Strong setback: On the Maoist movement and anti-Maoist operations

When an insurgent organisation is faced with a precipice, it has two options — it can either go down with a fight and pull some of its adversaries across the cliff or it can see the futility of its aims and give up the fight for good. Ideologically motivated insurgent organisations rarely choose the second option, especially those that are engaged in decades of conflict. Even those organisations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that gave up violent insurgency and entered into an armistice find it difficult to convince factions or cadres who are committed to the violence as a means of not just rebellion but also of their existence. Since the merger of various Naxalite currents into the party in the early 2000s, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has rarely ventured to speak of peace and ending the violent conflict except for tactical reasons. Its ideology not just talks of the utilisation of violence for its aims but also makes it central to its existence. The dastardly killing of eight security personnel and a civilian driver in an improvised explosive device blast in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh on Monday (January 6, 2025) might seem like a sign that the potency of the CPI(Maoist) in inflicting such acts remains, and, therefore, the Maoists are a dangerous insurgent force. While there is a grain of truth to that, especially in the Abujmarh jungles and adjoining areas of the Bastar region in the State, it is also accurate to suggest that these are acts of a flailing outfit struggling to retain what was the only bastion for the left extremist organisation.

The deaths of the security personnel, who belonged to the District Reserve Guard and Bastar Fighters of the Chhattisgarh Police, are certainly a setback to the anti-Maoist operations that have picked up pace and resulted in significant deaths of Maoist cadres and other tribal people caught in the conflict. In 2024, an estimated 296 insurgents died in the operations while security forces lost 24 people and there were 80 civilian deaths. To suffer eight casualties early in 2025 is a major blow and one of the severest losses for the security forces in recent years. The heavy use of explosives and the camouflaged nature of the planted IEDs suggest that the Maoists had planned this attack for a long time; the last such IED blast was in April 2023 in Dantewada. The knee-jerk reaction to this incident will be the security forces intensifying their operations to identify the culprits, potentially targeting innocent civilians. While stepping up the security campaign is inevitable considering the fact that the Maoists have refused to abjure violence, the security personnel and the government should not get carried away in retaliation and target civilians as this would play right into the hands of Maoist propaganda about state repression. As tempting as it is to wipe out the Maoist movement through military means, as the Union Home Minister has promised, it is still prudent to use civil society actors to work out a ceasefire agreement and utilise it to end the conflict.