Battle for Bastar Part 1: How Maoist citadel was breached
Bastar comes out of Maoist shadow after 2.5 decades of daily horror; how did it happen, and what next for the mostly tribal population? First of a 5-part series
Two major anti-Maoist operations in Bastar in the past two months are but signs of a sustained pushback of the armed movement and major setbacks to the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist).
The first of these lasted 21 days and involved 10,000 security personnel on the Karre Gutta Hills (KGH) in Bijapur district, in which 31 Maoists were killed. The second, a three-day clinical operation in the hitherto impenetrable fortress of Abujhmadh in central Bastar’s Narayanpur district, led to the killing of Basavaraju, the general secretary of the banned outfit.
Bastar, southern Chhattisgarh’s tribal hinterland rich in mineral resources, flora and fauna, and nature’s bounty, of a size bigger than the state of Kerala, has been the stronghold of the armed guerrillas for at least two and a half decades.
Two independent reporters, who have long reported from the region for their respective newspapers since the early Salwa Judum days of 2005, teamed up to revisit the region for The Federal to get a fresh perspective on how things have changed dramatically. It’s a reversal of the scenario that persisted 15-20 years ago in this sprawling, densely forested region at the centre of the Maoist insurgency — a part of Dandakaranya.
This is a series looking at the processes marking that change in Bastar, a change that may precipitate one of the most enduring armed movements in the annals of independent India’s history.
What it was like
Fifteen years ago, the around 110-km undulating stretch of highway connecting Jagdalpur, the headquarters of Bastar district, and Sukma, then a tahsil in South Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, wore the look of a place under curfew even in daytime.
It served as the lifeline for the deadly Maoist insurgency, Left-wing extremism (LWE) in official parlance, where the rebels could strike at will with brutality — this being a strategic road for the rebels for a free movement from South Bastar to western Odisha — that showed its most frightening face in the May 2013 Jheeram valley massacre of 27 Congress workers, virtually wiping out the entire state party leadership.
Before that, in 2010, the Maoists had ambushed and killed 76 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawans at Tadmetla, about 50 km west of Dornapal village off the Sukma-Konta road, about 100 km further from Sukma, now a district carved out of Dantewada. The entire stretch of the dilapidated road from Dornapal to Tadmetla was strewn with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Until 2014-15, the security forces faced many fatal reversals as Maoists struck with precision.
For the first time in decades, the residents of Nambi have access to bus services. All photographs by Deepak Daware
Reversal of fortunes
Cut to 2025. The beautiful, lush green valley, through which this part of National Highway 30 winds its way, has restored the serenity and dignity it deserves — peace has returned, perhaps with the promise to endure.
And the story of Jagdalpur-Sukma road today finds echoes in distant but contiguous stretches of the vast landscape of entire Bastar region, a thickly forested, hilly, and undulating terrain bigger than the size of Kerala, across almost all the LWE-affected districts, viz. Bastar, Sukma, Narayanpur, Kanker, Kondagaon, Dantewada, and Bijapur.
Bastar is home to several tribal communities, a few of them, such as the Abujhmadias, belonging to the Primitive Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs).
While districts like Kanker and Kondagaon had begun to clear around 2015-16, some of the no-go areas, particularly in South Bastar region, where the Maoist guerillas held sway until not so long ago, have opened up, new roads constructed, mobile towers erected across its length and breadth, and signs of the interaction between the inside and the outside worlds are writ large.
The Jagdalpur-Sukma stretch of NH30 today is a far cry from what it was 15 years ago. This idyllic-looking road then served as the lifeline for the deadly Maoist insurgency
Also read: How Karregutta ops became the beginning of the end of Maoist leader Basava Raju
Out of the shadow of fear
Take, for example, the tiny Nambi village, nestled in the thickly-wooded foothills of the now-famous Maoist bastion of Karre Gutta Hills (KGH) or “black hills”, along the western Modakpal-Pujarikanker axis in Bijapur’s most sensitive area where the biggest ever anti-Maoist operation was undertaken from April 21 to May 11. Nambi appears to have come out of the shadow of fear, with people talking freely about how their lives have changed.
Backed by two major forward security bases on either side, the village has a round-the-clock vigil by paramilitary troops; the security camps form the epicentre of the primary administrative developments.
“Abhi pehli baar koi bus yahan chal rahi hai (It’s for the first time in decades that a bus comes here),” remarked Chandrashekhar Renga, a 35-year-old villager in Nambi belonging to the Dorla tribe. Renga has a tractor, a recent addition to his farm equipment. A water tank has come up here, he told The Federal. “Abhi ek Anganwadi khulne wala hai (a new Anganwadi centre is about to open).”
And the village has just got a primary school; otherwise, local kids either never went to school or had to shift to the Pota Cabin, a tribal residential school, in Usur village, about 10 km away.
An all-weather road now connects Nambi to the tehsil and district headquarters, which has been a major respite for the villagers, Renga says.
Also read: ‘Historic breakthrough’ in making India Naxal-free: Shah on Karregutta ops
Need for livelihoods
In Jagargunda, a tehsil place in Sukma that remains a small village in the once-sensitive Zone 80, south of Dantewada, a branch of the Indian Overseas Bank opened a month ago, first in ages since the Maoists burnt down a branch of the Grameen Bank long ago.
Sarpanch Pooransingh Kosma says it will be a big help for the villagers in the vicinity. “They won’t have to go to Sukma anymore," he said.
But Kosma, who also doubles as a peon in the local primary school, says the villagers will now need work. “We are seeking MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) funds so that villagers can get some sort of livelihood here,” he added.
Jagargunda has been in the shadow of this conflict for decades.
At Jagargunda in Sukma, a branch of the Indian Overseas Bank opened a month ago, first in ages since the Maoists burnt down a branch of the Grameen Bank long ago
Challenges ahead
Villagers in Nambi or Jagargunda — and indeed across Bastar — still suffer from an administrative or political vacuum. For instance, South Bastar has not been conferred many community or individual forest rights under the transformative Forest Rights Act of 2008, which has played a major role in Gadchiroli (Maharashtra). But they are slowly coming out of the shadow of the bloodied conflict.
For the first time in decades, South Bastar’s villages held their panchayat elections in February 2025 without any major untoward incident, albeit under the shadow of a strong security apparatus.
It’ll be a big challenge, Kosma says, to run the panchayat affairs. But they will learn, he says.
Even in Awapalli, in remote Bijapur, three tribal students making it to the medical colleges in the state show growing aspirations in this boxed region.
Also read: Who is Basavaraju, the top Maoist commander killed in Bastar encounter?
The Salwa Judum years
The strides are remarkable even if nascent, given that the South Bastar region suffered immensely during the Salwa Judum campaign, when the then Raman Singh government in Chhattisgarh gave arms to the civilians and turned the anti-Naxal campaign into a fratricidal war, until a Supreme Court decision asked the state to dismantle it by calling it unconstitutional and illegal.
Jagargunda, Tadmetla, Nambi, and all the villages in Dantewada, Sukma, or Bijapur were split along vertical lines, with the tribals turning on each other, picking up guns either on behalf of the police or the Maoists.
Hundreds of tribals fled their homes to escape the fratricide. Hundreds of them had to move to the Judum camps to protect themselves from the Maoists, while scores of young men and women joined the Maoist ranks to seek retribution against security forces.
Today, the Judum camps have folded up. People have moved back to their native villages, except those who fled to migrate to Andhra Pradesh. Their lives still hang in balance there.
Also read: Jharkhand: Maoist with Rs 10 lakh bounty killed in gunfight
How the change came
Bastar's journey from the 2010 Tadmetla ambush and the 2013 Jheeram Ghati massacre to the KGH operations that served a crushing blow to the Maoists has been a story of determination and endurance of security forces to come a long way from being frequently proven sitting ducks groping in the dark to a juggernaut striking at will.
There’s a stark contrast today with the security scenario 15 years ago, not just in Bastar, but perhaps across the country in the LWE-affected areas of Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and West Bengal.
“The Maoists are at their weakest today,” a top intelligence officer in Raipur told The Federal, enlisting several factors that have led to the security forces gaining, perhaps, a decisive upper hand: Surrenders of Maoist cadres, the waning of local support, exterminations of top cadres, filling up of security and administrative vacuum, infrastructure changes, gathering of quality real-time intelligence on the movement of the Maoist top ranks, and changed social conditions.
Today, across the entire Bastar landscape, even in the remotest parts, villagers can be seen riding motorcycles, using smartphones, and using tractors for agriculture
Major hits this year
With the key axes dotted with heavily-staffed security camps, the pinnacle of the security blitz came in about 50 days in three different police raids on Maoists in their own fortified strongholds in Bastar, particularly in the Bijapur and Narayanpur districts.
For the first time ever in the LWE’s history of over five decades, its topmost leader, the general secretary of the banned CPI (Maoist), was killed in a three-day operation on May 21.
Nambala Keshav Rao alias Basavraju (74), successor to the long-time general secretary Ganapati aka Muppala Lakshamana Rao, was killed along with 27 others in a hideout in what was hitherto considered an impregnable Maoist “safe zone” of Abujhmadh in Narayanpur.
Barely 15 days after this operation, in early June, security forces caught up with another top Maoist leader, the 66-year-old Thentu Laxmi Narasimha Chalam alias Sudhakar, a member of the top CPI (Maoist) decision-making body called the Central Committee (CC) — this time in Bijapur.
Also read: Bastar belongs to its people, security camps will go once Naxalism ends: Chhattisgarh DyCM
Out on the run
The other top Maoists, who apparently managed to escape the KGH given its vast expanse, now seem to be running for cover, according to the officials overseeing the anti-Naxal operations.
Prominent among them are Madvi Hidma, the most feared Maoist military commander believed to be involved in many police ambushes, including the Tadmetla CRPF ambush, Devji, who is said to be commanding their central military commission, and Bhupathi, a senior CC member pitted to be the next general secretary of the outfit, among many others.
The encounters followed the biggest 21-day joint security operation in history — carried out by about 10,000 personnel belonging to the CRPF, the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA), the Chhattisgarh police’s own District Reserve Guards (DRG) and the Bastar Fighters, from April 21 to May 11, at another Maoist stronghold of KGH, a huge 60-km-long and 20-km-wide mountain, about 800 metres tall with four graded peaks, straddling the two sides of the Chhattisgarh-Telangana border — in which 31 Maoists were killed.
The newly made Dornapal-Jagargonda road, which was once an extremely sensitive zone. In 2010, Maoists had ambushed and killed 76 CRPF jawans in Tadmetla, about 50 km west of Dornapal, in this area
As the massive juggernaut of security forces tighten the screws on the Maoists, also often referred to as Naxalites, in what is poised to be the battle to the finish, the rebels find themselves in an unprecedented existential crisis. So deep and decisive is the penetration of the forces, who are now better trained in guerilla warfare than ever before, that they are dangerously close for the Maoists’ comfort and safety, steadily shrinking the rebels’ area of operation and influence to a few hundred square kilometres. To be precise, those areas are now shrunk to pockets.
Also read: 26 Maoists killed in encounter with security forces in Chhattisgarh
Local forces take the lead
The major changes appear to have happened after Chhattisgarh created two elite fighting forces roping in local youths — the District Reserve Guards in 2015 and the Bastar Fighters in 2022. The DRG mainly consists of surrendered Naxals and former Special Police Officers (SPOs) drawn from among the armed activists of Salwa Judum. The Bastar Fighters comprise tribal youths — male and female candidates —recruited locally in each of the seven districts with terrain and language familiarity.
Incidentally, a sizeable section of these locals are women, who participate shoulder-to-shoulder with men in armed conflicts with Maoists.
One circular issued by the Maoists in August 2024 told their ranks to be wary of the DRG and the Bastar Fighters, a senior intelligence officer revealed. The same circular specifically asked the cadres to retreat to their bases in multiple states, splinter into small formations of two or three, melt into civilians but with arms, and lie low. Monsoon is looming and the Maoists hope for some respite from the security offensive during the season when troop movement slows down.
Also read: Eight Maoists lay down arms before police in Telangana
Nothing succeeds like success
Officials attribute these successes in the anti-Maoist operations largely to the DRG and BF, who know the terrain and the treacherous explosive-laden footpaths (pagdandis) used by the Maoists to reach their hideouts and resting places like the back of their hands.
It is also this guidance from these local elite fighters that helps the forces remain safe from the IEDs that lie strewn across the landscape and premeditate the tactics of Maoist guerillas.
Ten years ago, the paramilitary forces mainly led the operations, suffering from the lack of familiarity with the terrain and tribal language. Today, with paramilitary troopers acting as the force multipliers and the DRG and the BF taking the lead, the operations are seeing success.
“Nothing succeeds like success,” said the intelligence officer The Federal spoke to. “There is an avalanche effect of one successful operation to the other,” he added.
Nambi village, in the foothills of the Karre Gutta Hills in Bijapur district, has got a water tank recently
Money speaks
Today, across the entire landscape, even in the remotest parts, one can find villagers riding motorcycles, using smartphones and deploying tractors for agriculture. Even the extremely remote Nambi village boasts three tractors, recent additions here, indicating a surge in the aspirational levels engendered clearly by a free and fearless interaction with the outside world in these past few years.
The mobile connectivity has also given a leg-up to real-time intelligence about Maoist movements. “With the fear factor reducing substantially due to the sanitisation of the areas of Maoists, communication becoming easy and quick, and handsome monetary rewards being offered, real-time and pin-pointed intelligence has started coming in greater measure, contributing to our operational success in a big way,” a senior Intelligence officer said.
Also read: Chhattisgarh: Woman Naxalite carrying Rs 45 lakh reward in two states gunned down
Back to the wall
Clearly, the Maoists are fighting with their back to the wall. On one side, their “safe haven” has shrunk vastly, and on the other, the villages they could influence and get recruitment from are out of bounds. The banned outfit’s political work is crippled; it’s unable to hold meetings with villagers as freely as it did a decade ago.
Adding to their woes is the real-time intelligence that the surrendered cadres and villagers are providing to the police, exposing them to surprise police attacks. Whether — and how — the Maoists will negotiate this unprecedented crisis of survival, a paralysis at the helm post the recent killings of their top leaders, remains to be seen.
Still, nobody is writing them off just about yet.
Part 2, coming soon: Multi-layered security strategy at play in Bastar
