Is this the end for India's Maoist insurgency?

After nearly 60 years of violence, the jungle-based struggle for communist rule in India could finally be coming to an end. Operation Kagar, a military offensive launched by Indian security forces in April this year, has apparently reduced to remnants the once-powerful Naxalite insurgency group. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi's crackdown on the guerrilla movement "comes at a bloody price", and may, critics say, be motivated by something "other" than a "wish for peace", said The Guardian.

Agrarian revolution

The Naxalite insurgency began in 1967, with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal. Inspired by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and Marxist-Leninist ideology, the rebels advocate for class struggle and agrarian revolution through armed resistance. Their aim is to overthrow the government and establish a communist state.

The insurgents say their fight is for the rights of indigenous tribes and the rural poor, pointing to decades of state neglect and land dispossession. Since 2000, violence between insurgents and security forces has claimed nearly 12,000 lives, more than 4,000 of them civilian, according to the South Asian Terrorism Portal.

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The strength of the insurgency has "surged" at various points over the past 50 years, said The Guardian. During its "peak" in the early 2000s, the Naxalites controlled "large swathes of the country, known as the 'red corridor'", and had more than 30,000 foot soldiers. But now there are thought only to be about 500 active fighters, operating in "limited districts".

Corporate interests

Last month, India's most-wanted Naxalite, Nambala Keshava Rao, was cornered and killed, along with 26 others, in a major attack, described by Home Minister Amit Shah, as "the most decisive strike" against the Maoist insurgency in three decades, said the BBC. The moment marked "more than a tactical victory", it also signalled a "breach in the Maoists' last line of defence in Bastar", the densely forested heartland that's been the group's "fiercest stronghold" since the 1980s.

The government crackdown has its sceptics, however, given the Naxalite leaders' repeated calls, since the start of the year, for a ceasefire and peace negotiations. The government has "ignored" these calls, said The Guardian, reinforcing a "suspicion among activists and lawyers" that the main motive for the crackdown is "not peace but corporate interests". The forests in which the insurgents have historically operated are "rich with coal and minerals", such as iron ore, and some of India's biggest industrialists have plans to expand their mining operations there, with government backing.

"This is not an anti-Maoist operation; it is a killing spree," N. Venugopal, a newspaper editor who has spent years writing about the Naxalite movement, told The Guardian. The security forces have "become like bounty hunters, killing for rewards".

Modi's government has vowed that the Maoist insurgency will be "completely eradicated" by March 2026, so this "battle-hardened" story of rebellion "stands at a crossroads", said the BBC. It remains to be seen if this is "truly the end" or "just another pause in its long, bloody arc".