Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : Naxal Mukt Bharat as a step towards democratic politics and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has made it abundantly clear that it is aiming to achieve a Naxal Mukt Bharat by March-end. The massive surrenders by members of CPI (Maoist) since June 2025 indicates that they are on the right path vis-à-vis the stated objective. The violence and counter violence unleashed by the Indian State and the Maoist party is never going to solve the problem at hand. The revolutions in Cambodia, China, Columbia, Cuba and Vietnam provide ample evidence of the expansion of communism across the globe. Inspired by these international developments, the Communist Party of India (CPI) was established in 1920 immediately after the Second World Congress of the Communist Third International. The Marxist-Leninist politics in India was pursued by activists such as Muzaffar Ahmad, S A Dange, and Singaravelu Chettier, among others.
The Naxalbari uprisings critiqued the capitalist mode of development adopted by the Indian government. The split in CPI gave birth to two broad categories; one was revisionism that led to the formation of the first non-Congress government in West Bengal in 1967, while the0 other was the revolutionary method. Charu Mazumdar, through ‘historic eight documents’, called for ‘people’s protracted war’ hoping to replicate the Chinese mode of agrarian revolution. Meanwhile, Naxalbari uprisings attracted the attention of China. The July 5, 1967 editorial of People’s Daily of Beijing called it ‘spring thunder over India’.
On one side, the movement was led by Charu Mazumdar and named Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969 and People’s War Group (PWG) under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamaiah and Dr Kolluri Chiranjeevi in 1980. The goal of PWG was to “uplift the downtrodden tribal people who are considered the lowest rungs of Indian society.”
The revolution didn’t take place in West Bengal, while the Andhra Pradesh government formed a special GreyHounds police force to fight the people’s guerrilla forces in 1989.
Augmented by the national and international developments the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist), PWG and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI) came together to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004.
According to the Global Attack Index, 2016, the CPI (Maoist) was one of the top terrorist organisations in the world.
The demise of the central committee members of the CPI (Maoist) in a series of encounters reflect the assertive approach of the Union Government to put an end to the political ideology of Marx-Lenin-Mao. The insurrectionary zeal of adivasis was tapped and exploited by the CPI (Maoist) to achieve their political goal of “new democratic revolution” through “protracted people’s war”. The party perceives “this revolution is the part of world proletarian revolution, which has begun with the Great October Revolution of Russia as a historical continuum.
The Government of India refused the Maoist party’s willingness to hold talks and adopted zero tolerance towards them and their ideologues. The ongoing insurrection in central and eastern India is a classic case where the Maoist party has undertaken violent methods to achieve the “new democratic revolution” through “people’s protracted war”.
The parliamentary politics and its governance are ineffective in implementing the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. This is tantamount to ideological decline in Indian politics with particular reference to independent India. Seminal works like “The End of Ideology” and Mostafa Rejai’s “Decline of Ideology” substantiate this point. The decline of ideology has taken place rapidly with power assuming the highest value among political parties.
Fight for equality & justice
The sixty years of Naxalbari insurrection provide a national context in revisiting the tactics of Communist Parties of India, including the CPI (Maoist) party to bring social change in the country. Globally, the centenary of the Russian Revolution signifies the need to look at the constitutional methods to resolve issues of socio-economic and political inequality and the concerns of rights and justice to the most disadvantaged sections of the society. The decline of political morality among the national and regional parties is effectively corroding the constitutional philosophy and democratic tradition in the country.
Peace and non-violence have significant lessons for both the modern Indian State and the CPI (Maoist) party to strike a balance between revolutionary vs. parliamentary politics.
Democracy requires insurrection as an active part of citizenship. What is going on in the Fifth Schedule areas is a fight for the issues of land rights, equality and justice and not so the sovereign challenge to the Indian state.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Symbiosis Law School, Pune, Symbiosis International (Deemed University). Views expressed are personal)