by 2015, the same tribal social leaders who had brought communities into the movement began to step back. Their message was: The Dadas (the Maoists) are good people, certainly better than the police. But in the long run, their path of violence is not in the best interests of our society.
Since 2004, I have been working on an experiment in media democratisation in Dandakaranya, training local people in citizen journalism. In our meetings, people began saying something that surprised us: This work is valuable. But what we need most from you is something else entirely. We want to leave the Maoist movement.
For three years, we deferred and delayed. We then reached out to urban figures — intellectuals and activists close to the movement or familiar with it. Nearly everyone agreed that a peace process should begin. But no one did anything.
From 2018, we set aside our media work and began facilitating a peace process. Meetings were held, padayatras (foot marches) were organised, bicycle rallies were conducted. Gradually, Maoist leaders began making contact. The pattern was always the same — a press statement denouncing us in the morning, a call from a new, untraceable number in the evening.
Their position, expressed again and again, was: You are asking us to surrender. You are asking us to accept the Indian Constitution. We can never do either.
We told them we could find other words if words were the obstacle. The Union government showed no interest in engaging.
Meanwhile, on the ground, a new military strategy was working where Salwa Judum had failed. The government was establishing Forward Operating Bases – permanent camps pushed deep into Maoist territory – steadily shrinking the space in which the movement operated.
As the government’s March 31, 2026 deadline approached, I travelled toward Kutul in Abujhmad – long considered the Maoists’ undeclared capital, where their top leader, Basavaraju, had lived for years. He had been killed the previous year, and the movement had been weakening ever since.
On the way, I met Robinson Gudiya, the Superintendent of Police for Narayanpur district. Over the past two years, Robinson had led operations deep into what had been considered impenetrable Maoist territory. I asked him how it had happened so quickly — how did a movement that had held for decades collapsed like a house of cards.
“Human intel,” he said. “Eighty percent human intelligence, 20% everything else.”
And the 20%? “Amit Shah, the double-engine government, drones, satellites, funding, the DRG.” The District Reserve Guard is a battalion composed of local recruits and former Maoists who have surrendered.
The real story, though, began on January 16, 2024.
By then, the BJP had formed the government in Chhattisgarh, and the camp-establishment strategy, already accelerated under Amit Shah as Home Minister, was in full swing. To counter it, the Maoists ordered fighters from West and South Bastar to converge on a single target: the Central Reserve Police Force’s (CRPF) Cobra Battalion, stationed at Dharmavaram in Bijapur district.
The planning was meticulous. A mock-up of the Cobra camp was constructed along the banks of the Talperu River. Fighters were fitted with grass camouflage. Extensive reconnaissance was conducted. And yet the attack failed completely. The Maoists issued a press statement claiming 35 security personnel were killed. In reality, not one died.
The reason for the failure was significant: the local population did not, or could not, participate in large numbers, as they had in every previous major attack.
But the failed assault produced an unintended consequence. For the first time in a long while, key tribal Maoist commanders had gathered in one place. In reviewing what had gone wrong, they crossed a threshold that had never been crossed in 45 years of the movement in Dandakaranya: every tribal Maoist leader in that room said aloud, to one another, what they had privately believed for years: Society wanted them to change course, society wanted them to lay down their arms.
They drafted a letter to the Central Committee, the supreme body of the Maoist party. It read, in effect: The security camps are making it impossible to meet with people or maintain their support. The party must change its strategy. We should temporarily lay down our arms.
The Central Committee met, considered the letter, and rejected it.
But the letter had already done something irreversible. The fighters who drafted it had asked their principal commander, Hidma, perhaps the most formidable armed figure in the movement, to circulate it to all factions within the party.
It is worth pausing here on a fact: though 99% of the fighters in Dandakaranya were tribals, and half of them women, not a single tribal person or woman had ever held a seat in the Central Committee. The party’s leadership remained overwhelmingly non-tribal and Telugu-speaking. Hidma circulated the letter regardless.
The first senior leader to express agreement with the letter’s sentiments was Venugopal, the Central Committee’s spokesperson. Gradually, General Secretary Basavaraju followed. With Hidma having built support across factions, he was inducted into the Central Committee — a historic moment.
Basavaraju then began holding dialogue with communities about peace. Members of the Central Committee, including Hidma and Rupesh, attended these meetings. I suggested involving a few journalists in the process; my wife’s illness prevented me from participating directly.
Then came the blow that threatened to unravel everything. A DRG team comprising local youths, many of them former Maoists, assassinated Basavaraju. The anti-peace faction immediately blamed the pro-peace faction. Yet the peace process survived his death.
Through a journalist friend, contact was made with Chhattisgarh’s Home Minister, Vijay Sharma. Rupesh traveled to Raipur to negotiate. He returned with agreement on three points: no legal prosecution for Maoists who returned to mainstream society; no coercion to join the police; and the lifting of the ban on the Mulwasi Bachao Manch (Save the Indigenous People Forum), the Maoists’ legal front organisation.
Hidma was furious about this agreement. “I am not fighting for myself,” he said. “I am fighting for my community. There is nothing in this agreement for the community.” He took roughly 70–80% of the remaining fighters with him into the anti-peace faction.
Venugopal’s pro-peace faction – approximately 20% of the fighters – surrendered on the three agreed conditions.
The split was now total and public. The Adivasi communities living in the forests knew it too, and the intelligence they began providing to police became extraordinary in its precision. Small police squads were able to locate and neutralise the most senior leaders and return safely. The targeted killings of prominent Telugu commanders accelerated.
Some people in the state’s urban corners were alarmed by what appeared to be an oncoming bloodbath. They made fresh attempts to mediate. But the intelligence flowing from the ground had rendered the security situation decisive.
And then Hidma, too, was killed.
According to the Times of India, his final letter reached the community on the day he died. In it, he expressed his wish to engage the government in dialogue on tribal issues.
The surviving senior leaders of the anti-peace faction surrendered, in much the same way the pro-peace faction had before them. The sanctuary of Dandakaranya, built over 45 years, collapsed almost overnight.
What destroyed the Maoist movement in central India was not, in the end, drones or satellites or superior firepower, though these played their part. It was the withdrawal of the one thing that had made the movement possible in the first place: the quiet, durable consent of the Adivasi communities it claimed to represent.
The writer is a former journalist with BBC and the founder of CGNet Swara – a voice-based online news portal focussed on central Gondwana region. He was also the convener of the New Peace Process.
Views expressed are the author's own.
This report was originally published in the Newslaundry and can be accessed here.
