New Delhi, April 5 (IANS) Picture the forests of Bastar in 2013. No roads. No mobile signals. No banks. No schools worth the name. A parallel government, complete with its own courts, its own tax collectors and its own executioners, ruled these jungles by absolute terror. Tribal families buried their dead in silence, fearing that grief itself might draw suspicion. Security forces moved in convoys because moving alone meant dying.
India, the world’s largest democracy, had effectively ceded sovereign territory to a Maoist militia operating on the instructions of a long-dead Chinese dictator. Fifty-seven years of this. Twenty thousand dead. Twelve crore citizens held hostage to an insurgency that previous governments had quietly accepted as a permanent feature of the national landscape. Then, PM Narendra Modi assumed office. And everything changed.
Sixty years of failure: The Inheritance PM Modi walked into
Naxalism did not persist because it was undefeatable. It persisted because defeating it required political will that successive governments refused to summon. Congress, which governed India for sixty of its seventy-five post-Independence years, found tribal grievance more useful as a narrative than as a problem to be solved. The result was catastrophic: 20,000 lives lost, 5,000 of them security personnel, and 12 crore citizens permanently outside the constitutional tent. When PM Modi inherited this in 2014, he inherited not just an insurgency. He inherited half a century of institutional betrayal.
The Masterstroke: PM Modi fuses welfare and security into one doctrine
PM Modi’s decisive contribution was an insight that sounds simple but had eluded every predecessor: tribal welfare and national security are not separate problems. They are one. Every previous government ran security operations in one lane and development in another, rarely coordinated, frequently working against each other. PM Modi fused them into a single, non-negotiable doctrine.
For the first time, the constitutional promise reached the actual doorstep. Pucca houses. Gas cylinders. Clean water. Jan Dhan accounts. Food security. Insurance. The state did not merely send in forces. It sent in the Constitution, household by household, village by village. PM Modi understood the truth that had been studiously avoided for decades: an insurgency feeds on the vacuum the state leaves behind. Fill that vacuum completely, and the insurgency starves. Twelve years of that clarity delivered what sixty years of managed ambivalence could not.
HM Amit Shah: The Man who set a deadline and kept it
Strategic vision needs an executor of rare quality. In Home Minister Amit Shah, PM Modi found one. Amit Shah brought to the Home Ministry a combination of a commander’s decisiveness paired with a strategist’s astuteness and patience.
In August 2024, HM Shah announced publicly that India would be Naxal-free by March 31, 2026. Not a hope or an aspiration. A hard, public commitment. A deadline set by a minister with an unbroken record of delivery concentrates resources, compresses timelines and sends an unmistakable message to every wavering cadre in the forest: the endgame has begun. Come in now.
A Parliamentary address that history will record
Home Minister Amit Shah’s ninety-minute address to Parliament on March 30 was one of the most commanding ministerial performances in the Lok Sabha in recent memory. Having personally reviewed over two thousand pro-Naxal articles in the preceding six days, he cited operation dates, committee structures, and surrender numbers with prosecutorial precision. He paid tribute to the fallen with dignity, without exploiting their sacrifice for effect. PM Modi described it as a speech filled with important facts, historical context and a decade of governmental effort. That commendation, from a Prime Minister, said everything.
The numbers that no propagandist can spin away
The data speaks without equivocation. In three years: 706 Naxalites neutralised, over 4,800 surrendered. In 2025 alone: 270 neutralised, 680 arrested, 1,225 laid down arms. The extremist Maoist Politburo dismantled: 12 top leaders killed, the sole remaining fugitive in active surrender talks. The dreaded 27-member state committee of the principal affected region wiped out entirely. Over the decade, more than 8,000 cadres have abandoned the armed movement.
The development record is equally unambiguous. 14,902 kilometres of roads built through the terrain of Maoist areas kept deliberately inaccessible for decades. 8,640 mobile towers commissioned, ending the communications blackout that insurgents weaponised for control. 179 Eklavya Residential Schools now functional. 5,899 post offices with banking services opened in LWE districts. These are not statistics. They are the Constitution, delivered at scale, across the most forgotten terrain in India.
Compassion as a weapon: Naming the propaganda for what it is
Even as this transformation unfolded on the ground, international platforms aligned with Maoist networks described security operations as genocide and portrayed killed armed commanders as martyrs of tribal India. HM Amit Shah exposed this with one precise observation: not one of those two thousand articles mourned the widows of security personnel. Not one grieved for the civilians killed in Maoist ambushes. Not one acknowledged the tribal families whose children were conscripted at gunpoint.
That silence is structural, not accidental. The Naxals never represented Adivasi India. It required the Adivasi suffering to remain unresolved to justify its own existence. Every road built and school opened under PM Modi was a direct blow to that argument. Selective compassion for armed insurgents, with none for their victims, is not humanitarianism. It is insurgent propaganda wearing a humanitarian mask.
Consolidating the win: The work that must not stop
Rehabilitation of surrendered cadres must be sustained with full seriousness. The remaining two affected districts must be brought entirely into the national mainstream. Development momentum in Bastar must not slow once the security headlines move on. The lesson of this decade is irreversible: comprehensive, consistent governance is the most powerful counter-insurgency instrument ever devised. That lesson must now become permanent policy, not merely operational memory.
A constitutional debt, finally settled
The forests of Bastar now have roads, schools and mobile signals. Children there will grow up knowing the Indian state as a protector, not a predator. The Maoist Politburo has been dismantled, cadre by cadre, committee by committee. On March 31, 2026, HM Amit Shah stood before Parliament and closed a chapter that sixty years of governments had chosen to leave open.
PM Narendra Modi provided the structural vision and insight that national security and the welfare of India’s most forgotten citizens are one indivisible obligation. HM Amit Shah provided the operational architecture, the public deadline, and the executive will to deliver it.
Together, in twelve years, the courageous leadership and vision of PM Narendra Modi, with diligent efforts and execution of HM Amit Shah has settled a constitutional debt that had accumulated over sixty years. That is not a political achievement. That is a civilisational one.
(The author is a senior advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India)
–IANS
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