Almost 10 months ahead of the March 2026 deadline given by Amit Shah, Naxalism is breathing its last.
NEW DELHI: In August 2024, Home Minister Amit Shah, while addressing a press conference in Chhattisgarh’s capital, Raipur, declared that by March 2026, Naxalism would be eradicated from the face of India.
Journalists present at the press conference couldn’t help but exchange wry smiles at what they believed was an exaggerated claim—especially since, not long ago, Naxalism had been described by former Prime Minister, the late Manmohan Singh as India’s biggest internal security threat. When Singh made this observation in October 2009, 83 of India’s 640 districts were classified as affected by Left-Wing Extremism or Naxalism. By 2013, that number had surged to 126 districts across 10 states.
Now, almost 10 months ahead of Shah’s deadline, Naxalism is, for all practical purposes, breathing its last.
According to a recently released Ministry of Home Affairs notification, the number of Naxal-affected districts has dropped to just 18 as of April 2025.
Significantly, once the epicentre of the insurgency, even Bastar and Kondagaon in Chhattisgarh have now been officially removed from the list.
This dramatic contraction or collapse as some would like to call, of the so-called “Red Corridor” comes less than a year after Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared that Naxalism would be eradicated by March 2026.
In 2024, 38 districts across nine states were still officially classified as LWE-affected. These included 15 in Chhattisgarh, 7 in Odisha, 5 in Jharkhand, 3 in Madhya Pradesh, 2 each in Maharashtra, Kerala, and Telangana, and 1 each in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal.
The sharp drop from 38 in 2024 to 18 in 2025 reflects an accelerated phase of counter-insurgency operations and targeted development over the past 12 months, officials told The Sunday Guardian.
As of April 2025, only six districts remain under the “most affected” category: Bijapur, Kanker, Narayanpur, and Sukma in Chhattisgarh; West Singhbhum in Jharkhand; and Gadchiroli in Maharashtra. Another six are under observation as “districts of concern,” while six more continue to show residual activity.
This shift has been enabled by what senior officials describe as a “free hand” from the Centre to neutralise armed Naxals without bureaucratic interference—combined with equal focus on tribal welfare and grassroots development. Working in tandem with directives from Shah’s office, Chhattisgarh’s security forces established more than 30 new camps in core Naxal areas, double the annual average in previous years. The goal: reclaim territory and disrupt Maoist logistics, recruitment, and influence. It is expected that by next year’s end, 30 more camps will be in place.
This resulted in the shrinking of space for Naxals, both physically and in terms of recruitment.
Significant changes were seen on the ground post November 2023, when Vishnu Deo Sai was made the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, thereby becoming the state’s first tribal CM. Sai is a member of the Kanwar community.
Sai has made visible efforts to integrate tribal identity with state outreach and now, Bastar is no longer considered a “punishment posting” in government circles—a far cry from two decades ago, when even sunset brought an unofficial curfew.
Last year, The Sunday Guardian had visited the interiors of Chhattisgarh and the changes were clearly visible.
Areas like Gidam, once symbols of lawlessness where Naxals brazenly attacked police stations, are now home to jewellery shops and night-time tourism to Chitrakote waterfalls. Roads and bus services now link previously inaccessible villages such as Bechapal, Bedre, Galgam, and Gangalur, while major projects like Sukma-Bhejji-Chintaguffa and Basaguda-Jagargunda roads are taking the state deeper into the Maoist heartland.
As per official estimates, the security forces have neutralized an estimated 210-220 Naxalites nationwide in 2025. In Chhattisgarh alone, 153 were killed by April—124 of them in the Bastar division. Major operations include the killing of 31 Naxalites in Bijapur’s Indravati National Park on 9 February, and 27, including top leader Nambala Keshava Rao, in Narayanpur on 21 May.
Additional fatalities—8 in Bokaro (Jharkhand) and 30 in Bijapur and Kanker—contribute to the confirmed toll.
On 26 March 2025, CM Sai, speaking in Bengaluru, claimed over 325 Naxalites had been killed and more than 2,000 arrested or surrendered in just one-and-a-half months. Though not independently verified, the claim aligns with broader trends.
These numbers assume greater significance when seen through the lens of history—a time when Naxals were feared not just for their ideology, but for the scale and brutality of their violence.
Among the worst Maoist atrocities was the Jeeram Ghati massacre of 2013, where senior Congress leaders were gunned down. In 2010, 76 CRPF jawans were killed in a single ambush in Dantewada. As recently as 2021, 22 security personnel were killed near the Bijapur-Sukma border. These attacks underscored the Naxal threat’s scale, reach, and resilience.
Officials say that apart from responding by guns, the government has, in parallel, introduced and executed beneficiary programs like the “Niyad Nella Nari Yojana” across more than 90 villages near the security camps to ensure state and central schemes reach remote populations. Twenty-nine schools that had been shuttered because of Naxal threats have been reopened.
Since 2014, more than 11,500 km of roads and 2,350 mobile towers have been constructed in LWE-hit areas. With Bastar symbolically scrubbed from the map of insurgency and territory rapidly reclaimed, India’s campaign against Naxalism has entered its final—but crucial—phase.
The late Ajit Jogi, the first CM of Chhattisgarh, in a bid to bring development to the Naxal infested Bastar, realised that the best way was to build roads, as roads would lead to other things. However, the Naxals would beat up local and private contractors, torch their machines leading to no one applying for the road construction tenders. The former bureaucrat turned politician then decided to seek help from Delhi and brought in the Border Roads Organisation, a central agency under the Ministry of Defence, to construct roads into Bastar.
Two decades later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah—by providing unprecedented political backing, resources, and operational autonomy to security forces—have achieved what once seemed improbable: the dismantling of India’s most enduring internal security threat.