Battle for Bastar Part 2: How tide was turned with multi-pronged strategy

A highly spirited multi-layered and multi-agency state security apparatus appears to have virtually liberated the fabled Maoist “liberated zone” from the latter’s clutches over a decade and a half after the launch of Operation Green Hunt in 2010 by the then central government led by Manmohan Singh, the prime minister who dubbed the Maoist insurgency the “biggest internal security threat to India”.

Read Battle for Bastar Part 1 here: How Maoist citadel was breached

The CPI (Maoists) face virtually an existential crisis today, with their areas of domination shrinking rapidly, their political work coming to a standstill, scores of cadres surrendering before the police in the past two years, and senior military and central committee members killed in the security offensive across Chhattisgarh’s Bastar, Gadchiroli in neighbouring Maharashtra, and in other states too, according to multiple recently-surrendered cadres, police and intelligence officials, and villagers across Bastar and Gadchiroli who The Federal spoke to.

But while the transformation has come after a lot of nerve-wracking reverses for security forces — hundreds of security personnel have died in the Maoist attacks — the tide has been turning fast and decisively in favour of security forces during the past three years.

Greater resources and coordination

A recurring theme that comes up in the interaction with security forces, top to bottom, is a marked change in the political will to go decisively after the Maoists.

From December 2023 till date, there has been a coordinated approach building upon the strategies of the past: One, over and above the heavy spendings in central India’s Left-wing extremism (LWE) areas, the central and state governments are topping up the resources.

These resources range from making fresh recruitments in the security apparatus, organising multi-faceted training, intelligence gathering and analysis, and procuring fighting equipment to offering huge incentives to informants and Maoist cadres willing to surrender, and building infrastructure and amenities.

Two, the coordination between the states’ anti-Naxal organisations, the regular police, the central paramilitary forces, and other line departments of the governments has improved greatly, according to one top intelligence officer overseeing the current operations.

Focus on disarming rebels

Asking not be named or identified, he said: “The focus is to disarm the movement.”

Not only is eliminating the top armed cadres in increasingly pinpointed operations a security imperative for the forces, but recovering the arms and ammunition dumps and a push for the surrender of the cadres with their arms also seems a key objective.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah has reportedly fixed March 31, 2026, as the deadline to finish off left-wing extremism.

While that deadline could be a bit unrealistic, given the deep inroads of the Maoists in many of central India’s hinterland and heartland regions, there’s an urgency in not allowing the rebels a let-off or breathing space to rethink and rebuild.

Loss of local support

As the security vacuum gets plugged in, with new front bases opening up right in the middle of the Maoist strongholds across Bastar and the neighbouring districts of Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha, the support of the local communities to the rebels has eroded significantly — a key to guerilla tactics — and fresh recruitments of the cadres has virtually died down, according to several surrendered ranks these reporters spoke to. That, primarily, seems to be the reason for many lower and mid-level armed cadres giving up their fight and surrendering before the police.

Also read: Who is Basavaraju, the top Maoist commander killed in Bastar encounter?

A senior official in the Chhattisgarh anti-Naxal operations, asking not be named, said, “The March 2026 deadline to finish off the armed Maoist movement is more of a broad target. We are under no illusion it will be all over by then. So, there is no letting the guards down till as long as it takes.”

Manifold increase in camps

As the Bijapur Superintendent of Police, Jitendra Yadav, told The Federal, 20 new security camps, also known as forward bases, have opened in the key and the last remaining citadels of the Maoists in the past one and a half years. It takes quite some effort to open a well-fortified security camp — including construction of roads, laying the wired fencing, erection of living quarters and barracks, and a war-room within.

This manifold increase in camps ramps up the forces’ ability to strike in a quick time, which is what seems to be the hallmark of all the recent operations, and makes it difficult for the rebels to hold meetings in the nearby villages, once under their domination.

The Inspector General of Police (Bastar Range) Sundarraj Pattilingam explained, “We have now been able to bring 70 per cent of the Bastar region, which was supposed to be out of bounds for security forces till about a decade ago, under our domination. Our operational reach is a hundred per cent though. We will bring the entire area under our domination in a short time.”

The areas where the security forces don’t have a fortified presence through a police station or a forward base are mainly in Abujhmadh (Narayanpur district), Indravati Tiger Reserve (Bijapur district), the Karre Gutta Hills (KGH) (bordering Bijapur and Telangana), and remote parts bordering Maharashtra along the perennial Indravati river that separates the two states.

Bridging the gap

In 2013, the police and paramilitary had very limited presence, said the IG. In 2025, Bastar has 300 security camps (also called forward bases) and over a 100 police stations, which gives a vast operational advantage to the security forces.

“It has done two things: one, the security vacuum has been plugged; two, the distance between the launch bases and the targets reduced,” Pattilingam said.

Also read: How Karregutta ops became the beginning of the end of Maoist leader Basava Raju

The second vertical that aides both the local communities and the police is the network of mobile towers: Today, Bastar region has some 800 mobile towers covering its length and breadth, along with mobile and internet connectivity, a marked difference from just 10 years ago, when cell phones did not catch networks across vast stretches of the land.

“We could greatly re-establish the road connectivity — like the Dornapal-Jagargunda-Basaguda stretch,” the IG said. Or, the sensitive Narayanpur-Basaguda-Dantewada stretch.

A new national highway will link Narayanpur to Gadchiroli soon, winding its way through the foothills of the Abujhmadh and linking Laheri and Bhamragarh in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra.

Simultaneously, electricity connectivity is improving too.

“Connectivity is the main antidote to the problem,” he said. “It ends the isolation.”

Time to deliver

What has begun to follow on the security apparatus is the other delivery services: health, schools, banks, and public distribution services. This now leaves the other line departments of the government with much task: to begin to deliver the services earnestly and without any waste of time.

Jagargunda, for instance, is now a tehsil, though it pretty much remains a village. It has a tehsil office, but with no tehsildar or revenue and administration staff there. Villagers say they must go to Sukma to do their basic works. It’s here that the state government will have to work harder, given that Bastar’s tribals are still beyond the margins. Health infrastructure is non-existent.

The security successes have come after a gruelling 15 years of hot pursuit that saw many lows for the forces. Unacquainted with the tricky terrain, hundreds of security personnel have lost their lives over the years in surprise guerrilla attacks by Maoists, but through continuous improvement of tactics and preparedness, they have finally been able to push the rebels into a tight corner.

A new bus service

Today, for example, Tadmetla has come out of an eerie ambience, thanks to a road that connects it to Sukma via Dornapal on one side and the tahsil headquarter of Jagargunda on the other. A passenger bus service delegated to a local private operator has made life much smoother and a tad comfortable for the locals, who would otherwise walk for miles and days to reach Sukma.

The bus plies once a day to and from Sukma to a remote village called Puvarti, but its frequency will go up subsequently, government officials say.

What’s evident, after speaking to villagers in many erstwhile Maoist-dominated parts of Bastar, is their waning support to the rebels, a key factor in the changed security dynamics.

And if everything goes to plan, security officials say they hope to at least disarm the movement, if not completely end the Maoist insurgency, by March 2026.

Clear and hold

The key to the success has been the “clear and hold” approach, where the forces have been pushing ahead in newer areas, setting up forward posts about every five kilometres apart and creating a web-like grid of bases that serve as both security and civil administration hubs.

With this gridlock, the security forces have virtually cut off the Maoists from most of the corridors that helped them move with impunity from one region to the other and even from one state to another.

Also read: Lakshmi, said to be last Naxalite in Karnataka, surrenders in Udupi

“Today, we have over 70,000 personnel. These belong to, besides local police, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and Border Security Force (BSF) in Central Bastar, Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) in North Bastar, and CRPF in South Bastar,” said the IG.

“From the administration point of view, we have set up development centres around these posts to deliver government schemes to locals,” said Pattilingam, who currently coordinates the Bastar-wide security operations. “It is helping us build trust with local villagers,” he said.

Link to outside world

Many villagers, who haven’t had a glimpse of the outside world and were taken in by the Maoist propaganda of the outside world being predatory for them, are able to see the other side themselves. “Getting benefits of the welfare schemes has brought about a change of perspective and attitude in them towards the government,” he said.

During the KGH and Abujhmadh operations, the security forces killed 31 and 28 Maoists, respectively, including 29 female cadres, and recovered a large cache of arms that included SLRs, INSAS rifles, .303 rifles, 12-bore rifles, barrel grenade launchers, and explosives used in IEDs.

Since 2001, the security forces and Maoists have had over 3,300 direct confrontations in Bastar, in which 1,323 security personnel and 1,503 Maoists have died. The data shared by the Bastar range police show that the bulk of the casualties among the security personnel was between 2001 and 2015 in this region, while the Maoists began to face the setbacks since 2015. Between 2016 and May 2025, as many as 923 Maoists were killed, over 400 of them in the past 17 months when the security operations intensified.

Also read: Chhattisgarh anti-Naxal operation: Out-of-turn promotion reward for 295 cops

Change since 2016

Data for the past 25 years shows the conflict’s remarkable highs and lows, but numbers markedly improved in favour of the security forces since 2016. Just take another data: Over 7,000 Maoists of different ranks have given up arms and surrendered in Bastar region since 2001, about 5,400 of them since 2016. Of these, 800 surrendered in 2024 and 555 until May end in the current year.

“The quality of surrenders has improved in the past two years,” said Pattilingam, meaning that top and key cadres have laid down arms, in addition to different lower ranks, including Jan Militia (people’s support groups in villages) members. Concurrently, the budgeted funds that the state government pays to those who have surrendered have also gone up multiple times.

Wrongful arrests, extrajudicial killings

The same is true about the arrested cadres. The police claim — and data show — that they arrested over 13,000 Maoists since 2001, but near 6,600 of them since 2016. The controversy is mostly around the arrests and some encounters as the local civil society activists and tribal leaders say that many of those arrested or killed were not Maoists but common civilians, an allegation the police reject.

After the abduction of Sukma collector Alex Paul Menon in 2012, the state government had instituted a commission to look into the veracity of the arrests following a demand from the banned organisation in exchange for his release. The commission had then recommended dropping the cases against many arrested individuals whom it found innocent.

Recently, five leftist parties have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling for an end to the extrajudicial killings in Bastar.

Part 3, coming soon: Blitzkrieg in the ‘forbidden hills’