The Naxalite Maoist movement is usually written in one of two registers. The first treats it as an insurgency: a security problem with a body count, a map of affected districts and a succession of operations, in which the movement appears as an armed organisation to be measured by the rifles it fields and the ambushes it mounts. The second treats it as an ideological history: a lineage of texts and splits running from Charu Mazumdar’s Eight Documents through a thicket of party acronyms, in which the movement appears as a doctrine arguing with itself across five decades. Both registers record real things, and both misplace the movement’s actual continuity. This article defends a third reading. The uprising at Naxalbari in May 1967 and the consolidation that formed the Communist Party of India (Maoist) on 21 September 2004 are the two load-bearing events of a single five-phase structure, and the five-phase framework captures what the insurgency framing and the ideological-history framing each leave out: the way each phase inherited an organisation, a geography and a theory of the Indian state from the phase before it, and bequeathed a changed version of all three to the phase after it. Read phase by phase, the movement’s violence, its fragmentation and its decline stop looking like separate stories. They become the record of one political formation passing through five distinct institutional conditions, and they test, at the hardest edge, the claim defended at this pillar’s opening: that Indian movements are best read as citizens renegotiating, by whatever means they choose, the terms on which the republic governs them.

Two Framings and a Third: Why the Naxalite Maoist Movement Has Five Phases

The five-phase map defended here can be stated compactly, and the article’s single table sets it out in citable form. The Five-Phase Map of the Naxalite Maoist Movement, 1967 to 2024, is the artifact around which the argument is built; every later section fills one of its rows.

Phase	Dates	Defining events	Organisation in command	Geography at its widest
One	1967	Naxalbari uprising of May 1967 in Darjeeling district	Siliguri group of the CPI(M), then the AICCCR	Naxalbari and the north Bengal tea belt
Two	1969 to 1972	CPI(ML) founded 22 April 1969; annihilation campaign; state suppression; Mazumdar dies in custody 28 July 1972	Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)	Calcutta, Srikakulam, Debra-Gopiballavpur, Mushahari
Three	1972 to 2004	Fragmentation into Liberation, Janashakti, People’s War Group and Maoist Communist Centre	Rival CPI(ML) factions and the MCC	Bihar plains, Andhra Pradesh forests and plains
Four	2004 to 2009	Merger of 21 September 2004 forms the CPI (Maoist); Red Corridor at its widest	Communist Party of India (Maoist) under Ganapathy	Some 180 to 220 districts by official counts, Dandakaranya as base
Five	2009 onward	Operation Green Hunt from late 2009; Salwa Judum struck down 2011; sustained contraction after 2014	CPI (Maoist) under Ganapathy, then Basavaraj from 2018	Contracting to 38 most-affected districts by 2024, per the Home Ministry

The insurgency framing, whose fullest popular expression is the running chronicle maintained by the South Asia Terrorism Portal and the annual reporting of the Ministry of Home Affairs, has the virtue of precision about incidents and the defect of amnesia about structure. It can say how many died in a district in a year; it cannot say why the organisation that fought in that district in 2010 was the organisational grandchild of a party founded in Calcutta in 1969, or why its stronghold sat in forests that a rival faction had entered in the 1970s. The ideological-history framing, whose finest expression remains Sumanta Banerjee’s In the Wake of Naxalbari (1980), has the opposite virtue and defect: it renders the doctrine faithfully, argument by argument, and loses the terrain, the state and the dead. The five-phase reading keeps both sets of facts and adds the connective tissue. Its claim is adjudicable. If the phases were arbitrary slices, the boundaries between them would fall at round dates and change nothing. In fact every boundary in the map is an organisational event with documentary form: an uprising, a founding declaration, a death in custody, a merger deed, a court judgment and a coordinated offensive. The framework also operationalises the movements-as-citizen-renegotiation framework at the point of maximum stress, because no Indian movement has pressed a rival claim to govern territory harder, or for longer, than this one.

Phase One: Naxalbari, May 1967

The ground was prepared by law that did not arrive. West Bengal’s land reform statutes had promised ceilings on holdings and security for sharecroppers, yet across the Siliguri subdivision of Darjeeling district the jotedars, the substantial landholders of the north Bengal plain, retained benami land beyond the ceiling and evicted bargadars whose names the record rooms did not carry. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), in office from March 1967 as the senior partner of a United Front government, held the land revenue portfolio through Hare Krishna Konar, who pursued settlement of vested land through the courts and the administration. The Siliguri radicals drew the opposite conclusion from the same files: that the state would not deliver the land because the state, at village level, was the jotedar’s committee. Charu Mazumdar, a CPI(M) organiser from a Siliguri landholding family who had broken with the party line in a series of internal documents written between 1965 and 1967 and later collected as the Eight Documents, argued that India was a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, that its revolution would be agrarian and protracted, and that the peasantry, led by a revolutionary party, would encircle the cities from the countryside as Mao Zedong’s forces had done in China. Kanu Sanyal, the party’s peasant organiser in the subdivision, built the village committees that gave the argument hands. Jangal Santhal, president of the Siliguri Kishan Sabha and himself a Santhal Adivasi, carried it into the tribal settlements of the tea belt, where Rajbanshi and Adivasi sharecroppers faced eviction from land they had cleared and tilled for generations.

The sequence of May 1967 is documented, and its disputed points can be marked exactly. Through the spring, peasant squads seized benami land, harvested standing crops on disputed plots and resisted eviction parties. On 3 March 1967 peasants had seized a plot and its crop from a jotedar in the Naxalbari area; on 18 May the Siliguri Kishan Sabha declared for armed struggle to redistribute land to the landless. On 23 May 1967, a police party led by Inspector Sonam Wangdi, sent to arrest wanted peasant leaders, was ambushed by armed villagers; Wangdi was struck by arrows and killed, and two of his party were injured. Some accounts place the ambush on 24 May, and the one-day variance runs through the literature from Sumanta Banerjee’s account onward; the date of what followed is not in dispute. On 25 May 1967, at Prasadjote village near Naxalbari, police fired on a crowd of villagers, predominantly women and children gathered in the path of the arrest party. The official count and the movement’s count have never agreed; the names recorded in the standard accounts give ten dead, among them women and two children, and the firing at Prasadjote is the event from which the uprising takes its date and its moral charge in every later retelling, including the party histories of its enemies.

Why did the United Front government order police action against its own peasant base in 1967?

The United Front ministry, in office for eleven weeks, contained the contradiction entire: its land revenue minister was negotiating settlements on the seized land at the very moment its home department, held by Jyoti Basu of the same CPI(M), answered the killing of a police inspector with an arrest expedition that ended in the Prasadjote firing.

The ministry chose the state’s monopoly of force over its own programme, and the Siliguri group read the choice as proof of Mazumdar’s thesis.

The retaliation completed the phase’s political work. When the enlarged police expedition entered the villages after 25 May, peasants fled to the forests and the tea gardens; the CPI(M) central leadership disowned the rising, expelled the Siliguri group and directed its cadres to defend the ministry’s authority. Radio Peking, in an editorial of 28 June 1967 that Indian communists quoted for a generation, hailed a peal of spring thunder over India, and the phrase did double service: it certified the rising’s international lineage, and it terrified the Indian state into reading a district revolt as a Chinese beachhead. In November 1967 the expelled revolutionaries from seven states met in Calcutta and formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, the AICCCR, with Sushital Roy Chowdhury among its convenors. What had happened at Naxalbari was, by any military measure, small and swiftly contained: a few hundred peasants, one dead inspector, ten dead villagers, a few weeks of seizures. What it founded was the conviction, held with documentary seriousness by the men who built Phase Two, that the parliamentary road itself was the obstacle, and that a party built for protracted war could begin from a village of sharecroppers whom the republic’s land laws had failed in writing. The phase’s bequest was therefore not territory. It was a template: land as the revolutionary question, the village committee as the revolutionary instrument, and the state’s firing squad as the revolutionary certificate.

Phase Two: A Party Founded, 1969 to 1972

On 22 April 1969, Lenin’s ninety-ninth birthday, the AICCCR declared itself dissolved into a new party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and on 1 May 1969 Kanu Sanyal announced the founding to a mass meeting at the Shahid Minar maidan in Calcutta. Charu Mazumdar was elected general secretary of the central organising committee. The founding declaration and the party programme adopted the Eight Documents as the party’s ideological foundation: India as a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society; the stage of revolution as new democratic; the path as protracted people’s war beginning in the countryside; the Chinese Communist Party’s line, as Mazumdar read it during the Sino-Soviet dispute, as the international reference; and elections as a fraud to be boycotted absolutely, a boycott carried so far that the party treated participation in any mass organisation tainted by legality as revisionism. The documents were written between January 1965 and 1967 as internal polemics against the CPI(M) leadership, and their afterlife as scripture is the phase’s first paradox: texts composed to win an argument inside one party became the constitution of another, quoted in squad camps four decades later by cadres who had never seen Calcutta.

The practice the documents authorised was annihilation. Mazumdar’s writings of 1969 and 1970, carried in the party organs Liberation and Deshabrati, held that the annihilation of class enemies was the highest form of class struggle, that a cadre who had not shed the blood of a class enemy remained bound by feudal and bourgeois ideas, and that guerrilla squads striking individual jotedars, moneylenders, police informers and later policemen, teachers and rival leftists would ignite the countryside in sequence. The squads did strike. In the Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh, where Girijan tribals led by Vempatapu Satyanarayana and Adibhatla Kailasam had risen under communist leadership from late 1967, the annihilation campaign and the police answer consumed the movement’s best organisers within three years; both leaders were killed by police in July 1970, in encounters their party recorded as martyrdom and the state recorded as operations. In Debra and Gopiballavpur in West Bengal’s Midnapore district, and at Mushahari in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district, peasant squads seized land and killed landlords through 1969 and 1970. In Calcutta the campaign turned inward on the city itself: from 1970 the party’s student squads attacked police pickets, smashed statues of nineteenth-century reformers, and killed traffic constables and alleged informers in lanes across the metropolis, a turn that Mazumdar defended against Kanu Sanyal’s own documented misgivings about the line’s distance from peasant mass work.

What was Operation Steeplechase, and what did it end?

Operation Steeplechase, mounted in July 1971 across the border districts of West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, was the first time the Indian state answered the movement at army scale, with regular troops cordoning the countryside in support of police and paramilitary columns.

It broke the rural squads’ freedom of movement in the movement’s oldest zones, drove the surviving cadres into the cities and the forests, and gave the state a template of joint operations it would reach for in every later phase.

The state’s answer had in fact begun earlier and ran on several tracks at once. Indira Gandhi’s Congress, its central populism constructed through bank nationalisation and the mandate politics of 1969 to 1971, held the Centre throughout, and Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s Congress ministry, installed in West Bengal in March 1972, inherited a counter-offensive already under way under President’s rule: joint raids, encounter killings whose official versions the civil liberties groups of Calcutta documented and disputed case by case, and mass arrests under the preventive detention statutes. Between the Calcutta killings and the rural cordons, the CPI(ML) lost its second line almost entire. The party also consumed itself. Satyanarayan Singh, a central committee member from Bihar, revolted against the annihilation line and Mazumdar’s authority in 1971 and was expelled, carrying a provisional committee into the split that prefigured Phase Three. On 16 July 1972 police arrested Charu Mazumdar in a Calcutta hideout. On 28 July 1972, twelve days later, he died in the lockup of the Lal Bazar police headquarters; the official cause was heart failure in a man already ill with asthma and cardiac disease, the party’s charge was deliberate medical neglect amounting to killing, and the dispute over those twelve days has never closed, because the state published no inquiry that its critics were required to accept. Phase Two closed with the party’s founder dead in custody, its squads destroyed or scattered, its doctrine intact on paper and its organisation in pieces. The bequest to Phase Three was precisely that split inheritance: a canon of texts claiming a single line, and a dozen committees each claiming to be the canon’s heir.

Phase Three: Fragmentation and the Two Survivals, 1972 to 2004

The fragmentation that followed was not a decline into noise. It was a sorting. The committees that survived the 1970s did so by repudiating, in practice, one or more articles of the founding faith, and the three formations that matter for the movement’s later history each preserved a different fragment of Mazumdar’s inheritance. The CPI(ML) Liberation line began in July 1974, when Subrata Dutt, known in the underground as Jauhar, reorganised a central committee in the Bihar plains and argued, against the annihilation doctrine, for mass peasant organisation and open fronts alongside armed squads. Jauhar was killed by police in November 1975. Vinod Mishra, who led Liberation from 1975 until his death in 1998, carried the argument to its conclusion: through the Indian People’s Front, founded in 1982 as an open political platform, Liberation contested elections, and in 1989 its candidate Rameshwar Prasad won the Arrah Lok Sabha seat in Bihar, the first parliamentary victory of any Naxalite formation. Bela Bhatia’s ethnography of the movement in central Bihar, published in 2005 after fieldwork in Jehanabad district, records what that dual existence looked like at ground level: peasant associations fighting landlords over wages and dignity in daylight, armed squads behind them at night, and a state whose local officers treated the whole structure as a single enemy. Liberation’s trajectory is the phase’s standing rebuke to the founding boycott, and its standing complication for any account that treats the parliamentary road and the armed road as alternatives the movement voted on once.

Why did CPI(ML) Liberation’s turn to elections divide the movement for a generation?

Liberation’s leaders argued from the Bihar record that annihilation had delivered the peasantry to the landlords’ private armies and the police, and that mass organisation, including electoral contests, was the only road back to the villages. The boycott’s defenders answered that legality was the CPI(M)’s road repeated.

Every concession to legality, in the boycott parties’ documents, was the first step on the road to ministerial office and police firings on peasants; each side quoted Mazumdar’s Eight Documents against the other, and the quarrel structured the movement’s internal polemics for thirty years.

The second survival kept the boycott and rebuilt the gun. In Andhra Pradesh the Andhra Pradesh Revolutionary Communist Committee tradition and the repression that followed the Srikakulam defeat produced, on 22 April 1980, the founding of the CPI(ML) People’s War Group by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, a schoolteacher turned organiser who had been expelled from the CPI(ML) constellation a decade earlier. The People’s War Group, universally the PWG, rejected annihilation of individuals as a strategy while retaining protracted war as the path; it built peasant and student fronts in the Telangana plains, taxed contractors and landlords in the north Telangana forests, and by the late 1980s fielded squads across the Andhra forests that the state answered with a specialised instrument examined in Phase Five. Seetharamaiah was arrested in Bombay in 1993 and withdrew from active leadership, and the party he founded passed to a second generation. In January 1998 the PWG merged with the Party Unity organisation of Bihar to form the CPI(ML) People’s War, extending its structure from Andhra into the Bihar and Jharkhand plains. A third Andhra formation, the CPI(ML) Janashakti, was assembled in 1992 from seven smaller groups and held a smaller territory in the same districts; its existence inside the same geography as the PWG, and its later partial mergers, mark the phase’s texture of permanent negotiation among armed cousins.

The third survival was the oldest and the least visible. Kanai Chatterjee and Amulya Sen, Bengal organisers who had stood apart from the CPI(ML) in 1969 over the method of party building, had formed their Dakshin Desh group in the 1960s; the group’s own history, published at the 2004 merger, dates its adoption of the name Maoist Communist Centre to 20 October 1969, while the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s record dates the existence of Dakshin Desh from that day and the renaming to 1975. The discrepancy is small and instructive: even the movement’s birthdays are argued from competing archives. What is not disputed is the MCC’s trajectory. Working from Bengal into Bihar’s coal and mica belt, Chatterjee’s organisation built, through the 1970s and 1980s, a peasant base in the districts south of the Ganga, waged war on the landlords’ senas of central Bihar from a position independent of both Liberation and the PWG, and survived Chatterjee’s death in 1982 and its own splits, including the departure of Ramadhar Singh’s faction, to emerge by the 1990s as the second armed pole of Indian Maoism. The correspondence and polemics between Seetharamaiah’s and Chatterjee’s organisations across the fragmentation decades, partly preserved in party archives and partly destroyed in police actions, argued the questions the 2004 merger would have to settle: the weight of mass work against squad action, the timing of a people’s army, and the character of the Indian state. Phase Three’s bequest was thus a map of two armed survivals facing each other across the Bihar and Andhra divide, plus one parliamentary survival proving daily that exit from the armed road was possible, at the price the other two refused to pay.

Phase Four: The 2004 Merger and the Red Corridor

On 21 September 2004, four months after the post-2004 UPA mandate had brought a Congress-led coalition to office in Delhi, the CPI(ML) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India announced their merger into a single Communist Party of India (Maoist). The joint declaration, issued in the names of the two general secretaries and circulated to the press within days, presented the union as the recovery of a unity broken since 1969: one party, one line of protracted people’s war, one army. Mupalla Laxmana Rao, known as Ganapathy, the People’s War general secretary who had led his organisation since the early 1990s after Seetharamaiah’s arrest and retirement, became general secretary of the merged party; the MCC’s military experience in Bihar and the PWG’s structures in Andhra and Dandakaranya were folded into a single central committee and a single military commission. The People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, constituted on 2 December 2000 out of the People’s War Group’s guerrilla squads and renamed at the merger, became the party’s armed wing in form as it already was in fact, organised in platoons and companies with a central military commission above the state committees. A unity congress in early 2007, held in the forests along the Bihar and Jharkhand border and known in party literature as the ninth congress, ratified the merger’s programme and elected the leadership that would conduct the war’s most violent years.

The merger’s geography is the fact the phase is named for. The Red Corridor was a journalistic and official shorthand for the arc of districts running from the Nepal border through Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district, Andhra Pradesh and into Karnataka at its widest telling, within which the merged party claimed presence, taxed commerce, ran jan adalats, people’s courts whose punishments ranged from fines to execution, and contested the state’s writ village by village. The counts require the attribution discipline this article has kept throughout. At the peak years around 2009 and 2010, statements by the Ministry of Home Affairs and its ministers placed Maoist violence or presence across a range of some 180 to 220 districts depending on whether the measure was districts reporting incidents, districts with party presence, or districts under some degree of influence; the districts of serious, sustained Maoist control were always far fewer, and the party’s own documents claimed a smaller and deeper map centred on the forest belt of Dandakaranya, the region spanning the Abujhmad hills of Chhattisgarh, Gadchiroli and the Odisha border country. Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun (2008), a travel account through this geography written before the merger’s consequences had fully unfolded, records the texture that the district counts flatten: government schools occupied or abandoned, contractors paying for permission to build roads, health workers absent, and the party’s committees performing the functions of a state for populations the republic reached mainly as police.

What made Dandakaranya, rather than the Bihar plains, the merged party’s durable base?

The Bihar plains offered no depth: dense settlement, landlord armies, and roads the police could flood within hours. Dandakaranya offered forest canopy, inter-state seams across five states, a mining economy to tax, and Adivasi grievances against forest law and displacement that the party’s committees could organise for decades.

The plains had carried the movement since Mushahari, yet the merged party’s central leadership, its training camps and its 2007 unity congress all sat inside the forest depth the plains could not give it.

The phase’s violence crested with the base. The years 2006 to 2010 were the deadliest of the entire insurgency on every count the record offers, and the two archives this article has used throughout, the Ministry of Home Affairs annual reports and the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s fatality database, agree on the shape if not every digit: deaths rose past a thousand a year, with the Portal’s count for 2010 standing at 1,180 fatalities, the highest annual figure in its series. The incidents that fixed the phase in public memory were attacks on the state’s armed presence at scale. In March 2007 Maoist cadres overran a police post at Rani Bodli in Chhattisgarh, killing 55 policemen and special police officers. In February 2008 a combined force crossed into Odisha and attacked the Nayagarh district armoury and police stations, killing 15 and carrying away more than a thousand weapons. In October 2009 a patrol of the Maharashtra police was ambushed in Gadchiroli’s Laheri forest and 17 policemen were killed. Each attack was a military fact and a political argument: the party presented them as proof that a people’s army existed, and the state answered in the vocabulary of Phase Five. It matters to the adjudication that the same years carried the movement’s deepest penetration of the state’s own claimed constituency, the Adivasi belt, and also the beginnings of the argument inside the republic about whether the war in the forest was a security problem at all, an argument the next phase would conduct in courtrooms and cabinet rooms as much as in the field. Phase Four’s bequest was scale: a single party holding a corridor on the map of India, an army in embryo, and a casualty ledger heavy enough to force the republic to decide, in public, what the movement was.

Phase Five: Green Hunt, the Courts and the Long Contraction, 2009 Onward

The state’s formulation came first, and it came from the top. In April 2006, addressing a standing committee of chief ministers of the affected states, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described left-wing extremism as the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country, a phrase he repeated in stronger registers in later years, including his 2009 description of the Maoists as the gravest internal security threat India faced. The formulation mattered because it licensed scale: a challenge described as the largest of its kind could be answered with the largest instruments the republic possessed short of the army in its war role. Through 2009 the Union home ministry under P. Chidambaram assembled those instruments: some seventy thousand additional central paramilitary personnel sanctioned for the affected states, a dedicated force raised within the Central Reserve Police Force under the name CoBRA, the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action, whose first battalions were deployed from 2008, and a plan for coordinated operations across the inter-state seams that the party had exploited since the 1970s. The offensive that began in late 2009 across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh was never formally christened by the government that launched it. Journalists named it Operation Green Hunt, the home minister denied that any operation of that name existed, and the name survived the denial, which is why it stands in this article’s table and its seeds as the phase’s common title: the record of the state’s campaign is filed, even by the state, under a name the state disowned.

The campaign’s template had been built two decades earlier in a single state. The Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh, raised in 1989 under the police officer K.S. Vyas, who founded and trained the force and was assassinated by the People’s War Group in Hyderabad in January 1993, were a small, jungle-trained commando establishment that fought the PWG squad by squad inside its own forests, backed by an intelligence apparatus and a surrender and rehabilitation policy that drained the party’s Andhra leadership through the 1990s. By the middle of the following decade Andhra Pradesh, the PWG’s founding state, had been largely cleared of the party’s armed presence, and the model of specialised state forces, surrender economics and intelligence-led small-unit operations became the doctrine the Union pressed on Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Researchers and state officials who open the Home Ministry’s district-wise tables to test that doctrine’s spread usually meet them as dense spreadsheet files, the kind read through an office file viewer rather than in print, and the tables tell the model’s story in the state’s own units: districts entering and leaving the security-related expenditure scheme year by year as the geography contracted.

Was Operation Green Hunt an official operation, and when did it begin?

No document of the Government of India announces an operation of that name. The phrase entered print in 2009 as journalists described coordinated offensives being prepared across the Maoist-affected states, and Home Minister P. Chidambaram stated in Parliament and to the press that no operation called Green Hunt existed.

The Centre, he said, was assisting state police forces. The coordinated deployments themselves began in earnest in November 2009, and the denied name became the campaign’s universal label.

The offensive’s first year was also the war’s bloodiest, and its central event fixed the phase’s moral geometry for both sides. On 6 April 2010, in the Mukrana forest near Chintalnar in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district, a company of the Central Reserve Police Force returning from an area domination exercise was ambushed in strength; 75 CRPF men and a Chhattisgarh police constable were killed, the heaviest single loss the state’s forces suffered in the entire insurgency. The party’s statements claimed the ambush as a victory of the people’s army; the inquiry that followed, conducted by the retired Border Security Force director general E.N. Rammohan, recorded a patrol that had departed from its own standing instructions and a command structure that failed it. Three years later, on 25 May 2013, the party struck the political class directly: an ambush in the Jhiram valley of Sukma district on a Congress party convoy returning from a rally killed more than two dozen people, among them the Chhattisgarh Congress president Nand Kishore Patel, the former minister Mahendra Karma and the veteran leader Vidya Charan Shukla, who died of his wounds in June. Karma’s presence in the convoy bound the phase’s two halves together, for it was Karma who, in June 2005, had founded the Salwa Judum, the state-backed vigilante mobilisation that armed Adivasi villagers as special police officers and emptied hundreds of villages into roadside camps in the name of denying the Maoists the population. The Judum’s record, documented by the National Human Rights Commission’s inquiry of 2008, by Human Rights Watch and by the petitioners who carried the matter to the Supreme Court, included killings, arson and sexual violence by its cadres alongside genuine popular anger against Maoist taxation and conscription; both halves of that record belong in any honest account, and the Court’s judgment addressed the structure rather than choosing between the halves.

On 5 July 2011 a bench of the Supreme Court of India, Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar, delivered judgment in Nandini Sundar v State of Chhattisgarh and struck the structure down. The Court ordered the state to cease using tribal youth as special police officers in counter-Maoist roles, to disarm those already appointed, to recall the firearms issued to them and to investigate the criminal acts alleged against them; the appointment of barely literate village youth, armed after days of training and set against an insurgency, was held to violate Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, and the judgment’s reasoning ranged beyond the pleadings into a critique of a development model that, in the bench’s language, treated the dispossession of tribal India as the price of growth. The judgment is one of the four primary texts on which this article stands, because it is the moment the republic’s own constitutional machinery ruled, in terms, that the manner of the state’s war was itself unconstitutional, and it is the clearest instance in the phase of the basic-structure constitutional tradition reaching into a forest war. The state complied in form, dissolving the special police officer system in Chhattisgarh, and argued in its turn that the judgment had tied the hands of lawful authority before an unlawful army. Both positions stand in the record at full strength, and the article’s adjudication section takes them up together.

The contraction that defines the phase’s second half is measurable in the state’s own series, and the attribution discipline matters more here than anywhere, because decline is the claim every party to the argument wishes to prove. The Ministry of Home Affairs annual reports record left-wing extremist incidents falling from 2,258 in 2009 to a few hundred a year by the early 2020s, and deaths falling from the 2010 peak to double figures in some recent years. The South Asia Terrorism Portal’s database, compiled from press and official reporting, gives the same descent with its own totals, including the 1,180 fatalities of 2010 against figures below one hundred in the weakest recent years. By the measure the brief directs this article to use, the Ministry’s count of affected districts moved from approximately 200 at the turn of the decade’s peak to approximately 38 in the most affected category in 2024, with the security-related expenditure scheme covering a wider but shrinking ring beyond them. The party’s losses in the field matched the geography. Cherukuri Rajkumar, called Azad, the party’s spokesperson and politburo member, was killed by Andhra Pradesh police in the Adilabad forests on 1 July 2010 in an encounter the party and civil liberties organisations described as a staged execution of a man engaged in exploring a ceasefire, and the state described as a genuine firefight; the dispute is part of the record and is marked as disputed here. Mallojula Koteswara Rao, called Kishenji, the politburo member who had led the party’s West Bengal resurgence through the Lalgarh mobilisation of 2008 and 2009, was killed by joint forces in Burishole forest in November 2011, in circumstances his party likewise contested. Kobad Ghandy, the politburo member responsible for the party’s urban and international work, had been arrested in Delhi in September 2009 and spent a decade in prison before acquittals and bail closed most of the cases against him. Ganapathy, ageing and in poor health by the party’s own later statements, gave way in November 2018 to Nambala Keshava Rao, called Basavaraj, the chief of the central military commission, as general secretary, a succession the party announced and the security establishment confirmed from its own intercepts; the party’s founding generation, the men of 1969, had by then entirely left the field, Mazumdar dead in custody in 1972, Sanyal dead by his own hand in 2007 after years of public distance from the party he had announced, Seetharamaiah dead in 2002, Chatterjee in 1982.

The state’s doctrine in the contraction years paired the security grid with an administrative claim. From 2017 the home ministry of the Modi era’s government, under Rajnath Singh, publicised its approach under the acronym SAMADHAN, an eight-part doctrine of smart leadership, aggressive strategy, motivation, actionable intelligence, dashboard monitoring, harnessing technology, action plans and no access to financing; the acronym’s ingenuity was noted by its critics, and its content was the Andhra doctrine generalised, intelligence-led operations by specialised forces, road and mobile tower construction inside the corridor, and surrender policies that the Ministry credited with thousands of cadres leaving the party across the decade. The Maoist reply, in the party’s statements and in the record of its actions, held that the contraction was a strategic retreat rather than a defeat, and the party continued to mount attacks that demonstrated residual capacity at the highest level of violence: the April 2017 ambush at Burkapal in Sukma district, which killed 25 CRPF men, and the April 2021 encounter at Tekulguda on the Bijapur and Sukma border, in which 22 security personnel and a number of Maoist cadres were killed in a battle both sides described in incompatible terms. Those events fall inside the brief’s mandated scope for this phase and are recorded here as the record carries them: the contraction is real in every official and independent series, and it is a contraction of a war that continued, not a peace that arrived. Phase Five’s bequest to any successor phase is an organisation reduced to its Dandakaranya core and fragments in the Jharkhand and Bihar forests, a state doctrine proven in the field and contested in the courts, and a question the adjudication must face directly: whether a framework of phases explains a trajectory that the war’s own participants describe in the simpler words of victory and betrayal.

The Argument About the War: Security, Development and the Constitution

No phase of the movement can be read without the republic’s argument with itself, and Phase Five brought that argument to its sharpest form. The state’s case, stated at its strongest by its own senior holders, runs as follows. The CPI (Maoist) is an armed organisation that murders civilians it designates as informers, executes prisoners in jan adalats, destroys schools, railway lines and mobile towers, extorts the contractors who build the roads its own constituency needs, and recruits minors into armed squads; a constitutional republic cannot subcontract its monopoly of force in any district, and the development the forest belt lacks cannot be delivered until the state’s personnel can enter it alive. Home Minister P. Chidambaram carried this case into print and Parliament through 2009 and 2010, coupling it to an offer, repeated on the record, of talks within seventy-two hours of the party abjuring violence. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s formulation of the movement as the single biggest internal security challenge supplied the case’s strategic frame, and the security establishment’s scholars added its operational corollary, that the Andhra experience proved the war winnable by specialised forces and intelligence rather than by negotiation with an organisation whose programme, printed in its own documents, is the seizure of state power.

The critics’ case, stated at its strongest by its own holders, answers on three levels. At the level of origins, the Planning Commission’s expert group report of 2008, Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, an official document commissioned by the republic itself, located the movement’s roots in land alienation, the non-implementation of the Fifth Schedule and the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996, forest laws that criminalised Adivasi subsistence, and displacement by mining and industry, and it described the state’s response as heavily security-centred and its development delivery as captured. At the level of the war’s conduct, the civil liberties tradition running from the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee through the People’s Union for Civil Liberties documented encounter killings, village burnings during the Salwa Judum years and the use of draconian statutes against unarmed sympathisers; the prosecution of Dr Binayak Sen, the Chhattisgarh physician and civil liberties activist arrested in 2007, convicted of sedition by a Raipur sessions court in December 2010 and released on bail by the Supreme Court in April 2011 with observations sharply critical of the evidence, became the case through which much of urban India met the war. At the level of political economy, Arundhati Roy’s essay Walking with the Comrades (2010), written after weeks inside Dandakaranya with a Maoist platoon, presented the party as the armed resistance of the dispossessed to a mining frontier, a presentation the party’s critics within the left answered in print, among them scholars who held the essay’s romance blind to the party’s own coercions. Nandini Sundar, the Delhi sociologist whose petition produced the 2011 judgment, assembled the scholarly case in The Burning Forest (2016): that the war’s deepest damage was done to the Adivasi society in whose name both sides claimed to fight. The movement’s own documents complete the triangle of cases: the CPI (Maoist) programme and its 2004 merger declaration hold that the Indian state is the instrument of imperialism, feudalism and comprador capital, that its elections are a fraud on the exploited, and that protracted people’s war is the only road the ruling classes have left open, a claim the party supports from the record of Naxalbari itself, where a constitutional government fired on the peasants its own land reforms had promised relief.

The adjudication this article owes its readers is not a verdict between these cases in the round; it is a verdict on what the five-phase framework explains that the rival framings do not. Weighed in the synthesis below, the cases matter here as evidence about the phases themselves. The state’s case is strongest exactly where the framework predicts: the movement’s violence was never a metaphor, and phases two and four, the annihilation campaign and the corridor’s crest, show an organisation whose theory licensed the killing of named individuals as politics. The critics’ case is strongest where the framework also predicts: each phase of the movement’s growth follows a documented failure of the republic’s own instruments, land reform in 1967, the Fifth Schedule across the corridor decades, the constitutional limits of counter-insurgency in 2011. A framing that cannot hold both halves of that sentence is not an explanation of the movement. It is a side in the argument the movement created.

The Movement’s Reckonings: Lalgarh, the Cities and the Argument Inside

The movement conducted its own argument about its phases, in documents its enemies rarely quote whole, and the argument’s turning points belong in the record. The West Bengal resurgence of 2008 and 2009 is the fullest test. In November 2008, after a Maoist landmine attack on the convoy of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee near Salboni, police raids across the Lalgarh area of West Midnapore arrested and, on the documented record of the movement that followed, beat and humiliated villagers including schoolchildren and elderly women. The villages answered by forming the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities, cutting roads, felling trees across them and expelling the police from a wide area for months, a mobilisation in which the CPI (Maoist), through Kishenji’s open telephone contact with journalists, claimed a guiding role it presented as the mass line restored. Lalgarh mattered to the party’s self-understanding because it appeared to reverse Phase Three’s verdict: here was an urban-adjacent mass uprising, led in public, against police repression rather than for land alone. It mattered to the state’s understanding because the joint forces that retook the area in June 2009 met an administration vacuum that the Left Front government of thirty-two years had left behind its own party offices. And it mattered to the adjudication because its end was written by neither: the Trinamool Congress victory of 2011 re-routed the grievance into electoral politics, Kishenji was dead within the year, and the party’s Bengal structure never recovered the ground the committee had held. The episode is the movement’s own strongest evidence that mass politics could open doors its squads could not, and its enemies’ strongest evidence that the opening closed the moment a ballot offered the same villages a different instrument.

The urban argument ran parallel. The party’s documents from the 2004 merger onward assigned the cities a defined role in protracted war: supply, recruitment, publicity and the building of front organisations among workers, students and intellectuals. The state’s urban case, stated in charge sheets from the Delhi arrests of 2009 through the Elgar Parishad prosecutions that began in 2018, held that the party’s urban network directed and financed the forest war and that its front organisations were indistinguishable from the party itself. The accused in those cases, among them academics, lawyers and poets, denied the charges in court and in print; several were held for years under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act before bail or acquittal, and the poet Varavara Rao’s long imprisonment and the death in custody in July 2021 of the eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, arrested in the same case and repeatedly denied bail on medical grounds, became the facts through which the urban argument was judged by audiences far from the forest. Stan Swamy’s death falls within the brief’s mandated scope for this article and is recorded as the record carries it: an undertrial prisoner, charged and never tried, who died in a Mumbai hospital while his bail application was pending. The party’s own assessment literature, captured and published in part by the security establishment it fought, conceded from the middle of the contraction decade that recruitment had thinned, that the urban network’s losses exceeded its gains, and that the correlation of forces its 2007 congress had projected had not arrived. A movement that began by declaring the republic’s elections a fraud ended its fifth decade negotiating, in its internal documents, the consequences of the fraud’s popularity.

Land, Forest and Law: The Substrate of Every Phase

Beneath the phases runs a substrate that explains why the map of the movement and the map of India’s mineral forest are the same map. The corridor districts sit on the republic’s richest deposits of iron ore, coal, bauxite and manganese, and under its oldest unresolved land question: the Adivasi belt was promised, by Schedule Five of the Constitution and by the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996, a measure of self-governance and protection against land alienation that the record of mining leases, police camps and displaced villages shows delivered in fragments. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, recognising individual and community rights over forest land and produce, was the republic’s largest single attempt to rewrite that record in law; its implementation across the corridor, measured in claims recognised and rejected in the Home Ministry’s and Tribal Affairs Ministry’s own reporting, remained partial through the contraction years, and the Maoist squads taxed the tendu leaf and bamboo trade that the Act’s community rights were designed to return to the villages. When, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s direction in the Niyamgiri matter put the question of a bauxite mine to the gram sabhas of the Dongria Khond in Odisha and every village voted against the mine, the episode demonstrated the instrument the substrate argument claims the corridor was denied: a lawful forum in which refusal counted. The mining agreements signed across Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in the boom years after 2004, as the economic-policy-as-politics framework of the reform decades reached the forest as lease and mine, including steel and power projects of the Tata and Essar groups in districts the party taxed or contested, gave the critics’ political economy its documentary spine, and gave the party its recruiting sentence, that the republic arrived in the forest as a lease, a camp and a mine, in that order. The five-phase framework does not require the reader to accept that sentence. It requires the reader to notice that the movement’s geography tracked the substrate for fifty years, through five organisations and four doctrines, and that neither the insurgency framing, which treats geography as terrain, nor the ideological-history framing, which treats it as a stage for texts, has an account of why the war stayed where the minerals and the unimplemented schedules were.

The Republic the Party Built: Committees, Courts and Taxes

The five phases were not only a war. In the territory it held longest, the party built the apparatus of a rival governance, and the apparatus is evidence in the adjudication because it is what the citizen-renegotiation framework, applied at its hardest edge, actually confronted. In Dandakaranya the party’s documents describe a structure of revolutionary people’s committees at village level, area and divisional committees above them, and from the early 2000s a claimed janatana sarkar, a people’s government for the region, administering through departments the collection of taxes from contractors, traders and tendu leaf merchants, the running of jan adalats, the organisation of agricultural cooperatives and the recruitment of the militia that guarded the whole. The Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan, the party’s women’s organisation founded in 1986, claimed a membership in the tens of thousands across the forest belt, and women constituted a large share of the PLGA’s fighting strength, a share the party’s literature placed at a third or more and that journalists who travelled in Dandakaranya, Sudeep Chakravarti among them, reported from the squads they met. The jan adalat is the institution on which judgment of the whole apparatus turns, because it performed both halves of the movement’s record in a single sitting: villagers brought disputes over land, wages, marriage and debt to forums that settled them in hours where the republic’s courts had settled nothing in decades, and the same forums sentenced designated informers and class enemies to beatings and death, punishments recorded by the state’s charge sheets, by the party’s own claims of revolutionary justice, and by the testimony collected in the civil liberties reports of the Salwa Judum years. Bela Bhatia’s fieldwork in central Bihar caught the duality a decade earlier and a region away: the peasant who praised the squad for the wage it had won him and feared it for the levy it demanded were, in her account, frequently the same man in the same week. The citizens inside the corridor were not renegotiating with one state. They were renegotiating with two, each armed, each taxing, each punishing, and the five-phase framework earns its place by treating that doubled sovereignty, phase by phase, as the movement’s central political fact rather than as colour around a body count.

Counting the War: What the Fatality Series Can and Cannot Show

Because both the insurgency framing and the state’s decline claim rest on numbers, the numbers deserve a section of their own. The two running series, the Ministry of Home Affairs tables laid before Parliament and the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s database, draw on overlapping official and press reporting, and they diverge in instructive places: totals for individual years differ by tens, the classification of the dead into civilians, security forces and Maoists follows the reporting of the forces engaged, and the category of the civilian dead in forest operations is the most contested number in Indian public life. The Sarkeguda case is the documented instance. On the night of 28 June 2012, in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh, a CRPF and police operation fired on a gathering of villagers at Sarkeguda, killing 17 people, among them minors; the forces reported a Maoist encounter, the villagers and the opposition parties reported a festival gathering fired upon without provocation, and the judicial inquiry under Justice V.K. Agrawal, whose report was tabled in 2019, found no evidence that any of the dead were Maoists and recorded that the force’s account of incoming fire was unsupported. The case stands in this article for a discipline rather than a verdict on the war: every fatality figure in the preceding sections is attributed to its keeper, the Home Ministry or the Portal, and where the keepers disagree with a judicial finding, the finding is named. The same discipline governs the phase’s peak claims in reverse. The party’s own martyrs’ lists, published in its literature, run to thousands of names across the decades and cannot be reconciled line by line with either official series; the insurgency framing that treats the official series as the war’s whole truth, and the movement framing that treats its lists as beyond audit, both fail the test this article has applied to every holder, that a number is only as good as the record that carries it.

The Inheritance the First Phase Carried

Naxalbari had a genealogy, and Phase One’s actors knew it by heart. Between 1946 and 1951 the Communist Party of India had led the Telangana armed struggle in Hyderabad state, in which peasant squads redistributed land across some three thousand villages before the party, after the Indian army’s entry in 1948 and years of internal argument, withdrew the struggle in October 1951 in favour of the first general election. The withdrawal founded the Indian communist movement’s permanent question, whether the ballot had buried the revolution or saved it, and the question ran through the 1964 split that produced the CPI(M), through the CPI(M)’s own participation in the United Front ministries of 1967, and into Mazumdar’s Eight Documents, whose first charge against the leadership was precisely that it had repeated 1951 as a permanent condition. The foreign-policy frame of the founding decades supplied the second inheritance: the Sino-Soviet dispute gave the Siliguri group its international pole, and the Chinese Communist Party’s endorsement of Naxalbari, extended in print in June 1967, was withdrawn in practice within three years, when Chinese leaders told CPI(ML) representatives, on the party’s own later accounts, to abandon the annihilation line and the slogan that China’s chairman was theirs. The third inheritance was the state’s: the republic that faced the squads of 1969 had written its counter-insurgency grammar in Telangana, in the Naga hills and in Mizoram, and Operation Steeplechase was a sentence in a language the state already spoke. The five-phase framework begins at Naxalbari not because nothing preceded it, but because Naxalbari is where the three inheritances, the party that chose the gun over the ministry, the doctrine that named India semi-feudal, and the state that answered with cordons, were first bound into the single structure whose transformations the phases record.

Exit Routes: Surrenders, Prisons and the Released

A phase is also defined by how people leave it. The state’s surrender and rehabilitation policies, run by the affected states with central support, recorded surrenders in the thousands across the contraction decade on the Home Ministry’s figures, and the individual files behind those aggregates run from teenage militia members who walked into police camps in Sukma to senior cadres whose surrender press conferences the state staged as strategic events. The party’s documents treated surrender as betrayal purchased by the police, and the record contains documented cases on both sides of that claim: genuine disillusion recorded by journalists who interviewed surrendered cadres in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and civil liberties documentation of villagers presented as surrendered Maoists after arrest. The prison files mark the war’s other exit. Through the contraction years the jails of Bastar and Jharkhand held large populations of Adivasi undertrials charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, many held for years before acquittal; the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, founded in 2013 by lawyers including Sudha Bharadwaj to represent such prisoners, was itself driven out of Bastar in 2016 under police pressure its members documented and the state disputed, and Bharadwaj was arrested in 2018 in the Elgar Parishad case and released on bail in 2021. At the top of the movement the exits were narrower: Kobad Ghandy’s decade of prosecutions ended in acquittals and release, Kobad Ghandy having been convicted in one case in 2016 and acquitted on appeal in others; Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, arrested in 1993, withdrew into private life and died in 2002 without returning to the party he founded. The citizen-renegotiation framework is tested by these exits as by nothing else in the article, for they show the corridor’s inhabitants using every instrument the republic offered, petition, bail, surrender, the ballot that Liberation had pioneered, to renegotiate their own terms of life between two armed sovereignties, and they show both sovereignties punishing the negotiation when it was aimed at them.

The Corridor Measure by Measure

The Red Corridor’s measurements deserve one direct treatment, because the corridor is the phrase through which India pictures the war and the picture is assembled from unlike parts. The Home Ministry’s public counts across the decades answer at least three different questions: in how many districts was any Maoist incident reported in a year; in how many districts does the party maintain presence, taxation or committees; and how many districts qualify for the security-related expenditure scheme under which the Centre reimburses the states’ counter-insurgency spending. The first measure produced the widest peak figures, the statements of some 180 to 220 districts that this article used for Phase Four; the third is an administrative list, revised downward in successive notifications through the contraction years, and it is from that administrative family of measures that the figure of approximately 38 most affected districts in 2024, used in the phase table, is drawn. The party’s measures answer a fourth question, how much territory its own structure claims, and its documents have at every stage claimed less ground than the widest official counts and held it more deeply. The scholarly literature, from Bela Bhatia’s district ethnography to the essays collected around the 2008 Planning Commission report, adds the corrective that a district is an administrative fiction spread over thousands of villages in which the party might hold one valley and the state the road past it. The five-phase framework’s use of geography respects those distinctions: phases are bounded by organisational events, not by district totals, and the corridor enters the argument as the name of a depth of control in the forest belt, not as a count to be won or lost in a press release. Where the state’s decline claim rests on its narrowest administrative measure and the party’s survival claim rests on its deepest valley, both can be true at once, and the framework is the instrument that lets a reader hold them together without conceding either side’s arithmetic.

Adjudication: What the Five Phases Explain

The named disagreement this article was set to judge can be judged. The insurgency framing holds that the movement is a security phenomenon whose truth is in its incidents; the ideological-history framing holds that it is a doctrinal phenomenon whose truth is in its texts; the five-phase reading holds that it is an organisational phenomenon whose truth is in the sequence by which one formation inherited, transformed and bequeathed a doctrine, a geography and a theory of the state. On the primary evidence assembled here, the five-phase reading carries the adjudication, and the reasons can be stated as findings. First, the boundaries are documentary, not decorative: 25 May 1967, 22 April 1969, 28 July 1972, 21 September 2004 and the Green Hunt years each changed who commanded the movement, where it could stand and what it believed the Indian state to be, and no incident count or textual lineage marks those hinges as cleanly. Second, the reading explains persistence, which neither rival framing can do alone: the movement survived the annihilation of its founding party, the death of its founder in custody, the defection of its Bihar wing to the ballot box and the loss of its founding state, because what persisted was not a text or a tactic but a structure of village committees sitting on an unwritten land settlement, rebuilt by each phase’s survivors in the next phase’s form. Third, it explains decline without recourse to either side’s preferred single cause: the contraction after 2009 was the product of a specialised state doctrine proven in Andhra Pradesh a decade earlier, a constitutional judgment that removed the state’s most lawless instrument, the exhaustion of the party’s second generation of leadership, and the slow arrival, by road, tower and welfare office, of the republic the corridor had been promised, and the phases show these causes arriving in sequence rather than competing in the abstract.

The strongest counter to the reading was named at the outset, and it deserves its answer in full. The counter holds that the phases domesticate a war: that the movement operated through insurgency conditions, ambush, execution, cordon and encounter, which a framework of organisational periods risks converting into administrative furniture. The answer is in the record this article has kept. The five phases are not a euphemism laid over the violence; each phase is defined in part by its characteristic violence, the firing at Prasadjote and the annihilation line, the corridor’s thousand-death years, the Judum’s emptied villages and the Dantewada ambush, and the framework’s claim is precisely that the violence changed its form as the organisation changed its condition, which the incident ledger alone cannot show. Where the framework genuinely strains, this article concedes the strain. The phases are drawn from the movement’s commanding heights, and the corridor’s villagers enter them too often as the ground on which organisations acted; Bela Bhatia’s ethnography and the Sarkeguda inquiry record restore a scale at which the phases blur into a single continuous condition of being governed, taxed and suspected by turns. A framework that knows its own blind spot is not thereby refuted. It is thereby usable.

What remains is the claim with which the pillar began, tested at its limit. The movements of this pillar, from the JP movement’s total revolution to the Narmada valley’s satyagraha, were read at the pillar’s head as citizens renegotiating the republic’s terms, and the Naxalite Maoist movement is the case that refuses the reading’s comfort, because its renegotiation was conducted against the republic’s existence and at the price of its own constituency’s blood. The five phases show the refusal and the negotiation in the same frame. The movement’s founding charge was that the republic had broken its written promises on land; its fifty-year record is of promises contested by every means from the village committee to the ambush; and its contraction has proceeded, district by district in the Home Ministry’s own tables, in step with the republic’s instruments arriving in forms, roads, courts that struck down the Judum, inquiries that named Sarkeguda, that the corridor could use. The series closes, in its final article, with farmers at Delhi’s borders conducting a renegotiation by occupation and statute, the constitutional opposite of the forest war in method and its twin in structure: a constituency the republic’s laws had failed, assembled at the seat of power until the laws were withdrawn. Between Naxalbari’s ten dead villagers of May 1967 and that closing scene runs the whole argument of Indian movements as this pillar has defended it, that the republic is remade, phase by phase and movement by movement, by citizens who refuse the terms on which they are governed and compel the state to answer, in whatever register the refusal is made.

A Note on Sources: Reading a War in Four Archives

The evidence for this article comes from four archives that do not trust one another, and the five-phase reading is partly a method for using all four without surrendering to any. The first archive is the party’s own: the Eight Documents of 1965 to 1967, the founding declaration of 22 April 1969, the merger declaration of 21 September 2004, the programme and constitution adopted around the 2007 unity congress, and the statements, interviews and martyrs’ lists issued through the party’s spokespersons. This archive is precise about intention and unreliable about effect; it records what the movement willed, in language that hardened early and changed slowly, and its silences, on the annihilation campaign’s civilian dead and on the corridor’s coercions, are data of the same order as its claims. The second archive is the state’s: the Home Ministry’s annual reports and parliamentary answers, the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s incident database built from official and press reporting, the charge sheets and the inquiry reports, among them the Rammohan inquiry into Dantewada and the Agrawal commission’s findings on Sarkeguda, and the one judgment this article treats as a primary text, Nandini Sundar v State of Chhattisgarh of 5 July 2011. The state archive is precise about incidents it chooses to count and structurally silent about the ones that shame it, which is why its own judicial arm’s corrections carry such weight inside it. The third archive is the scholarship and reportage that stood between the two: Sumanta Banerjee’s In the Wake of Naxalbari, written in 1980 from inside the movement’s first decade and still the fullest account of Phase Two’s ideas in their moment; Bela Bhatia’s central Bihar ethnography of 2005, which remains the standard for how the movement actually governed and coerced at village level; Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun of 2008, the corridor travelled on foot at Phase Four’s crest; and the Planning Commission expert group’s report of the same year, an official text that reads like an indictment of the officials who commissioned it. The fourth archive is the counter-archive of the civil liberties movement: the fact-finding reports of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, the documentation assembled for the Nandini Sundar petition, and the testimony of the corridor’s own lawyers and doctors, whose cases the state answered in court and whose credibility the Supreme Court’s bail observations in the Binayak Sen matter partially restored. Where these archives agree, as they do on the dates of the founding, the merger and the judgment, this article states the fact plainly. Where they disagree, on the death of Charu Mazumdar, the killing of Azad, the authorship of village burnings in the Judum years, the article names the holders of each version and marks the point disputed, which is the evenhandedness the series charter requires and the only treatment a contested war can honestly receive.

The Comparative Mirror: Nepal and Peru

Two foreign mirrors test the five-phase reading by showing the roads India’s movement did not take. In Nepal, a Maoist party launched a people’s war in 1996 from grievances of land, caste and regional exclusion recognisably kin to the corridor’s, fought the state to a stalemate in a decade, and then did the thing the CPI (Maoist) programme forbids: it negotiated. The Comprehensive Peace Accord of November 2006 ended the war, the Maoists entered an interim government, won the largest share of seats in the Constituent Assembly election of April 2008, and their leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, called Prachanda, became prime minister of the republic his war had created. The Indian party’s documents received the Nepal outcome as a warning dressed as a victory, holding that the Nepali leadership had traded the revolution for office; Liberation’s tradition in India received it as the vindication of its 1980s argument, that a movement rooted in mass grievance could take its aims into electoral politics without surrendering them wholesale. The phases framework sides with neither reception and explains both: India’s movement had already run the Nepal experiment in miniature in Phase Three, in Bihar, and the half of the movement that watched Liberation win a Lok Sabha seat and remain a regional party drew the lesson that the ballot absorbs what it cannot defeat. In Peru, the mirror shows the opposite fate. Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path launched by Abimael Guzmán in 1980 on a doctrine of Gonzalo Thought as rigid in its way as the Eight Documents, terrorised the Peruvian state for a decade and collapsed within two years of Guzmán’s capture in September 1992, because the organisation had been built as the instrument of one man’s line. The CPI(ML) of Phase Two had been built the same way and died the same death in 1972, and the parties that survived Phase Three were precisely those that had distributed authority beyond a single founder’s charisma, Liberation into its mass fronts, the PWG and MCC into military commissions and state committees that outlived Seetharamaiah’s arrest and Chatterjee’s death. The merged party of Phase Four survived Ganapathy’s replacement in 2018 without a tremor in its structure, a fact the Peruvian mirror makes legible: India’s Maoism outlasted its founders because its third phase, the fragmentation its historians treat as failure, was in truth the selection process that replaced a prophet with an institution. The insurgency framing cannot see that selection, because it counts only the war; the ideological framing cannot see it, because it reads only the doctrine the institution carried. The phases are where the selection happened, which is why the framework that names them explains the movement’s longevity, its violence and its limits in a single account.

Bihar’s Private Armies: The War Inside the War

No account of the middle phases is complete without the war’s second army, the one the landlords raised. In the Bihar plains where Liberation, the MCC and later the People’s War organisation contested the villages, the landowning castes answered organisation with organisation: through the 1980s and 1990s a succession of caste senas, the Bhoomi Sena, the Kisan Sangh, the Sunlight Sena and the rest, culminated in the Ranvir Sena, founded in 1994 in Bhojpur district under Brahmeshwar Singh, an armed militia of Bhumihar landholders that made the massacre its instrument. At Bathani Tola in July 1996 Ranvir Sena men killed 21 Dalit villagers, most of them women and children; at Laxmanpur Bathe on 1 December 1997 they crossed the Sone river by boat at night and killed 58 Dalit villagers, again predominantly women and children, in the single deadliest massacre of the Bihar conflict. The Maoist organisations answered in kind across the same years, killing upper-caste villagers in attacks at Senari in 1999, where 34 Bhumihar men were killed by the MCC, and at Mianpur in 2000, and the cycle of massacre and counter-massacre is the Bihar form of the doubled sovereignty described earlier: two armed powers taxing, judging and executing in the same villages, with the state arriving after the funerals to count the dead and register cases that, in the Laxmanpur Bathe matter, travelled through trial court convictions in 2010 to wholesale acquittals by the Patna High Court in 2013, a judicial arc the victims’ organisations and the state government, which appealed, both placed on the record. Brahmeshwar Singh was arrested in 2002, released in 2011 and assassinated in Arrah in June 2012; the Ranvir Sena faded as the agrarian structure that fed it changed, and the Bihar movement it had fought contracted in the same decades for reasons the phases supply: Liberation’s electoral road drew the plains struggle into the assembly and the panchayat, the MCC’s strength passed at the merger into a party whose centre of gravity had moved to the forests of Dandakaranya, and the plains war’s terrible symmetry exhausted the villages that had hosted it. The episode disciplines the adjudication in both directions. Against the movement’s self-account, it records that the party’s squads massacred as the senas massacred, and that its claim to defend the village was contested in blood by the village’s other armed claimant. Against the state’s account, it records that for two decades the republic’s writ in central Bihar ran so thin that landlords fielded private armies in daylight and the dead of Laxmanpur Bathe waited sixteen years for a verdict that acquitted everyone. The phases explain what the framings cannot: why the movement in the plains, where its social base was deepest and its enemies most organised, transformed itself into politics and merger, while in the forests, where the state’s absence was total and no sena stood, it built its republic and held it into a fifth decade.

The Doctrine in Its Own Words

The ideological-history framing fails as a total account, yet the doctrine is real evidence, and the adjudication owes it a close reading on its own terms. The Eight Documents, written by Charu Mazumdar between 1965 and 1967 and published in Liberation from 1968, argue a connected chain. India, the first documents hold, is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, its big bourgeoisie comprador to imperialism, its agrarian relations the fetter on every other development; the revolution is therefore new democratic in stage and agrarian in content, its motive forces the peasantry above all, its path the protracted people’s war in which base areas in the countryside encircle and finally take the cities; the party that leads it must be built in struggle against the revisionism of the established communist leadership, whose crime, in Mazumdar’s most quoted charge, was to have made the Indian working class tail the bourgeoisie through parliament. Two features of the chain explain the phases that followed from it. The first is its theory of the state as nothing but an instrument of the exploiting classes, from which it followed that the state’s local face, the jotedar, the moneylender, the police informer, was not a symptom but the substance, and that annihilation of that face was revolution in miniature; the annihilation campaign was not a deviation from the documents but their application, which is why its repudiation by Liberation required a doctrinal reconstruction and not merely a tactical vote. The second is the doctrine of the boycott, which treated elections as the mechanism by which the state converts revolt into administration; from it followed Phase Three’s central quarrel, conducted for thirty years in the movement’s journals, and the CPI (Maoist) programme adopted at the merger retained the boycott entire, holding the Indian parliament a pigsty of the ruling classes in the programme’s own vocabulary and the path of protracted war unchanged. The 2004 party’s basic documents, its programme, constitution and the strategy and tactics text adopted in the merger period, updated the chain for a globalised economy: finance capital and the Indian big bourgeoisie drawn tighter to imperialism, the countryside’s semi-feudal relations persisting under contract farming and mining capital, the people’s war to be waged with a people’s army built in three stages from guerrilla squads to a liberation army, and the cities assigned the auxiliary role the urban sections of this article described. Read against the record, the doctrine’s strength was its diagnosis of the village, where its categories of rent, usury and caste power named what Bela Bhatia’s fieldwork found; its weakness was its theory of everything else, a state it could not model as anything but a committee of landlords, an electorate it could only read as deceived, and a working class it addressed for fifty years without ever organising at scale. The five phases are, in one sense, the history of that doctrine meeting the republic it misdescribed: surviving where the misdescription matched the ground, in the forest where the state truly was a camp and a lease, and failing where the republic was more than its doctrine allowed, in the plains where the deceived electorate kept voting its grievances into assemblies the movement had sworn to shun.

What Would Count as an Ending?

The brief for this article carries its evidence past the movement’s contraction to the state’s declared horizon, and the horizon belongs in the record. Through 2024 the Union home minister, Amit Shah, stated in Parliament and at public functions in the affected states that the government intended to free India of the Maoist insurgency by March 2026, a deadline the home ministry’s reviews repeated as districts were struck from the affected lists and as the security establishment reported the party’s central committee thinned by arrests, surrenders and deaths in action. The party’s surviving statements answered in the vocabulary its documents have used since 1969, that a people’s war is measured in decades and that reverses are the tuition of protracted struggle. Between the deadline and the doctrine sits the question the five-phase framework is built to ask. Every prior phase ended not when the killing stopped but when the organisation commanding the movement changed its form: the rising became a party, the party became fragments, the fragments became one party again, and the one party became a shrinking army inside a single forest. An ending, on the framework’s terms, would be a sixth transformation, and its documentary form, a dissolution, a negotiated settlement on the Nepal pattern, a Liberation-style entry into open politics, or a final military reduction of the Dandakaranya base, cannot be read from the incident counts of any single year. The framework’s last service is to say what evidence would settle the question its rivals argue past: not the fatality series, which both sides will quote at the end as at the beginning, but the fate of the structure, the committees, the army and the doctrine, that five phases built.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What was the 1967 Naxalbari uprising?

The Naxalbari uprising was a peasant revolt in the Siliguri subdivision of West Bengal’s Darjeeling district in the spring of 1967, led by the Siliguri group of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) under Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. Sharecroppers and Adivasi peasants, facing eviction from benami land that land reform law had promised to settle on them, seized plots and crops and resisted the jotedars’ eviction parties. On 23 May 1967 a police party led by Inspector Sonam Wangdi was ambushed and Wangdi killed; on 25 May police fired at Prasadjote village on a crowd of villagers, killing ten people, predominantly women and children. The United Front government, in which the CPI(M) itself held office, suppressed the rising and expelled its leaders, who formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries that November. The uprising lasted weeks and held a few villages, yet it founded the Naxalite movement, named for the village, and supplied every later phase with its founding argument: that the republic’s land promises had failed in writing, and that the failure licensed revolution.

Q: Who founded CPI ML in 1969?

The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was founded on 22 April 1969, Lenin’s birthday, by the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, the body formed by the revolutionaries expelled from and in revolt against the CPI(M) after Naxalbari. Charu Mazumdar, whose Eight Documents of 1965 to 1967 supplied the new party’s ideology, was elected general secretary of its central organising committee, and Kanu Sanyal announced the founding publicly at a mass meeting on the Shahid Minar maidan in Calcutta on 1 May 1969. The party programme declared India a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, set the stage of revolution as new democratic, prescribed protracted people’s war from the countryside as the path, and imposed an absolute boycott of elections. Its founding united most, not all, of the revolutionary groups thrown up by Naxalbari; Kanai Chatterjee’s Dakshin Desh group stayed outside over the method of party building and became the Maoist Communist Centre, the second pole whose merger with Mazumdar’s organisational descendants in 2004 closed the circle the founding had opened in 1969.

Q: What is the post-2004 CPI Maoist consolidation?

The post-2004 consolidation is the unification of India’s two surviving Maoist armed organisations into a single party. On 21 September 2004 the CPI(ML) People’s War, descended from Kondapalli Seetharamaiah’s People’s War Group of 1980 and dominant in Andhra Pradesh and Dandakaranya, merged with the Maoist Communist Centre of India, descended from Kanai Chatterjee’s Dakshin Desh group of 1969 and rooted in Bihar, to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Mupalla Laxmana Rao, called Ganapathy, became general secretary, the two armed wings were unified under the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, and a unity congress in early 2007 ratified a single programme of protracted people’s war. The consolidation ended thirty-five years of fragmentation among the heirs of Naxalbari, gave the movement one command across the forest belt from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh, and produced the Red Corridor at its widest extent. It also concentrated the movement for the state’s answer: the coordinated offensives from 2009, the Salwa Judum judgment of 2011 and the long contraction that followed were all directed at the single organisation the merger had created.

Q: What is the Red Corridor?

The Red Corridor is the shorthand name, used by journalists and officials, for the arc of districts across central and eastern India in which the CPI (Maoist) maintained presence, taxed commerce, ran people’s courts and contested the state’s authority. At its widest telling in the peak years around 2009 and 2010, official statements placed Maoist violence or presence across some 180 to 220 districts in states running from Bihar and Jharkhand through Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with outliers toward the Nepal border and Karnataka. The name flattens distinctions the record requires. Districts reporting a single incident, districts where the party taxed contractors, and districts where its committees governed villages were counted together in the widest figures, while the territory of deep and durable party control was always far smaller, centred on the Dandakaranya forest of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and the Odisha border. By the Home Ministry’s administrative measures the corridor contracted steadily through the 2010s, reaching approximately 38 districts in the most affected category by 2024, a contraction every major fatality and incident series confirms in direction if not in exact figures.

Q: What was Operation Green Hunt 2009?

Operation Green Hunt is the name given by journalists from 2009 to the coordinated counter-Maoist offensive assembled by the Union government across the affected states, and the name the government itself never accepted. Home Minister P. Chidambaram stated on the record that no operation of that name existed and that the Centre was assisting state police forces; the assistance was on a scale the denial did not diminish. Some seventy thousand additional central paramilitary personnel were sanctioned for the theatre, the CoBRA commando battalions raised within the Central Reserve Police Force from 2008 were deployed to the forests, and coordinated operations across the inter-state seams of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh began in earnest in November 2009, applying nationally the Andhra Pradesh doctrine of specialised forces, intelligence-led small units and surrender policies. The offensive’s first year, 2010, was the deadliest of the insurgency on the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s count, with 1,180 fatalities including the 75 paramilitary men killed in the Dantewada ambush of 6 April 2010. The denied name outlasted the denial and remains the campaign’s universal label.

Q: What are the five phases of the Maoist movement?

The five phases are the framework this article defends for reading the Indian Maoist movement as one organisational history rather than as an insurgency chronicle or a history of doctrine. Phase One is the Naxalbari uprising of May 1967, the peasant revolt in Darjeeling district that founded the movement’s argument. Phase Two runs from the founding of the CPI(ML) on 22 April 1969 through the annihilation campaign and the state suppression to the death of Charu Mazumdar in police custody on 28 July 1972. Phase Three, from 1972 to 2004, is the fragmentation, in which CPI(ML) Liberation moved toward mass politics and elections while the People’s War Group in Andhra Pradesh and the Maoist Communist Centre in Bihar rebuilt the armed road in parallel. Phase Four, from the merger of 21 September 2004 to 2009, is the consolidation of the CPI (Maoist) and the Red Corridor at its widest. Phase Five, from the coordinated offensives of late 2009 onward, is the era of Operation Green Hunt, the Salwa Judum judgment and the sustained contraction of the movement’s geography and strength.

Q: Who was Charu Mazumdar?

Charu Mazumdar (1918 to 1972) was the founder and general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the ideological author of the Naxalite movement. Born into a landholding family of Siliguri in north Bengal, he organised peasants for the Communist Party of India and then the CPI(M), and between 1965 and 1967 wrote the series of internal documents later collected as the Eight Documents, which declared India semi-colonial and semi-feudal, prescribed agrarian revolution through protracted people’s war, and condemned the CPI(M) leadership’s parliamentary road as revisionism. After the Naxalbari uprising of May 1967 he led the expelled revolutionaries into the AICCCR and then into the CPI(ML) founded on 22 April 1969. His doctrine of the annihilation of class enemies directed the party’s campaign of 1969 to 1972, and his refusal of every compromise, with the state, with rival leftists and with his own dissenting colleagues, shaped the movement’s character for decades. Arrested in Calcutta on 16 July 1972, he died in the Lal Bazar police lockup on 28 July 1972, officially of heart failure; his party recorded the death as killing by neglect, and the dispute has never been officially closed.

Q: What were Charu Mazumdar’s Eight Documents?

The Eight Documents are the series of polemical texts Charu Mazumdar wrote between January 1965 and 1967, as a CPI(M) organiser in Siliguri arguing against his own party’s leadership, and later published in the journal Liberation as the ideological foundation of the CPI(ML). Their argument runs in a chain. India is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, dominated by imperialism, feudalism and a comprador big bourgeoisie allied to both. The revolution is therefore new democratic in stage and agrarian in content, led by the working class through its party, powered by the peasantry as its main force, and conducted as protracted people’s war that builds base areas in the countryside and encircles the cities. The established communist leaderships, by contesting elections and serving in coalition ministries, had betrayed that revolution, and the documents’ immediate target was the CPI(M) of the United Front governments. The Eight Documents became scripture for the movement Mazumdar founded: quoted at the CPI(ML) founding of 1969, disputed by every faction of the fragmentation decades, and republished by the CPI (Maoist) after 2004 as part of its canonical inheritance, with the annihilation doctrine drawn from Mazumdar’s subsequent writings of 1969 and 1970.

Q: What was the annihilation of class enemies campaign?

The annihilation of class enemies was the CPI(ML)’s central practice between 1969 and 1972, derived from Charu Mazumdar’s writings in Liberation and Deshabrati, which held that the annihilation of class enemies was the highest form of class struggle and that a cadre who had not shed a class enemy’s blood remained in the grip of feudal and bourgeois ideas. Guerrilla squads assassinated designated individuals: jotedars and moneylenders in the villages of Srikakulam, Debra, Gopiballavpur and Mushahari, and from 1970 in Calcutta a widening circle of police constables, alleged informers, teachers and rival leftists. The campaign’s defenders inside the party argued that each killing broke the peasants’ fear of the landlord and the state; its critics, including Kanu Sanyal, whose misgivings are documented, and the Bihar leader Satyanarayan Singh, who split the party over the line in 1971, argued that it substituted assassination for mass organisation and delivered the movement to the police. The state answered with Operation Steeplechase in 1971 and the Calcutta counter-offensive of 1971 and 1972, and by the time of Mazumdar’s death in custody in July 1972 the campaign and the party that waged it were both destroyed in their original form.

Q: How did Charu Mazumdar die in 1972?

Charu Mazumdar was arrested by Calcutta police at a hideout in the city on 16 July 1972 and held in the lockup of the Lal Bazar police headquarters. He died there on 28 July 1972, twelve days after his arrest. The official account gave the cause as heart failure in a prisoner already suffering from asthma and cardiac illness, whose condition had been fragile for years. The CPI(ML) and his family and supporters charged that the state had killed him by deliberate neglect, withholding the medical care and the medicines his condition required from a man the government had every reason to want dead; civil liberties voices repeated the charge and demanded a judicial inquiry. No inquiry whose findings commanded general acceptance was ever published, and the two accounts stand unreconciled in the record, which is how this article has marked the death throughout, as a death in custody whose circumstances remain disputed. The death closed the movement’s second phase: the CPI(ML) fragmented in the years that followed into the committees whose rival claims to Mazumdar’s inheritance structured the next three decades of the movement’s history.

Q: What was the People’s War Group?

The People’s War Group, formally the CPI(ML) People’s War Group and universally the PWG, was the Maoist organisation founded on 22 April 1980 in Andhra Pradesh by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, a former schoolteacher and veteran of the earlier CPI(ML) constellation. The PWG rejected Charu Mazumdar’s annihilation of individuals as a strategy while retaining protracted people’s war as the road, and it built its strength on peasant, student and cultural fronts in the Telangana districts, armed squads in the north Telangana forests, and a system of taxation on contractors and landlords. The Andhra Pradesh state answered with the Greyhounds, the specialised commando force raised in 1989, with an intelligence campaign and surrender policies that progressively cleared the party from its founding state through the 1990s and 2000s; Seetharamaiah was arrested in Bombay in 1993 and withdrew from leadership. In January 1998 the PWG merged with the Party Unity organisation of Bihar to form the CPI(ML) People’s War, and on 21 September 2004 that party merged with the Maoist Communist Centre of India to form the CPI (Maoist), carrying the PWG’s structures in Andhra Pradesh and Dandakaranya into the consolidated party as its southern and central core.

Q: What was the Maoist Communist Centre?

The Maoist Communist Centre, the MCC, was the second armed pole of Indian Maoism, founded by the organisers Kanai Chatterjee and Amulya Sen from the Dakshin Desh group, which had supported the Naxalbari uprising but refused to join the CPI(ML) in 1969 over the method of party building. The group’s own published history dates its adoption of the name Maoist Communist Centre to 20 October 1969; the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s record dates the existence of Dakshin Desh from that day and the renaming to 1975. Working from Bengal into the coal and mica belt of Bihar, the MCC built a peasant base in the districts south of the Ganga through the 1970s and 1980s, fought the landlords’ caste senas of central Bihar in a war of massacre and counter-massacre, survived Chatterjee’s death in 1982 and its own splits, and emerged by the 1990s as the principal Maoist force in Bihar and Jharkhand. On 21 September 2004 the MCC, by then styled the Maoist Communist Centre of India, merged with the CPI(ML) People’s War to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist), ending a thirty-five year separation that had begun with the disagreement of 1969.

Q: How did the Greyhounds change the war in Andhra Pradesh?

The Greyhounds are the specialised anti-Maoist commando force of Andhra Pradesh, raised in 1989 and built by the police officer K.S. Vyas, who trained the first units and was assassinated by the People’s War Group in Hyderabad in January 1993. Their method inverted the state’s earlier practice of large cordon operations. Small, physically selected and jungle-trained teams, operating on dedicated intelligence and living in the forest for extended patrols, fought the People’s War Group squad by squad on the squads’ own ground, while a surrender and rehabilitation policy offered the party’s cadres a priced exit and the intelligence apparatus mapped the party’s courier and supply networks. Across the 1990s and the first years of the 2000s the combination progressively destroyed the PWG’s Andhra Pradesh structure, killing or capturing much of its state leadership and driving its surviving squads across the border into Chhattisgarh and Odisha, a displacement that helped concentrate the merged CPI (Maoist) in Dandakaranya. The Andhra model of specialised state forces, intelligence-led small-unit operations and surrender economics became the doctrine the Union government pressed on the other affected states after 2004, and its export is one of the mechanisms of the movement’s fifth phase.

Q: What was the Salwa Judum, and why was it struck down?

The Salwa Judum was a state-backed vigilante mobilisation launched in June 2005 in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada region, led publicly by the Congress legislator Mahendra Karma and supported by the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party government, which armed Adivasi villagers as special police officers and concentrated the population of hundreds of villages in roadside camps to deny the CPI (Maoist) its rural base. Supporters presented it as a spontaneous popular rising against Maoist taxation, extortion and violence, and genuine anger against the party existed inside it. Its documented record, assembled by the National Human Rights Commission’s 2008 inquiry, by Human Rights Watch and by the petitioners before the Supreme Court, also included killings, arson and sexual violence by Judum cadres and the emptying of villages across the region. On 5 July 2011, in Nandini Sundar v State of Chhattisgarh, a Supreme Court bench of Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar held the appointment of tribal youth as armed special police officers unconstitutional under Articles 14 and 21, ordered the force disarmed and disbanded and the alleged crimes investigated, and condemned the policy as an abdication of the state’s duty to govern by law.

Q: What happened at Dantewada in April 2010?

On 6 April 2010 a company of the Central Reserve Police Force, returning through the Mukrana forest near Chintalnar in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district from a three-day area domination exercise, was ambushed in strength by CPI (Maoist) cadres of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army. Seventy-five CRPF men and one Chhattisgarh police constable were killed, the heaviest single loss suffered by the state’s forces in the entire insurgency. The ambush came six months into the coordinated offensive the press called Operation Green Hunt and at the opening of the war’s deadliest year. The inquiry conducted by E.N. Rammohan, a retired director general of the Border Security Force, recorded that the company had violated its own standing instructions, had returned by a predictable route and had not been supported as doctrine required, findings that shifted part of the public argument from the ambush itself to the command that had exposed the men to it. The CPI (Maoist) claimed the action as a victory of the people’s army and a blow against the offensive. Dantewada fixed Phase Five’s moral geometry: the state’s case for the scale of its campaign, and its critics’ case about the campaign’s costs, both argued from the same seventy-six names.

Q: Who is Ganapathy, and who succeeded him as CPI (Maoist) general secretary?

Ganapathy is the nom de guerre of Mupalla Laxmana Rao, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) from its formation on 21 September 2004 until 2018. A former schoolteacher from the Karimnagar region of Telangana, he had led the CPI(ML) People’s War as its general secretary from the early 1990s, after the arrest and withdrawal of its founder Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, and he carried that party into the merger with the Maoist Communist Centre of India that created the CPI (Maoist). His fourteen years at the head of the merged party covered its widest geography, its deadliest years and the first half of its contraction, and he remained, throughout, a figure of the underground: no verified photograph circulated for most of his tenure, and the state’s knowledge of him ran through intercepted communications and captured documents. In November 2018, citing age and ill health communicated in the party’s own statements, he gave way to Nambala Keshava Rao, called Basavaraj, the chief of the party’s central military commission and the commander most associated with its largest ambushes, whose succession the security establishment confirmed and under whom the contraction continued.

Q: What did Prime Minister Manmohan Singh call the Maoist challenge?

Addressing the standing committee of chief ministers of the affected states in April 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described left-wing extremism as the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country, a formulation he repeated and strengthened in later years, describing the Maoists in 2009 as the gravest internal security threat India faced. The words did political work beyond description. A challenge ranked as the largest of its kind in the republic’s history could be answered with instruments of matching scale, and the years after the formulation brought the sanction of some seventy thousand additional central paramilitary personnel, the raising of the CoBRA commando battalions, the coordinated multi-state offensives from late 2009 and the pairing of the security grid with accelerated road, telecommunications and administrative penetration of the corridor. Critics of the formulation, including the members of the Planning Commission’s own expert group whose 2008 report located the movement’s roots in land alienation and unimplemented constitutional protections, answered that a challenge named as security would be met as security, whatever its origins. The formulation and the argument it licensed frame the movement’s fifth phase, and the article has treated both at their strongest.

Q: What is Dandakaranya, and why did it become the movement’s base?

Dandakaranya is the forest region of central India spanning the Abujhmad hills and Bastar division of Chhattisgarh, the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra and the border country of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, named from the forest of the Ramayana tradition. It became the CPI (Maoist)’s durable base for reasons of geography, economy and history combined. The forest canopy and the seams between five states gave guerrilla squads cover and escape routes that no single state police could seal; the mining and forest-produce economy gave the party contractors and traders to tax; and the Adivasi population, Gond and Muria in the main, carried grievances against forest law, land alienation and displacement that the party’s committees had organised since the People’s War Group first entered the region in the 1980s. In Dandakaranya the party built its fullest apparatus of rival governance, revolutionary people’s committees, people’s courts and a claimed people’s government, trained its People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army and held its 2007 unity congress. The Bihar plains, where the movement was older, offered dense settlement, landlord armies and fast police access; Dandakaranya offered depth, and depth is what a protracted war consumes.

Q: How many people have died in the Naxalite Maoist insurgency?

No single total commands the record, and this article has attributed every figure it uses to its keeper. The South Asia Terrorism Portal’s fatality database, compiled from official and press reporting, records the insurgency’s deadliest year as 2010 with 1,180 fatalities among civilians, security forces and Maoist cadres combined, and its year-by-year series from the middle of the 2000s shows annual totals in the high hundreds through the peak years before a long descent to double figures in the weakest recent years. The Ministry of Home Affairs annual reports publish their own incident and fatality series, close to the Portal’s in shape and different in detail. Both series share a structural weakness the record itself exposes: the classification of the dead in forest operations follows the reporting of the forces engaged, and judicial findings have corrected it in particular cases, at Sarkeguda in 2012, where an inquiry concluded that none of the 17 villagers killed by the security forces were Maoists as first reported. Aggregated estimates for the decades since 1967 run into the tens of thousands on every archive, including the party’s own martyrs’ lists, which cannot be reconciled with either official series and are not reconciled here.

Q: How did CPI(ML) Liberation come to contest elections?

CPI(ML) Liberation’s road to the ballot began in the reorganisation of July 1974, when Subrata Dutt, known as Jauhar, rebuilt a central committee in the Bihar plains on the argument that Charu Mazumdar’s annihilation line had destroyed the movement’s mass base and that peasant organisation in the open, alongside armed squads, was the condition of survival. Jauhar was killed by police in November 1975, and Vinod Mishra, who led the party until 1998, carried the argument through its stages: mass fronts among peasants and workers in central Bihar, the founding of the Indian People’s Front in 1982 as an open political platform through which the still underground party could act publicly, and finally open electoral participation. In the 1989 general election the Front’s Rameshwar Prasad won the Arrah Lok Sabha seat, the first parliamentary victory of any Naxalite formation, and Liberation thereafter functioned as a legal party while retaining its name and its account of its origins. The parties that kept the election boycott read the turn as the first step toward the CPI(M)’s ministerial road; Liberation read it as the only road back to the villages annihilation had emptied, and the quarrel structured the movement’s polemics for a generation.