Naxal Mukta Bharat: Ending Red Terror Under Modi’s Leadership

Speakers: Shri Babulal Marandi (Former Chief Minister, Jharkhand) · Shri Murlidhar Rao (Senior BJP Leader)
Moderator: Smt. Snigdha Reddy (BJP, Telangana)

The inaugural session set its own temperature. There was no hedging, no euphemism—only lived memory, constitutional conviction, and the granular texture of places where roads used to end and fear began. The panel framed Naxalism not as a passing law-and-order nuisance but as a long campaign against Indian democracy, sustained for decades by the absence of the state in its most concrete form: roads, power, schools, health posts, and banking. The journey from victimhood to victory, they argued, is paved as much by blacktop and bank accounts as by courage and counter-insurgency.

Shri Babulal Marandi spoke with the authority of a first-person ledger. He described how Maoists historically selected districts where development was a rumor; discontent could be stoked with ease precisely because the government had rarely arrived. Crucially, when the government finally did arrive—with a road project, a feeder line, a school—they did not press for better quality or faster delivery; they stopped it. Crews were chased away, materials torched, and any work that suggested the permanence of the state was violently resisted. As Chief Minister, he chose to test the proposition that governance itself is a weapon. He pushed for surrenders, reopened corridors, set down police camps, and insisted that roads and services be completed despite intimidation. The retaliation was savage: a daylight attack on a village cultural gathering left nineteen dead, including his own son. He offered the story without self-pity, only to underline a point: violent extremism seeks to erase public goods because public goods erase the logic of violent extremism.

If Marandi mapped the terrain, Murlidhar Rao traced the doctrine. Beginning with the campus years, he recalled a 1980 Republic Day confrontation at Kakatiya University where a Maoist-aligned student outfit attempted to desecrate the flag. For him, the episode was not a campus scuffle but a glimpse into a movement that denies the national flag, the Constitution, and the civic rituals that bind a diverse country. He connected those early confrontations to a long pattern: witnesses silenced, students marked as “class enemies,” profiles tracked for months before a final, ritualized elimination in so-called “people’s courts.” He survived a point-blank attack with a 12-bore shotgun in 1986—an ambush calibrated to his routines that failed only because he finished his meal unusually quickly and stepped outside the ambush window. The detail matters as it captures the Maoist method: meticulous reconnaissance, patience, and the normalization of murder as jurisprudence.

Rao also widened the lens beyond state boundaries, noting how skills and tactics—especially landmines and IEDs—circulated across militant networks in the 1980s–90s. The point was not to romanticize capacity but to remind us that insurgencies do not exist in isolation; they draw on transnational know-how while feeding on very local grievances. And yet, he argued, the last decade has produced a structural counter: tighter Center–State coordination, a deliberate whole-of-government push that pairs security with saturation delivery of welfare and infrastructure. When pensions, rations, schools, primary health, post-office banking, and mobile connectivity begin to persist—when they arrive and keep arriving—the moral oxygen of extremism thins.

The moderator, Smt. Snigdha Reddy anchored the conversation in her own bereavement: on 15th August 2005, her family lost multiple members in a single Maoist strike. The narrative was not offered to escalate grievance but to insist on clarity: this is not theater; it is blood and absence and a long shadow that families learn to live under. In her framing, the session’s title moved from slogan to diagnosis—the passage from victim to victor is neither linear nor guaranteed, but it is happening where state presence is consistent, respectful, and unafraid.

The discussion closed by returning to the young. Marandi was direct: development and employment are not conjured by gun-romance; they require peace, institutions, and the stubborn, often unglamorous work of governance. Rao’s final injunction was equally plain: do not mistake Maoism for a competing politics—it is a war on the Republic. The country has already shrunk the geography of the “Red Corridor” through patience and precision. The remaining task, he suggested, is to hold the line—security where necessary, services everywhere, and a refusal to launder violence with clever language.

If there was a single through-line to this session, it was that dignity and deterrence must advance together. Camps and clinics. Bridges and beat patrols. A ration card that works every time and a road that stays open at night. The panel did not pretend that this is easy; they did contend that it is working. And they left the hall with a simple proposition fit for a closing line: when the state keeps its promises, extremism loses its alibis.

Speakers: Shri Kuldeep Singh (Former DG, CRPF; Security Advisor, Govt. of Manipur), Shri Praveen Vashistha, IPS (Special Secretary, Internal Security, MHA, Govt. of India)
Moderator: Pathikrit Payne (Senior Research Fellow, SPMRF)

The session started with a stark reminder: the 1987 Dalelchak–Bhagaura massacre in Aurangabad, Bihar—an entire hamlet wiped out, with a lone child spared by circumstance. That survivor, present in the auditorium, set the moral register for a session that refused to romanticize violence. From there, the panel moved with clinical steadiness: how India has pushed Maoist extremism from swagger to a ceasefire plea, and what it takes to ensure the “last mile” is more than a slogan.

Shri Kuldeep Singh located the inflection point not in rhetoric but in resolve. He traced the arc from the romanticism of early campus-era “Naxal” idealism to the militarized consolidation that culminated in the 2004 CPI (Maoist) merger and the brutal peaks of 2010—Tadmetla/Chintalnar and Jnaneswari among them. The turnaround, he argued, rests on an unambiguous, sustained political will: zero tolerance for armed extremism; relentless operational pressure; and, crucially, an insistence that anyone with ideas contest them in the public square, not from behind a gun. He was unsentimental about capability: when legacy equipment failed on the ground, the center moved quickly—bridging gaps with Army loans, accelerating fresh procurement, and making command decisions that favored speed and field discretion over procedural drag.

On the operational plane, Singh described a quiet revolution. The old pattern—long-range patrols returning to far-off bases—has given way to dense forward operating bases placed every few kilometers, each with its own perimeter and local area dominance. With that, the grid has come to have better survivability and better intelligence: drones for overwatch, armored/wheeled platforms for protected movement, canines for route security, and even two-wheeler columns where mines make heavier convoys predictable. The intention was simple: deny safe havens, shorten the response loop, and shift from episodic raids to permanent presence. That presence is now increasingly local; the CRPF’s Bastariya Battalion and state formations like Danteshwari Fighters symbolize how tribal youth have stepped to the front line—language, terrain sense, and community trust becoming decisive tactical assets.

Shri Praveen Vashistha widened the aperture. Left-wing extremism, he said, was long misframed as a law-and-order issue. The 2015 National Policy & Action Plan reframed the fight as multi-dimensional: security operations in lockstep with governance delivery, entitlements, and perception management. He walked the room through what “whole-of-government” looks like when it leaves the minutes and hits the ground: unified command at the state level; regular center–state reviews by the Home Minister; sectoral tie-ups with ministries for Roads, Telecom, Health, Tribal Affairs, Railways, Forests. The outcomes are tangible—thousands of kilometers of roads sanctioned with the most vulnerable stretches prioritized; thousands of telecom towers erected to break information isolation; post offices seeded for financial inclusion; Eklavya residential schools and a long-overdue super-specialty hospital for Jagdalpur (fast-tracked with NMDC support) to anchor human development.

Both speakers linked this to the capacity where it matters most: the state police. Special forces—DRG and STF in Chhattisgarh, Jaguar in Jharkhand, SOG in Odisha, specialized CI units elsewhere—have been equipped and trained at scale. The center delegated financial powers, cut procurement bottlenecks, and standardized modern kits so that “need” did not have to queue behind “process.” The combined effect is measurable: districts once categorized as significantly affected have fallen from 126 to 18; core leadership attrition is accelerating; and, as Vashistha noted, this year alone a clutch of senior CPI (Maoist) figures have been neutralized or have surrendered—an index of organizational fatigue as much as tactical success.

The session did not blink at the brutality of the opponent: targeted killings of students and witnesses in earlier decades, deliberate mutilations aimed at booby-trapping dead bodies, public hangings to enforce fear—examples invoked not for shock, but to make a simple institutional point. Security forces are not fighting abstractions; they are securing the conditions under which development can arrive and remain. In that spirit, the panel pushed back against lingering “urban romanticism.” If roads and towers are the enemy’s first targets, then defending those works is, by definition, defending the public good.

Looking ahead, the speakers converged on two risks and one assurance. First, vigilance against ideological re-packaging in cities—the so-called “urban Naxal” bandwidth that seeks to soften public resolve. Second, the danger of a vacuum: security gains must be immediately followed by saturation delivery—grievance redress, livelihoods, schooling, health—so legitimacy sticks to the state, not to the loudest claimant. And the assurance: the goal of a Maoism-free India is not rhetoric pinned to a date. It is the practical outcome of a structure now in place—coordinated command, modernized kit, local recruitment, and development that actually arrives.

As rapporteur, I would add this: what has shifted is not merely the map but the mindset. The state has learned to stay, not just to visit; to listen, as well as to secure. When a forward base births a school, when a patrol route becomes a bus route, the narrative rights itself. The ceasefire talk we hear today is not a new idea; it is an old tactic returning in weakness. The country’s response, as laid out on this stage, is clearer than it has been in decades: lay down arms, enter politics, and make your case to the people—or face a state that is finally present, prepared, and patient enough to outlast you.

Speakers: Prof. Yogesh Singh (Vice-Chancellor, University of Delhi) and Shri P. Sundarraj (IG, Bastar Range, Chhattisgarh)
Moderator: Shri Abhishek Tandon (Associate Professor, University of Delhi)

The afternoon opened with formal courtesies and a packed hall that already knew the day’s arc: from lived trauma to the hard math of counter-insurgency. This session stitched those strands together. One speaker stood for the university space where ideas are shaped, the other for the forested front where the idea meets a rifle. Between them ran a single proposition: security and scholarship must move in step if the 31st March 2026, target of a “Naxal-free” India, is to be more than a date on a lectern.

Prof. Yogesh Singh took the first turn and, in a firm, uncluttered register, mapped why campuses become targets. Universities, he argued, are not peripheral to the conflict but often the upstream source of its narratives. He warned against what he called “urban Naxal” methods—appropriating the language of rights to mainstream an anti-state program—and pressed teachers to recognise their agency: silence, he said, is not neutrality but abdication. To illustrate how culture industries work on young minds, he contrasted two films: Buddha in a Traffic Jam (as a primer on the playbook inside campuses) and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (as an instance of romanticization). The point was not cinema criticism; it was the ease with which stories can tilt sympathy and, with it, student trajectories.

His intervention then moved to concrete episodes. He cited the “Pinjra Tod” mobilizations and the anti-CAA protests to show how campus energy can be channeled, and referenced arrests and prosecutions in the Bhima Koregaon investigations as cautionary markers. He also recalled the prosecution history of G.N. Saibaba to underline how, in his view, ideological work is sometimes intertwined with militant ecosystems. The thrust was consistent: universities must mount their own contest of ideas, publishing research grounded in verifiable data and refusing agenda-laden framings. “Vicharon ki ladai vichar se hi ladi jayegi”—and he placed the onus squarely on the academic guild to build rigorous counter-narratives rather than outsource the entire problem to policing.

If Prof. Singh spoke of minds, IG P. Sundarraj spoke of miles. He began by relocating the audience to Bastar as a physical and administrative fact: a 42,000 sq. km division, over 60% forest cover, two-thirds tribal population, and once defined as much by absence (roads, telecom, rail) as by insurgent presence. That baseline, he said, is changing, and not by accident. He described the evolution from a two-pronged approach (“security with development”) to a five-strand plan—vishwas, vikas, suraksha, seva, nyay—that binds force protection, last-mile services, and community legitimacy.

The operational detail was unsentimental. Local recruitment has been a game-changer: DRG companies, Bastar Fighters, and CRPF’s Bastariya battalion give the state a language, a gait, and an intuition for terrain that outsiders lack. Forward camps planted to guard bridges and culverts—often the first targets of Maoist sabotage—have pushed the security perimeter outward and made daily life possible: girls crossing swollen nalas (rivulets)to reach a school now use a bridge that exists because a camp sat on it long enough to be built. He named one such post “Sunil” after a fallen constable, a quiet ledger of costs behind the bland phrase “area domination.” Over 25 years, he noted, 1,452 personnel have laid down their lives in Bastar alone; the figure was used not to dwell on loss but to anchor the claim that connectivity today is not a statistic but a memorial.

Sundarraj also walked the auditorium through Abujhmad—the once “unknown” 6,000 sq. km massif across the Indravati—where survey work and an 800-meter bridge now stitch previously isolated hamlets to market towns. He was candid about tactics used against camp establishment—mobs fronted by women and children to bait an overreaction, pressure-activated IED belts seeded around likely approach routes—and equally candid about the long game: patience, vernacular communication, medical outreach, and routine hospitality gradually flipping villages from chanting “camp hatao” to pleading “camp yahin rahe.” The conclusion was unambiguous: with leadership focus, inter-force coordination, and administrative saturation, the remaining pockets can be finished on schedule.

The moderator kept the discussion tight, steering it back to the hinge between these worlds. In the final exchange, Prof. Singh returned to timelines. Militant capacities can be timed, he said; ideas cannot. If the state’s date is March 2026, universities must set their own clock—three to four years to cleanse the knowledge space of lazy romanticism, to insist on methodological integrity, and to cultivate a scholarly common sense that is resistant to seductive slogans. “Vyakti marta hai, vichar nahi”—but ideas can be disciplined by evidence and by a faculty that chooses to be extraordinary rather than merely employed.

As the hall rose to applaud, the session left a clear aftertaste. The forest and the faculty are not parallel theaters; they are successive ones. Bastar’s new roads, towers, and bridges will fail if, upstream, classrooms continue to launder violence as virtue. Equally, campus vigilance will ring hollow if the state cannot guarantee a child’s safe walk to school. The promise of a Naxal-free future, the speakers insisted in different idioms, rests on both the pen and the post—and on each knowing it is accountable to the other.

Speakers: Victims of Naxal violence in various states in India
Moderator: filmmaker Shri Vipul Amrutlal Shah

The hall fell quiet not because anyone asked for silence, but because the first voice made it inevitable. This was not an expert panel or a slide deck; it was a ledger of wounds. The session’s title—Where were our human rights?—landed with its full weight once the lives behind the phrase walked us through evenings that never ended.

From Balangir, Odisha, came the measured, almost disbelieving grief of Umesh Kumar Panda. On 14 August 2011, men with guns called his father outside and emptied their magazines into a man known chiefly for settling disputes and helping neighbours. That, Umesh said, was counted as “collaboration.” The killing did not end a life; it detonated an ecosystem. A household broke rank with school, savings, and sanity. A widowed mother now calibrates medicines against meals. Children turned from algebra to errands. “What was my father’s crime?” sits in his throat even now, a question with no respondent. His appeal was specific—employment, a pension, a safe roof—and quietly universal: “There are thousands like us whose stories do not travel.” 

A farmer from Chhattisgarh, Siyaram, offered the anatomy of survival. Stepping out to check his fields in October 2022, he met a well-laid ambush: the first round tore through his abdomen and kissed the spine; the second shattered a leg; a third chewed through the shoulder; stones did the rest. For hours, he bled into the soil before the family found him. Months of surgeries followed; metal now holds him upright. He leans on a stick, but not on bitterness. Koshish karne walon ki haar nahi hoti, he told us with the flat certainty of someone who has tested the line. His body is a map of trauma; his return, a rebuke to those who would make fear a form of governance.

If Umesh’s account was about erasure and Siyaram’s about endurance, Ashok Ganda’s was about humiliation engineered as policy. In 2016, he and ten other villagers were abducted, paraded, and beaten before a manufactured audience—an accusation of ferrying money to police weaponized into a public ritual of terror. One villager was killed to set the lesson; the rest were released to spread it. Ashok’s words carried a different timbre of loss: the theft of standing. He spoke of being driven out, of returning to a village whose gaze had been trained to doubt him. You can rebuild walls, he implied; it is harder to rebuild trust once spectacle has been used to salt the earth.

Through these narratives, the moderator, Vipul Amrutlal Shah, did not so much steer as steward. He allowed detail, respected silence, and asked only what the story itself required. The effect was to make the larger argument land without proclamation: that Naxal violence is not episodic “crime” but a sustained assault on the civic fabric—on the right to study without orphaning, to farm without triage, to belong without ritualized shame.

Three clear through-lines emerged. First, the calculus of “targeting” is brutally simple: those who mediate disputes, keep roads open, or assert a normal life are framed as state proxies and punished to instruct the rest. Second, that families require more than condolence—predictable entitlements (compassionate appointment, pensions, trauma care, housing) delivered without procedural siege. Third, that community is scarred as a unit. Public beatings and expulsion are not incidental cruelty; they are tools to corrode the idea of a neighbor, and thus the state’s ability to root.

It is easy, in rooms like ours, to speak of dates—targets by which a district will be “cleared.” This session insisted on a parallel clock: the one that governs a widow’s pharmacy bill, a child’s interrupted term, a man learning to walk with a rod in his femur. Meeting the security timeline without meeting these private calendars would be a victory badly spelled.

A  rapporteur is expected to distill; it would be dishonest to dilute. What we heard was not a plea for charity, but a demand for recognition as rights-holders. The state’s promise must therefore be legible where it matters most: a verified beneficiary list that does not expire with a posting; case workers who arrive without cameras; fast-tracked claims that do not require a second victimhood at counters; safe housing that cannot be vetoed by those who once issued the threats; and psychological support as routine, not rare.

Valedictory Address — Shri Amit Shah, Hon’ble Home Minister of India

The concluding session was marked by a forceful and detailed address by Shri Amit Shah, India’s Home Minister, who situated the fight against Naxalism within the broader canvas of India’s post-independence internal security challenges. Speaking with candor, he reminded the gathering that alongside Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast, the so-called “Red Corridor”—once stretching in imagination “from Pashupati in the north to Tirupati in the south”—had consumed not just territory but the lives, confidence, and hopes of nearly twelve crore people, almost a tenth of India’s population at the time.

In the 1970s and 80s, the specter of such a corridor induced genuine anxiety; today, Shah said, the very mention of “Pashupati to Tirupati” invites laughter, for the ground reality has shifted dramatically. Where once 126 districts were counted as Naxal-affected, today that number stands at 18, with the “most affected” category reduced from 36 to just 6. In 2014, nearly 330 police station areas lived under extremist dominance; now, barely 100 remain contested, many of them newly created stations, built precisely to extend state presence.

This transformation, the Home Minister emphasized, was the result of abandoning the fragmented, reactive approach of earlier years. The present government adopted a unified and ruthless strategy: security forces given a full mandate; the Center and states synchronized; arms supply chains choked by over 90%; and finances tracked and frozen through NIA and ED. Operations such as Octopus, Double Bull, and Black Forest struck at entrenched camps—even the May 2025 destruction of a fortified Naxal base on the Chhattisgarh–Telangana border, stocked with weapons and rations for two years, which Shah described as the “breaking of their backbone.”

Equally significant, he argued, was the moral clarity of policy. Those who surrender are welcomed—“a red carpet awaits them”—while those persisting with violence face decisive force. This twin track has produced results: in 2024 alone, 290 Naxals were neutralized, but over 1,090 were arrested and 881 surrendered; in 2025 so far, 270 neutralizations stand alongside 680 arrests and 1,225 surrenders. The numbers, he said, tell a story: “surrender and reintegration are rising, neutralizations are shrinking, and the movement itself is withering.”

But Shah was equally insistent that Naxalism cannot be explained away as a developmental shortfall. Roads, schools, mobile towers, banks, and welfare schemes have been denied to tribals not by state apathy alone, but by the gun-wielding cadres who prevented their arrival. He cited that 12,000 km of roads have been built in affected regions since 2014, with another 17,500 km sanctioned; 5,000 mobile towers, 100+ bank branches, 850 schools, and 186 health centers have been established, alongside 15,000 houses under PMAY newly cleared. “Development was not absent because of the state,” he asserted, “it was obstructed by an ideology that legitimizes violence.”

In conclusion, Shah returned to the ideological battle: the need to expose those who, under the garb of intellectualism or civil society, have provided narrative cover and legal shelter to violence. “Our Constitution gives every citizen a voice,” he reminded, “but it does not give the right to armed rebellion.” The task, then, is not just to win on the battlefield but to dismantle the selective sympathies that mask themselves as concern for rights while ignoring the widows, the maimed farmers, and the orphaned children of tribal villages.

The Home Minister’s conviction was unmistakable: by March 2026, armed Naxalism would be history. Yet his appeal was equally pointed—that universities, NGOs, and public voices must join in ensuring that when the guns fall silent, the space is filled not by apologists of violence but by institutions of learning, welfare, and dignity for India’s most vulnerable citizens.

Vote of Thanks — Shri Binay Kumar Singh, Director, SPMRF

Shri Binay Kumar Singh, delivering the vote of thanks, underscored how even Naxal leaders themselves once admitted—in their 2015 Eastern Regional Bureau meeting—that the coming of a Modi government had “increased their problems.” He noted that the same campuses once swayed by radical literature are today hosting discussions like this, with over 1,000 professors and scholars present. Linking past to present, he recalled the student martyrs of the late 1970s and 80s who were killed simply for hoisting the tricolor, and observed the irony that today, a one-time student activist of that very era, Amit Shah, now leads the final campaign to end the insurgency.

He concluded by describing the participants as “sadhaks, not badhaks”—builders rather than obstructers of India’s future—and affirmed that this movement to end Naxalism is no longer the responsibility of the state alone, but of every citizen who believes in the Constitution, in development, and in justice for the victims.