India’s government is conducting an all-out military offensive against a country’s diminished and decades-old Maoist insurgency, with Home Minister Amit Shah vowing to “eradicate” the movement’s final remnants by early next year.
We examine the history of one of Asia’s longest-running armed rebellions, which has killed more than 12,000 people since it began in the 1960s:
How Did The Insurgency Begin?
A 1967 rural revolt against exploitative landlords set in motion an insurgency that has rumbled on for much of India’s history as an independent nation.
Inspired by Maoist doctrine, peasants armed with spears and bows began seizing land in Naxalbari, a small and picturesque village in the Himalayan foothills.
The poorly organized uprising was swiftly crushed, but it inspired other armed groups to mobilise and demand land redistribution, and it also gave the emergent guerrilla force, known in India as the Naxalites, its name.
In the 1980s, one faction moved into forested lands in central India after resolving to expand its struggle to include attacks on police and paramilitary forces.
The dense jungles of Bastar, the present-day heartland of the insurgency in Chhattisgarh state, became a hideout and staging post for guerrilla actions elsewhere in the country.
Maoists cultivated support from the area’s tribal population by helping them campaign for proper land titles and better prices for forest produce.
How Powerful Were The Maoists At Their Peak?
The Naxalite movement significantly gained momentum in 2004 when two separate factions joined forces to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
According to a party document from the time, its stated aim was to establish a “people’s government” by “destroying, through war, the present autocratic state machinery.”
At their peak in the mid-to-late 2000s, the rebels had an estimated strength of 15,000 to 20,000 armed cadres and operated in districts equivalent to nearly a third of India’s landmass.
In vast swathes of this territory, known as the “Red Corridor”, the guerrillas effectively shut out the government and created their own parallel administration.
The rebels were known to maintain a tight grip in those areas, often executing individuals on mere suspicion of spying for government forces.
The period also saw some of the most lethal attacks by the Maoists on Indian state troops.
A 2010 forest ambush in Chhattisgarh killed 76 paramilitary troops — the single deadliest attack on Indian security forces by the insurgents.
An attack on a political convoy three years later killed more than two dozen people and effectively wiped out the top state leadership of Congress, India’s oldest party.
How Does The Rebellion Stand Now?
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh said during his tenure in 2009 that the Maoist insurgency was “the biggest internal security threat” India faced.
His government overhauled its strategy to deploy large contingents of paramilitary troops into Maoist hotspots.
Many rights groups and activists criticised the approach, citing high levels of collateral deaths among forest-dwelling tribal communities caught between the troops and the insurgents.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government kept up the sustained counterinsurgency, and the Maoist movement has now been severely depleted.
Police in Chhattisgarh told AFP they now estimate the guerrillas to have a fighting strength of 1,000 to 1,200 cadres — a figure impossible to independently verify.
But other metrics also suggest the government has the upper hand.
The combined number of civilian and security forces deaths in the conflict declined by 85 percent between 2010 and last year, figures presented to India’s parliament in March showed.
According to the same data, the number of Maoist attacks in a calendar year declined from more than 1,900 to 374 over that period.
Security forces killed 287 rebels last year, according to government figures, the highest since 2009.
More than 100 others were killed in the first three months of this year.
Via: Agence France-Presse
