Deadlines and Disappearances: The Last Stand of the Revolutionary Left

The Wire

13-07-2025

Shyam Tekwani
4 minutes ago
As the Modi government sets a kill-by date for ending the Maoist insurgency, a deeper reckoning unfolds in Bastar's forests, where refusal persists long after revolution has faded. This is not the end of an ideology, but an attempt at bureaucratic deletion of memory and grievance and of the land itself.
In this image via Palamu Police, Security personnel at the site after a commander of the CPI (Maoist) was killed in a gunfight with the forces, in Jharkhand's Palamu district, Tuesday, May 27, 2025. (Palamu Police via PTI Photo)
It sounds like a fiction Orwell might have sketched in the margins of 1984: a modern state affixing a "kill-by" date to its own citizens.
The Indian home minister's voice, flat with triumph, announced it plainly: the country would be "Naxalite-free by March 31, 2026." No caveats. No footnotes. A deadline: stamped, sealed, and sanctioned.
A deadline declared, for a war that wouldn't end
This declaration, on paper, was of resolve. In the forests of Chhattisgarh, it sounded like an ultimatum. A clock had begun ticking, not toward peace, but toward erasure. The deadline was not a plan. It was a purge by calendar, bureaucratic violence rendered as progress.
The war against India's Maoist insurgency is now nearly six decades old. It endures, not as ideology, but as refusal. It is the deep, slow resistance of rock against erosion, a silent declaration that some ground will not be yielded.
What does it mean to wage war on a memory?
From a peasant uprising in Naxalbari in 1967, the movement once stretched across a third of the country, its fighters dug into the forests, its sympathisers scattered across university campuses and marginal farmlands alike. But the rebellion was never meant to be permanent. It was, in its imagination, a fire to be lit, to engulf, to transform.
Instead, it endured, scorched, hunted, diminished and dispersed. It smouldered not in doctrine but in memory.
It mutters in the leaves, in the bodies unclaimed, in the names unspoken.
And now, it is to be extinguished.
Operation Kagar and the bureaucracy of violence
In April, the Minister doubled down on the state's newest campaign, Operation Kagar. Over 400 alleged Maoists have been killed since the beginning of 2024, 140 in the first three months of 2025 alone, many with bounties placed on their heads. There was no official response to proposals for a ceasefire. Dozens of 'surrenders' have been paraded on television. The killing of Basavaraju, the Naxalite commander-in-chief, was hailed as a 'decisive blow,' a ' turning point,' a punctuation mark on an era the state had already declared over.
The official line is clear: the Red Corridor is closing, as if rebellion could be mapped in ink and sealed by decree. But insurgencies don't end by press release.
Even as the state sets its definitive deadlines, the Naxalite movement, in its deep-rooted resistance, holds to its own calendar of remembrance, marking July, for instance, with solemn commemorations of Charu Majumdar's death, an event that continues to fuel their narrative of defiance despite official attempts to relegate it to forgotten history.
Elsewhere, the political weather has shifted: the world lurches rightward. The age of the charismatic technocrat and the flag-wrapped populist is ascendant. Nationalism is resurgent. Borders are sacred again.
Yet, a compelling paradox persists: as the world lurches right, the revolutionary Left, against all odds, like smoke trapped under stone, continues to draw breath. In the Indo-Pacific, the answer lies not in theory, but in geography: in mountains, jungles, and rivers that do not forget.
Forests do not forgive. They absorb. Slowly. Without permission.
Across the region, insurgent movements of the Left ended in different ways. In Nepal, a decade of war gave way not to defeat but absorption; Prachanda, the guerrilla, became prime minister; he now sits in parliament. The revolution was mainstreamed, not fulfilled. In Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna rose and was crushed, twice, its history folded into slogans, its ghosts buried in unmarked graves. Its leader is now the country's president. In the Philippines, the New People's Army endures as Asia's oldest communist insurgency, not as threat but as haunting; ritual without momentum, grievance without ground. Elsewhere, the Left either seized the state or was buried beneath it.
But only in India does the rebellion persist, not as strategy, nor even as doctrine, but as sediment. Dust that does not settle, only stirs. The forest does not forget. The land quietly, and without apology, refuses its appropriation.
Only here has the rebellion outlived its revolution.
A cartography not of hope, but of containment
The state calls it the Red Corridor, a diagonal scar stretching from Andhra Pradesh to the forests of Bastar in southern Chhattisgarh. Once it ran wider: into Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra. Now it has been narrowed, militarised and renamed.
On maps, the area is shaded in warning colours. In policy memos, it is referred to as 'left-wing extremism–affected districts.' In the field, it is something else entirely: a place where language ends and logistics begin.
The Naxalite movement in India is not what it was. It has no cities. No ideology beyond survival. But the rebellion, stripped of its verses, found new voice in the roots and red earth. Its logic remains, written not in theory but in terrain.
It is no longer about Marx. It is about land.
In Bastar, refusal has shape. For decades, the forests here have stood in quiet refusal, resisting mining leases, road surveys, the desecration of burial grounds, resettlement schemes, paramilitary encampments. The rebellion is now embedded in the trees, in the memory of what was taken. In Bhoramdeo, a hill once circled by prayer has been marked for limestone extraction. Now, its slopes buzz with drills, not chants. In the forests, the drone hum never quite fades, and the soil near the old river crossings tastes faintly of iron and ash.
Adivasis in the crosshairs
The violence, when it comes, comes without warning. A patrol van ambushed. A landmine in a clearing. A retaliatory raid. How do you throw a bomb from a drone and know it will land only on a Maoist? You don't.
In Karregutta, drones circled for days before the shelling began. Helicopters fired into ridgelines. Later, officials claimed that 'technical units' for IED fabrication had been destroyed. But the corpses were recovered slowly, some unidentifiable, others wrapped in yellow plastic. Ferried down, slowly, from the hills. You name the corpse after the fact and hope the press release gets it right. Headlines celebrate '31 Maoists killed'; weeks later, the names don't match, and a father waits by the roadside for a body that never comes. The corpses never explain themselves.
Adivasis live between the crosshairs. They are told the insurgents are their enemies. Then they are told the insurgents were once them. In Bastar, enemies are chosen retroactively. Today's suspect was yesterday's sympathiser. The past is always rewritten in the tense of the victor. Here, history is not merely forgotten; it is systematically unmade, line by line, as if by a Ministry of Truth.
The silence of the forest
According to published accounts from the field, the war has moved beyond combatants. Villages are razed. Women raped. 'Surrenders' are staged with locals in borrowed fatigues. Heron drones buzz overhead while schools are converted into camps. Development arrives, not with fanfare, but wrapped in camouflage netting, escorted by surveillance and suspicion. Here, progress marches in boots, ledger in hand, leaving behind ash where villages stood. Peaceful protests are treated as an 'unlawful activity' and banned.
The official narrative insists that victory is near. But in Bastar, no one speaks of endings. Only of movement, of migration, of patrols, of yet another body brought to the morgue, unidentified.
The Naxalites are often described as India's last armed revolutionaries. But what if that isn't quite true? What if they are less revolutionaries now than reminders, of a country still unsure what to do with its margins?
In Delhi, pundits debate policy. In Dantewada, facts are not corrected; they are buried. Language doesn't evolve here, it obeys orders.
The Left, as an idea, has faded in India's cities. Its vocabulary has grown brittle, its moral high ground muddied. But in the forests, the war was never theoretical. It was not about seizing the state. It was about keeping what little the state had never taken.
There is a temptation, especially among the middle classes, to see the Maoist movement as anachronism, dangerous, obsolete, incoherent. And yet, the persistence of violence cannot be explained away by irrelevance. A movement does not last fifty years because it is meaningless. It lasts because the grievance it articulates has never been resolved, only renamed.
To rename a grievance is to erase its cause. In official parlance, forest clearance becomes 'green development'; resistance becomes 'left-wing extremism.'
Memory is the last resistance
Elsewhere in the world, the Left surrendered. In Latin America, it negotiated. In Europe, it vanished into documentaries. But in India, it continues, beaten, mocked, surveilled, because the villages still burn, the mines still expand, and the state still cannot explain why development must arrive with so many coffins.
What does it mean to outlive one's ideology? Perhaps it means learning to fight for something more primitive than revolution: memory, land, absence. Not transformation, but interruption.
There are few photographs of this war. The land swallows evidence quickly. There is a photograph from long ago. A woman in a shawl stands in a clearing in Nepal, a rifle resting against her cheek. She does not pose. She does not smile. Her eyes do not challenge the lens. And yet they hold it, steadily, without apology. Behind her, the trees are patient. The silence has weight.
She was not famous. She did not rise to command. She likely never held office. But in that image is a trace of something the world is trying very hard to forget.
She does not represent victory. She represents presence. Not the kind that commands, but the kind that remembers.
'Progress' in fatigues
As India approaches 2026, the date fixed for the eradication of its last active Maoist cells, the question remains: what is really being eradicated? A threat? A rebellion? Or the final visible trace of a moral discomfort that the republic has never fully absorbed? The state does not just erase the insurgency, it erases the memory of the reasons it arose. History is redacted. Grievance becomes treason. Memory is proscribed.
What follows is not remembrance, but replacement. In the hollowed aftermath, the state raises no monuments; only corridors: roads wide enough for ore, slurry pipelines through scorched clearings and ghost villages renamed as development zones. Not justice, not reckoning, but a quieter violence: once-defiant land, stripped and rendered measurable, mute, and mined.
Deadlines, after all, are bureaucratic comforts. Revolutions no longer storm palaces. They dig in, like roots refusing the axe. Forests don't recognise deadlines. Grievances don't expire on cue.
The revolution will not end with surrender, but with deletion. History will be filed, sealed and lost, not to forgetfulness, but to instruction.
Somewhere in the red dust of Bastar, a child still learns to distinguish between the sound of thunder and the drone of a Heron. The state calls this progress. The land remembers it as a deadline, counting backward from erasure.
Somewhere, a mother buries a son with no certificate. Somewhere, someone will whisper the old songs again, quietly, under breath. Not in hope, but in refusal.
Refusal is not an act of power. It is the quiet breath of those who have nowhere left to go.
The Left has faded. Not vanished.
And perhaps, in some future footnote, written in the margins of another state's silence, Orwell will nod, not at ideology, but at the stubborn breath of the unnamed.
Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.