The Slayer of Maoism

INDIA’S FIRST HOME MINISTER SARDAR VALLABHBHAI PATEL was equally charming and forceful in his pursuit of establishing the rule of law. As his secretary VP Menon later recalled, before persuading the princely states to sign the Instrument of Accession—a legal document required for joining the Indian Union after the Indian Independence Act of 1947—Patel once appealed to a ruler by evoking the beauty of be­ing part of a larger geographical entity. He used a compelling metaphor: just as a large lake cools the entire atmosphere, small stagnant pools do no good to anyone.

Yet Patel could be tough when the situation demanded it. The annexa­tion of Hyderabad was a military operation launched in September 1948 that led to the integration of the princely state into the Indian Union.

Even the British recognised the Iron Man of India’s masterful blend of persuasion and resolve. Lord Mountbatten, the last Vice­roy, acknowledged the success of Patel’s accession policy and paid tribute to him as a farsighted statesman, remarking: “It is a great triumph for the realism and sense of responsibility of the rulers and the governments of the States as well as for the Government of India that it was possible to produce an instrument of accession which was equally acceptable to both.”

Patel’s deft handling of the princely rulers was a decisive factor in the success of the integration process, catapulting him to the status of a stabilising force in Indian politics who upheld and established respect for the rule of law. In that sense, he deserves our gratitude much more than any other Indian statesman.

But the problem was that his legacy was sought to be air­brushed from history, his contributions denied, and as a result, nobody considered him a role model. Until Narendra Modi arrived on the scene. Before the 2014 General Election, when Modi was on the cusp of a landmark victory, he launched the ‘Statue of Unity’ yatra covering more than five lakh villages to collect the iron needed for the monument by asking farmers to donate their used farm instruments. That was an acknowledge­ment of a Great who was sought to be belittled, forgotten, and erased by people who thought that giving Patel his due would cast a shadow on the greatness thrust on somebody else in Con­gress. Modi took the first step of acknowledging the stature of the man and his service to Mother India by resurrecting him from the footnotes and elevating him to the pedestal that should have always been his. But there was still a challenge. Who would fit into Sardar’s shoes? It was a big challenge.

And then in 2019, because of whoever drafted the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) constitution—which ensured Amit Shah was denied a third term—Modi put Shah in charge of the Union home ministry. Since then, Shah has worked to live up to the benchmark his ideal had set for himself—ensuring the unity and integrity of India, protecting and fortifying it from exter­nal threats by identifying and dealing with internal subversion which, crucially, was a major concern for Patel.

Shah began by addressing the Kashmir issue that was the result of a monumental folly on the part of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his belief that giving special status in the form of Article 370 would reconcile Kashmiri sub-nationalism with Indian nationhood. The result was violence and bloodshed for several decades.

In a bold step, the Modi government forged ahead, creating his­tory, and according to KJS Dhillon, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Army’s Northern Command and General Officer Commanding of XV Corps, the high point was Shah’s visit to Sri­nagar on June 26, 2019. Dhillon wrote in his book Kitne Ghazi Aaye, Kitne Ghazi Gaye (2023): “I must say that the Home Minister’s knowl­edge and in-depth assessment of the situation, including the likely fallouts, was exceptional as he had not only covered all bases but was ready with counter-plans for every possible eventuality and contingency. The rest, as they say, is history (itihas). History was in the making and here I am writing about it (Itihas banaya ja raha tha aur main aaj uske baare mein likh raha hoon). My words were com­ing true. I am honour-bound to say no more.” He added, “After this meeting, when I reached home, my wife, who had also been awake the whole night due to the multiple telephone calls I was receiving, asked me, ‘How was the meeting with the Home Minister?’ My instant response to her query was, ‘Bees yuvraj mil kar bhi iss bande ka muqabla nahin kar sakte (Even twenty crown princes together will not be able to match up to this person).’ And I was talking in terms of his decision-making prowess, analytical ability and absolute preparedness to handle any situation with guts and gumption.”

For Shah’s admirers in BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar, that would have been enough for fulfilling one of the foundational dreams of the party and realising a major part of the saffron imagination. If the conception was bold, the execution was exemplary. All the doomsday punditry was belied. No stone was pelted and no blood was spilled, as Farooq Abdullah had warned at a press conference in Srinagar. Of course, the contrar­ians would cite the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, 2025, but that is political cussedness and would fly in the face of the fact that such incidents have declined drastically.

Talking about the Modi government’s achievements, Shah told Parliament in March that things were on the mend in the border state. “Between 2004 and 2014, there were 7,217 terrorist incidents, but from 2014 to 2024, the number dropped to 2,242. During this pe­riod, the total number of deaths decreased by 70 per cent, the num­ber of civilian deaths decreased by 81 per cent and the casualties of security personnel decreased by 50 per cent. From 2010 to 2014, an average of 2,654 organised stone-pelting incidents occurred every year, but in 2024, not a single such incident occurred. There were 132 organised strikes, but there are none. In stone-pelting incidents, 112 civilians were killed and 6,000 were injured, but now stone-pelting itself has stopped. In 2004, there were 1,587 terrorist incidents while in 2024, this number was reduced to 85,” Shah had said.

BIT BY BIT, Amit Shah was putting in place the architec­ture of a robust internal security regime that Sardar Patel would have been proud of. Again, that would have been enough, going by the achievements and benchmarks set for the home minister in the popular imagination and by the media. But restlessness is an essential attribute of idealists and driven ones like him. He set upon himself a bigger task—the elimina­tion of Maoists, once described as India’s biggest internal security threat by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It was quite an admission and, at the same time, a recognition of the biggest threat that was gnawing at India just when it was trying to leave decades of economic stagnation behind.

Why is it the biggest threat? It is quite romantic to describe Maoists as rebels who have been forced to take up arms because the system has failed them. But that would be a simplistic view. The other part was the anarchy that this descended into, the ex­tortion racket which was coming in the way of development in a whole swathe of central India, which extended into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The suspicion that external forces were enjoying an India bleeding at its very core was not misplaced, as several intelligence accounts have shown.

Shah accomplished the challenge in two phases. First, and this has escaped the attention of the media, by pulling off a surprise upset by ensuring a BJP victory in Chhattisgarh when nobody was giving the party a chance and the only debate was on whether then Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel—the favourite of Congress’ first family—would be able to improve his party’s margin. In one fell swoop, Shah denied a major support system that Maoists had enjoyed.

When Shah took over as home minister in 2019, Left Wing Extremism (LWE) was as potent in derailing development in In­dia as terrorism in Kashmir. He hit the ground running, in coin­ing a comprehensive strategy to wipe out Maoism in India, with March 31, 2026 as the deadline. From August 2019 to December 2020, based on his strategy, the home minister began uprooting all LWE in state after state. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana were the first targets, followed by Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, all of which were cleared of Naxal activity by 2023 with such determination that Naxal-affected districts in 10 states have plummeted from 126 in 2014 to only 12 at present.

The biggest triumph for the Modi government on the LWE front was the recent killing of the general secretary of CPI(Maoist), Nambala Keshava Rao, commonly known as Basavaraju, a suc­cess that has practically rendered the group without a warlord to lead it. He had terrorised the region and confounded the govern­ment and security forces. But the final act was the result of detailed planning over years to identify, trace and hit Maoist safe havens, an exercise that gathered momentum only after BJP returned to power in Chhattisgarh, the state that was affected the most.

Operation Black Forest, conducted from April 22 to May 11, and now the Narayanpur operation, may not be widely known among ordinary citizens but together, on Shah’s watch, these eliminated 58 Maoists, including the dreaded Keshava Rao, de­livering that final blow. While Operation Black Forest successfully displaced the senior CPI(Maoist) leadership and the most potent People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) battalion No 1 from their Karregutta Hills hideout on the Chhattisgarh-Telangana border, forcing them to take refuge in segregated pockets with vastly depleted arsenal and supplies, the Narayanapur operation wiped out their chieftain, leaving the remaining rank and file in disarray. Both operations relied heavily not just on high-tech intel­ligence on the movement of Maoist leaders but also on the District Reserve Guard (DRG) experiment, to tap into surrendered Nax­als, for their resounding success. It was by using such precision intelligence that DRG was successful in its biggest achievement of killing Basavaraju, who was known to operate with “Ninja-like stealth”.

By December 2023, Maoist safe havens in Bihar and Jharkhand had already been cleared out by security forces. It was time for them to move to the hotbed of Naxal activity in Chhattisgarh, the Abujhmarh region, where its top leadership was hiding. From end-2023, there was heightened coordination and comprehen­sive strategising by CRPF, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), BSF, as well as the Chhattisgarh government and state police. All these agencies, alongside special anti-Naxal wings (STF), worked sys­tematically to target the lower, middle and senior echelons of the extremist organisation. The concerted and consistent exercises meant that the extremists were circumscribed to a progressively smaller area. Once this was done, Forward Operating Bases or FOBs (555 such camps since 2019) were set up to prevent their escape into nearby habitations again, even as the administration pushed deeper with welfare services for villagers. The smoothly coordinated strategy paid off. Between December 2023 and May 21 this year, a total of 401 Maoists were killed; 1,429 were arrested; and 1,355, driven by rapid development and the neutralising of their leaders, surrendered in Chhattisgarh.

This happened in defiance of criticism of being trigger-happy, oppressive and not tackling root causes. Shah paid no heed to these. He was clear that these had to be rebuffed. The commit­ment did not waver even when BJP failed to get a majority at the Centre of its own. If it’s called bloody-mindedness, well, it was an example of that.

After all, what Shah did was unparalleled. Even under Manmohan Singh, who had labelled Maoism India’s greatest inter­nal security threat, strong countermeasures were stymied. The Na­tional Advisory Council (NAC), led by Sonia Gandhi and influen­tial in Singh’s government, included sympathisers who opposed harsh action, framing Maoism as a reaction to socio-economic inequities. Sympathisers and NGOs advocating the preservation of status quo continued to hinder decisive action. Although the insurgency initially capitalised on legitimate grievances, such as exploitation and inequality, the movement’s leadership devolved into criminal elements engaged in drug trafficking and extor­tion. Attempts by former Home Minister P Chidambaram to curb the menace (through Operation Green Hunt) were shot down by Sonia Gandhi and her NAC, and faltered amid political discord and weak resolve. Some progress had been made earlier during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure as prime minister.

FOR A MOVEMENT that started in 1967 in West Ben­gal’s Naxalbari, inspired by the guerrilla tactics of Chi­na’s Mao Zedong, it later spread out to a larger chunk of India, with insurgency thriving in the mineral-rich ‘red corridor’ region, which comprised the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, and parts of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal. Back in the late 1960s, Charu Majumdar, one of the leaders of the Naxal movement, wrote passionately, endorsing Mao and saying, “China’s chairman [which Mao was then] is our chairman”. Portraying Maoist tactics as the future of the revolu­tion they were going to bring about, Charu Majumdar wrote on November 6, 1969: “We are living in the era of Mao Tsetung. Today, the great Communist Party of China, led by Chairman Mao and his close comrade-in-arms, Vice-Chairman Lin Piao, is leading the international proletariat in fulfilling their most glorious task, namely, the victorious completion of the world revolution. We are living in this period of world revolution. We are witnessing before our own eyes the glorious chapter of world history that the revolutionary people the world over are writing with their sweat and blood in order to abolish, once and for all, the system of exploitation of man by man from the world. We are a detachment of that international army.”

The romance associated with Maoism had attracted city-bred intellectuals to the extremist movement. Urban dwellers’ excite­ment about Maoism is nothing new. Similarly, Prime Minister Modi was right when he said that even as Maoism was being wiped out from the jungles, it was fast spreading roots in urban areas with some political parties also echoing their ideology. The concept of the urban Naxal, therefore, is a reality and has to be bat­tled with realism. There is still a significant section in academia and in editorial rooms that regularly whitewash red terror and its head-chopping monsters. All of these are in the public realm.

What remains largely unspoken, perhaps deliberately so, is the meticulous, almost obsessive rigour with which Amit Shah approaches every task he undertakes. Far from being merely the master strategist of popular imagination, multiple insiders at­test that Shah immerses himself in the granular intricacies of law enforcement, down to the precise moments when boots must land on the ground and drones must take to the skies. Yet his mission is not solely administrative. It is also very political. He must inspire chief ministers resigned to the abnormality of unrest in swathes of their states. He must coax cooperation from governments that often sit at opposing ends of the ideological spectrum. This delicate orchestration demands persuasion as much as it does candour; it calls for velvet gloves and iron fists. Shah, unwavering, employs both with equal ease.

Amit ShahDistrict Reserve Guardguerrilla movementhome ministerMaoismNarendra ModiSardar Vallabhbhai Patel