Outgunned, outnumbered and on borrowed time, Papa Rao emerged from the jungle of central India carrying a light checkered shirt, dusty trousers and scuffed sports activities footwear. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a $26,000 bounty on his head.
Behind him, in single file, trailed a troop of women and men carrying decades-old L1A1 and Lee-Enfield rifles. In sandals, and carrying Puma-branded sports activities backpacks, this group had been some of the world’s last Maoist rebels, heirs to a world revolutionary motion that fought capitalism for management of the twentieth century. They had been on their option to give up.
Fired by the teachings of China’s Mao Zedong, that they had spent many years battling to overthrow the Indian state, and set up in its stead a classless utopia. The rebellion they helped wage killed hundreds. At its peak practically 20 years in the past, India’s chief described the Maoists as the nation’s greatest inside safety risk, a blight on its standing as the world’s largest democracy and its aspirations of changing into a world energy.
Now the revolution is in its death throes.
India’s Maoist insurgency
In latest months safety forces have killed a string of high Maoists and the rank-and-file are laying down their weapons. India’s capitalist financial system is booming, and the ruling Hindu-nationalist authorities is crushing its above-ground leftist opponents at the poll field. Maoism shall be eradicated fully from the nation this 12 months, it has proclaimed.
Hours after they got here out of the jungle, Papa Rao and his 17 comrades stepped onto a stage. In entrance of them was a row of cameras. Behind, a backdrop introduced their “return to the mainstream,” in English and Hindi. Their surrendered, antiquated weapons had been laid out and labeled, like museum displays; on tables lined in blue fabric, clips of ammunition had been arrayed to kind the Hindi phrase for “sacred vow.”
As the cameras rolled, every former rebel was handed a rose and a replica of the Indian structure: a symbolic pledge of a brand new allegiance. They listened to native politicians make speeches and stood for pictures with members of the safety forces, after which they had been ushered off the stage and into the embrace of the Indian state.
The journey so far started nearly a century in the past and a whole lot of miles away in China, when Mao Zedong reshaped Marxist–Leninist concept to suit the pre-industrial situations of his nation. His new doctrine fueled a decades-long battle – one which finally carried the communist motion to victory and state energy in Beijing in 1949.
In the years following, Beijing funded or armed fellow communists in Vietnam, North Korea, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia, inflicting panic in Washington and different Western capitals as the ideological struggles of the Cold War rippled throughout Asia.
In India, Maoist guerillas are recognized by a distinct title: Naxals. That moniker comes from a violent 1967 peasant rebellion in opposition to oppressive landlords in Naxalbari, a village in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills in northeast India. Its success impressed extra uprisings, and in 1970 the Peking Review, the English-language mouthpiece of Mao’s authorities, wrote approvingly of how Indian peasants had been following “Mao Zedong Thought” and had “smashed the feudal yoke and overthrown the crushing tyranny.” Beijing’s assist doesn’t seem to have prolonged to instantly arming the Naxals, nonetheless.
A CIA report the similar 12 months gave a extra sober evaluation: “Their hit-and-run tactics and their spectacular exploits – bombings; murders; book burning; attacks upon police stations, movie houses, and libraries – have given the Naxalite movement newspaper headlines from which it derives both inspiration and new recruits.”
Over the following many years – regardless of splits and infighting – the Naxals cemented their maintain in what grew to become often called the “Red Corridor,” an enormous swathe of rugged territory stretching throughout a number of states in central and jap India and residential to many Adivasis – tribal communities typically marginalized by the Indian state. For many individuals in these communities, the Naxals’ message hit residence.
Sukhmati Dhruv, 45, was one. Growing up in rural Chhattisgarh state, she witnessed native forest officers piling stress on a village already grappling with poverty, and was impressed to affix the Naxals when she was in her teenagers.
“They used to collect tax on building houses, they used to collect tax on chopping wood,” she advised NCS.
“They used to beat people up,” she says. “There was a lot of violence.”
Papa Rao’s story was related.
“The reason for joining the movement was poverty, and the government’s Forest Department and the rural administrators used to trouble us a lot at the time,” he advised NCS earlier than he surrendered in March.
Against the may of the state, they adopted the techniques espoused by Mao in China: shock, mobility, deception.
Sukhmati described how her comrades would raid police stations to steal weapons.
“The mission would be to bring two weapons from the police force,” she stated. “If we bring two weapons from the police force, it means we have succeeded.”
“Our strategies would evolve,” says Satish, one other former Maoist NCS spoke with. “Depending on how many (security forces) were coming, in what formations, on what terrain, the geographical conditions we were in, the weapons and firepower we had.”
“Keeping in mind their strength we would try to find our opportunity and accordingly retreat, or if it’s an offensive action then we would use their weakness.”
The rebellion reached its peak in the early 2000s, a bloody rejoinder to the booming financial system fueled by the rise of outsourcing in IT and software program, and optimism about India’s future.
In 2003, the chief minister the state residence to Hyderabad, one of the cities driving the new IT increase – narrowly escaped assassination. Across India by 2007, the Naxals had affect over 92,000 sq. kilometers – roughly the measurement of the US state of Indiana – in line with a Home Ministry estimate.
In 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the Naxals the “single biggest internal security challenge to the Indian state.” The following 12 months, in one of the most infamous incidents of the battle, Naxals killed 76 members of the safety forces in an ambush in Chhattisgarh.
According to authorities estimates, left-wing extremism claimed practically 9,000 lives throughout the nation between 2004 and 2025. Accompanying the violence, each the Naxals and the safety forces – together with native militia raised to fight the rebels – have been accused of horrific human rights abuses, together with abductions, torture and rape.
Throughout the battle, rights teams have accused Indian safety forces of finishing up widespread extrajudicial executions of Naxals – after which claiming the killings passed off in self-defense, or in an alleged “encounter.”
Dressed in fight gear, a squad of the District Reserve Guard (DRG) stroll in single file alongside an empty highway in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district, one of the last Naxal holdouts.
Bastar’s hills and woods have seen some of the bloodiest combating of the insurgency. One safety official advised NCS that greater than 1,500 safety personnel have been killed by Naxals right here over the previous 30 years.
But there are indicators the authorities feels extra assured of its maintain over the space. Over the freeway main into Bastar now hangs a banner selling a nationwide public well being marketing campaign that has turn out to be one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signatures.
It’s mirrored in the DRG squad too, some of whom maintain their assault rifles with one hand, letting them dangle as they stroll. The DRG, shaped in 2008 to battle the Naxals, exit on two- or three-day patrols amongst the thick forests, rivers and hills. Their ranks are largely made up of former Maoists and Adivasis, enlisted as a result of of their familiarity with the area – and Naxal techniques.
“There are a lot of tough conditions,” says DRG member Dhansai Kashyap. “There are life-threatening dangers, but we have been taught well.”
In his workplace in the district capital of Jagdalpur, Bastar’s Inspector General for Police Sundarraj Pattilingam advised NCS he was assured the combat could be over quickly. As of March, the quantity of Naxals in the district was all the way down to “double digits,” he stated.
Around two weeks later, Pattilingam could be current at Papa Rao’s give up in entrance of the cameras.
Many Naxal commanders are not taken alive.
In the interview with NCS, Pattilingam reeled off an inventory of names of individuals who had been killed in latest months, killings that he says have severely impacted the rebels’ skill to function.
The state has thrown assets and personnel at the mission, which has helped, Pattilingam says. Information gleaned from surrendered Naxals has additionally fed into momentum, he says, serving to safety forces to mount additional operations.
He denied his forces have dedicated atrocities in opposition to the native tribal populations, including that any operations had been performed “according to the rules, laws and constitutional regulations.”
“We have clear instructions for our security personnel,” he says. “They have been sensitized.”
Sukhmati was one of those that surrendered, in October 2025, as the central authorities ramped up operations. She’s since been saved at a authorities facility as half of a rehabilitation program, together with different former Maoists NCS interviewed for this story. Speaking at the facility, in the presence of authorities officers, she was reluctant to enter particulars on the state of the rebellion when she determined to go away it.
“According to the changes, our struggle became weary in the new situation and taking the movement forward then was difficult,” she stated.
The Maoists’ shrinking realm sits atop wealthy veins of coal, iron, and bauxite – assets important to India’s modernization and rising vitality calls for; Modi’s pledge to convey electrical energy to each family; and his broader ambition to remodel India right into a developed nation.
Pattilingam, the policeman, says in addition to killing or arresting Naxals, half of the want is to “support development” and “create an opportunity for internal forest people and youth to be introduced to the outside world.”
In March, India’s residence minister declared that the combat in opposition to Naxalism had been received – to thunderous applause in parliament.
It’s not simply Naxal rebels who are on the again foot. In state elections this month an alliance led by above-ground communist events was voted out in the southern state of Kerala, the first time in many years that Marxist political events are not in energy in any of India’s states or territories.
But some are skeptical. A Naxal risk, actual or imagined, is additionally a handy manner for the authorities to tar any native protests in opposition to the push to open mines, stated tutorial Nandini Sundar.
“This artificial deadline (the government has given itself to eradicate Naxalism…) it’s never going to be full,” she advised NCS.
“Because if anyone protests against the mines, they’ll say ‘Oh, you know the Maoists are still there.’”
In March, earlier than he reached the spot the place his give up had been organized, Papa Rao sat down underneath a tree to speak to NCS.
His rifle was propped up in opposition to its trunk. Around its barrel was a bracelet bearing the phrase “Peace.”
“Our aim was to liberate the country,” he advised NCS, his voice skinny and lilting.
“The government has a lot of weapons and they threaten a lot of people. The Maoist party… was a small party and had fewer weapons.”