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, 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 BJP government in Delhi had staked a public claim on the outcome. Through 2024 and 2025, Home Minister Amit Shah repeated the same deadline 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 declared 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.

It learnt from failures

The other 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 a document known as 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 put a stop to 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.

The two catalysts

Unlike in other regions, Dandakaranya had no landlords and no landless laborers. 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” – whose primary purpose was to harass anyone who had assisted the 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 translatable 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.

The exhaustion sets in

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.