Countering Left Wing Extremism

The State Response

Fighting Left-Wing Extremism has been, from the start, a problem of division of labour. Under the Constitution, ‘police’ and ‘public order’ are State subjects, so the primary responsibility for law and order lies with the affected State governments.

The Union’s role is to coordinate, supplement and fund — supplying central forces, money, intelligence, equipment and a national strategy. The story of the State response is the story of how this shared effort matured from a narrow policing task into a genuinely holistic campaign.

The Evolution of the State’s Approach

Until 2006, the affected States largely fought the insurgency alone, and results were uneven. The turning point came when the movement was formally declared the gravest threat to internal security.

Two institutional steps followed: the creation of a dedicated Naxal Management Division (now the Left-Wing Extremism Division) in the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the appointment of an expert committee under D. Bandopadhyay, which located the lack of empowerment of local communities and the failure of good governance at the root of the spread and recommended a tribe-friendly land-acquisition and rehabilitation policy.

The decisive intellectual shift was the recognition that this could never be won by force alone. The Union therefore adopted an integrated approach acting simultaneously on four fronts — security, development, administration/governance, and public perception.

Everything that follows is an elaboration of this fourfold philosophy: enhance the capacity of the States to hold ground, while addressing the grievances that gave the movement its recruits.

National Policy and Action Plan, 2015

This is the master framework through which the integrated approach was formalised — a multi-pronged strategy resting on three limbs:

Limb	What it covers
Security-related measures	Central Armed Police Force battalions, helicopters and UAVs, fortified police stations, modernisation of State police, arms and equipment, training assistance and intelligence-sharing.
Development-related measures	Focused schemes for roads, mobile connectivity, skill development, and an improved network of banks, post offices, health and education facilities — concentrated on the worst-affected districts.
Ensuring rights and entitlements	Protecting the land, forest and statutory rights of tribal and forest-dwelling communities, so that the State is felt as a benefactor rather than an absentee.

The SAMADHAN Doctrine

If the National Policy and Action Plan was the philosophy, SAMADHAN (Hindi for ‘solution’) was the operational battle-plan — a memorable acronym in which each letter is a pillar of strategy, combining short-term security with long-term structural measures:

Letter	Pillar	Meaning
S	Smart Leadership	Sharp, decisive leadership of the forces on the ground.
A	Aggressive Strategy	A proactive, offensive posture rather than a defensive one.
M	Motivation and Training	Well-trained, well-motivated forces suited to jungle warfare.
A	Actionable Intelligence	Real-time, usable intelligence to drive operations.
D	Dashboard-based KPIs & KRAs	Measurable Key Performance Indicators and Key Result Areas to track progress.
H	Harnessing Technology	UAVs, satellite imagery, sensors and modern communications.
A	Action plan for each Theatre	Tailored plans for each affected zone rather than one-size-fits-all.
N	No access to Financing	Choking the movement’s funds and supply lines.

The Security Response — Forces and Operations

On the ground, the fight has been carried not by the Army — which, as a matter of settled policy, is not deployed against Indian citizens (its role limited to air support for evacuation, supply and medical aid) — but by a layered mix of central and State forces, each with a distinct role:

Force	Role
CRPF and CoBRA	The Central Reserve Police Force is the lead central force; its Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) is a specialised jungle-warfare and guerrilla-tactics unit.
Greyhounds	Andhra Pradesh’s elite, intelligence-led commando force — the model anti-Naxal unit, credited with clearing the State.
District Reserve Guard (DRG)	Chhattisgarh units raised largely from local tribal youth and surrendered cadres — unrivalled terrain and language knowledge; the spearhead of recent operations.
Bastariya Battalion	A CRPF battalion raised from local Bastar tribal youth to blend local knowledge into a central force.
Black Panther / Bastar Fighters	Newer specialised State commando and tribal-recruit units built to counter Maoist tactics on their own terrain.

These forces have been backed by hard infrastructure — a large network of fortified police stations pushing the State’s presence deep into former ‘liberated zones’ — and by a sequence of major operations:

• Operation Green Hunt (the large-scale deployment from 2010 that began shrinking the corridor), the SAMADHAN-Prahar offensives, and most recently Operation Kagar — the final, technology-and-intelligence-driven push into the Bastar–Gadchiroli–West Singhbhum core, whose very name means ‘the final edge’.

The Development and Governance Schemes

Running in parallel with the guns is a dense web of centrally-funded schemes, mostly sub-schemes of the umbrella ‘Modernisation of Police Forces’, designed to fund the security effort and refill the governance vacuum. The principal ones every aspirant should know:

Scheme	Purpose
Security Related Expenditure (SRE) Scheme	Reimburses affected States for operational and training costs, ex-gratia to victims’ families, and rehabilitation of surrendered cadres.
Special Central Assistance (SCA)	Fills critical gaps in public infrastructure and services of an emergent nature in the most-affected districts.
Special Infrastructure Scheme (SIS)	Funds fortified police stations and security-related infrastructure on States’ demand.
Assistance to Central Agencies for LWE Management (ACALWEM)	Strengthens central-agency infrastructure and meets helicopter hiring charges for anti-LWE operations.
Civic Action Programme (CAP) / ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’	Funds CAPFs to run welfare activities that put a human face on the forces; now shifted to an individual-and-family-oriented approach.
Media Plan	Counters Maoist propaganda through tribal youth exchanges, radio jingles, documentaries and pamphlets.

Connectivity and the Reach of the State

The Maoists always understood that a road is not just a road — it is the State arriving. That is why they attacked roads, towers and rail lines, and why connectivity became a weapon of counter-insurgency. The main instruments:

• Road connectivity — the Road Requirement Plan (RRP-I) and the follow-on Road Connectivity Project (RRP-II) have built thousands of kilometres of roads and bridges across the affected districts.
• LWE Mobile Tower Project — installation of thousands of mobile towers across two phases to end the communications blackout the movement relied on.
• Financial inclusion — a drive to expand bank branches, ATMs, banking correspondents and post offices so that welfare and wages reach people directly.
• Education and skilling — Eklavya Model Residential Schools for tribal children, and placement-linked skill schemes such as Roshani for tribal youth in the worst-affected districts.
• Aspirational Districts Programme — many LWE districts are covered by this focused development push, monitored for measurable improvement in health, education and livelihoods.

Surrender and Rehabilitation Policies

A purely military victory produces prisoners; a political victory produces defectors. Every affected State runs a surrender-and-rehabilitation policy offering cadres who lay down arms a package of cash incentives, vocational training, education, land or housing, and protection for their families.

These policies vary from State to State in generosity and design, and that variation is itself a weakness the movement exploits — pressure in a State with a strong policy can push cadres into a neighbour with a weaker one.

Done well, surrender policies are among the most cost-effective tools available, as the recent wave of surrenders shows; done carelessly, they invite fake surrenders and resentment.

Choking the Finance

Because the insurgency runs on an extortion economy, following and freezing the money became a front in its own right. State police raised dedicated anti-extortion and anti-money-laundering cells, while central agencies — chiefly the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) — investigated the levy networks, attached assets built from extorted funds, and prosecuted the overground workers who moved the cash.

Alongside this ran the legal front: bans on the CPI (Maoist) and its formations under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and action against front organisations, to dry up both the money and the recruitment pipeline.

The Andhra Model and the Chhattisgarh Experience

The single richest source of lessons is the contrast between the two States that mattered most. Andhra Pradesh authored the template for defeating the movement; Chhattisgarh became the place where the final, hardest battle was fought.

The Andhra Model — what worked	The Chhattisgarh Experience — why it was harder
An elite, intelligence-led force (the Greyhounds) with deep local-terrain knowledge and grassroots involvement.	The Bastar–Abujhmad heartland — denser, larger, less accessible forest than anywhere in Andhra; the movement’s true fortress.
A culture of police leadership, incentives for good work, and superior intelligence and coordination.	An early reliance on the counter-productive Salwa Judum, struck down by the courts, which set the effort back.
An effective surrender-and-rehabilitation policy plus infrastructure development.	Success ultimately came through locally-raised forces (DRG), fortified stations and sustained operations (Kagar) — the Andhra lessons adapted to harder ground.

The crucial caveat is the ‘squeezing-balloon’ problem: Andhra’s very success simply pushed the leadership across the border into Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Maharashtra.

The lesson that transfers is the method — intelligence-led operations, local forces, good surrender policy, police professionalism. The lesson that does not transfer automatically is durability: without synchronised, inter-State action and development following close behind the forces, a cleared area is only a displaced one.

Current Status (as of July 2026) — funding and operational figures

• SRE: about ₹3,260 crore released to the States between 2014-15 and 2024-25.
• SCA: about ₹3,900 crore released since 2017-18.
• ACALWEM: about ₹1,120 crore for helicopters and camp infrastructure over the same period.
• Fortification: more than 600 fortified police stations constructed in the affected States.
• Operations: in 2024, over 280 Maoists were neutralised and around 837 surrendered; Operation Kagar carried the offensive through 2025 into the Bastar core.

The 2026 Elimination Target

For the first time in the insurgency’s history, the State stopped speaking of containment and began speaking of elimination. This part of the section examines that declaration, the operations that gave it credibility, and — importantly for a balanced answer — the risks that make ‘victory’ a word to use with care.

The Declaration and What ‘Elimination’ Means

The Union Government set a firm public deadline: the complete elimination of Left-Wing Extremism by 31 March 2026. This was not rhetoric alone; it was backed by measurable targets — driving down the number of affected districts, incidents and deaths, and dismantling the leadership.

It is essential to be precise about what ‘elimination’ operationally means. It refers to the collapse of the movement’s organised armed violence and territorial control — the end of ‘liberated zones’, the parallel government and the capacity to mount large attacks.

It does not mean the automatic disappearance of the underlying Maoist ideology, the urban support networks, or the socio-economic grievances that first gave the movement its recruits. Conflating the two is the commonest error in weak answers.

Recent Operations and Leadership Attrition

What made the deadline credible was an unprecedented run of operational success, concentrated in the Bastar heartland under Operation Kagar, which deployed a very large force of central and State units around the movement’s last strongholds.

Two results stand out: a collapse in violence and a surge in surrenders, and — decisively — the near-total decapitation of the leadership, including the killing of a sitting General Secretary and the movement’s top military commander within a single year, as detailed in the treatment of the movement’s command structure.

With the top tier gone and cadres surrendering in their thousands, the organisational spine of the insurgency was, for practical purposes, broken.

Current Status (as of July 2026) — the endgame Following a security review after the 31 March 2026 deadline, the Ministry of Home Affairs stated that no district in the country now falls in the ‘LWE-affected’ category — the ‘most affected’ list having earlier been cut to just three (Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur, all in Chhattisgarh). Violence had fallen roughly 88% and deaths roughly 90% from their 2010 peak, and the affected-district count had dropped from about 126 (2013) to single digits. A balanced note: security forces are being retained in cleared areas precisely because the declaration marks the end of the armed movement, not the end of the conditions that produced it.

Risks — Residual Ideology, Urban Networks and the Conditions for Resurgence

History counsels humility. The movement was declared all but finished after the crackdown of the mid-1970s — and returned, more organised and more violent, within a few years. A movement built on the doctrine of protracted war is designed to survive defeat and wait.

The real risks now are three:

• Residual ideology: ideas do not die with cadres. As long as the Maoist worldview retains intellectual defenders, it can seed a future revival.
• Urban and front networks: the above-ground machinery of front organisations and sympathisers is harder to ‘eliminate’ than jungle camps, and can regroup, fundraise and recruit quietly.
• Unaddressed root causes: if the governance vacuum, land and forest grievances and development deficit that first bred the insurgency are not filled once the guns fall silent, the vacuum will simply invite the next movement — Maoist or otherwise.

The verdict, then, is that military elimination is necessary but not sufficient. Whether 2026 marks a genuine end or merely a lull depends entirely on what the State does after the shooting stops — which is the subject of the way forward.

Way Forward

Naxalism, it has rightly been said, is not the problem but the symptom of a problem. It has never flourished in the prosperous markets of Gujarat, the fields of Punjab or the IT parks of Hyderabad; it takes root where people are poor, aggrieved and unreached by the State.

The way forward, therefore, is less about defeating an enemy than about removing the enemy’s reason to exist.

Hold and Develop — Post-Conflict Reconstruction

The immediate task after clearance is to avoid the classic counter-insurgency trap of ‘clear but not hold’. Territory won by force must be held by a permanent State presence and then filled with development — the ‘hold-and-develop’ phase. This is where the underlying debate must be handled honestly:

• The Centre’s view: security must come first — roads, schools and clinics cannot be built, and staff cannot be posted, while the area is under the gun.
• The affected States’ counter-view: the movement would attract far fewer recruits if basic needs were met on a reasonable timeline, so development cannot simply wait indefinitely behind security.

The workable synthesis is sequencing, not choosing: security establishes the space, and development must follow immediately and visibly — using agencies such as the Border Roads Organisation for projects that contractors fear to touch, and putting a human face on the forces through Winning Hearts and Minds programmes. Security operations whose gains are not consolidated by development do not last.

The Political Process, Tribal Self-Governance and Mainstreaming

The deepest and most durable antidote to Naxalism is not a commando but a functioning democracy at the grassroots.

Three strands matter most:

• Deepening local democracy: genuinely empowered Panchayati Raj institutions break the movement’s monopoly on representing the poor — a lesson written in the recovery of once-Maoist blocks after regular panchayat elections restored a local political voice.
• Delivering on tribal rights: honest implementation of the safeguards for Scheduled Areas, self-governance in those areas, and community forest rights — answering the Jal-Jangal-Jameen grievance the movement lived on. The detailed instruments belong to the study of the tribal question and are only signposted here.
• Land reform and just rehabilitation: closing land-ceiling loopholes, securing tribal land titles, and ensuring fair, consent-based resettlement for those displaced by mining and industry.

Case Study — Democracy as the Antidote: the Sandesh Block (Bihar) Sandesh, a block in Bihar’s Bhojpur district, was once among the earliest seats of Naxal dominance. What broke that dominance was not primarily force but the restoration of Panchayati Raj elections. As villagers gained a genuine channel to voice grievances and choose their own leaders, the social distance between the community and the Maoists widened; social pressure pushed cadres to abandon the movement and return to farming. The block grew gradually free of violence. The lesson is exact: participative democracy is a counter-insurgency instrument — the change has to come from within the community, and the vote is what makes it possible.

A Multi-Layered Strategy — A Model-Answer Framework

Because examiners repeatedly ask for a multi-layered strategy to tackle Naxalism, it is worth carrying a ready framework. Treat Naxalism as a social, economic and developmental issue that manifests as a security threat, and answer on every layer at once:

Layer	Core measures
Security	Intelligence-led operations, local terrain-savvy forces, professional police dominance, inter-State coordination — but no Army against citizens, and no lawless vigilantism.
Development	Roads, power, water, mobile connectivity, health, education and livelihoods delivered fast on the heels of security.
Governance	Fill the administrative vacuum — functioning police stations, schools and clinics, honest and responsive local administration.
Rights & political process	Empowered Panchayati Raj, tribal-rights delivery, land reform, and mainstreaming through the ballot.
Perception	Persistent psychological operations and Winning Hearts and Minds to delegitimise the movement and rebuild trust.
Finance & law	Choke funding via NIA/ED and anti-extortion cells; time-bound conviction through criminal-justice reform; keep the door open to talks.
Rehabilitation	A generous, credible surrender-and-rehabilitation policy that protects cadres’ families and offers a real second life.

The single sentence to close any answer on this subject: the State must win the war without losing the peace — defeating the armed movement by lawful, intelligence-led means, while answering the genuine grievances of land, forest, livelihood and dignity that gave it life, so that the vacuum left by the gun is filled by the State and the vote, and not by the next insurgency.