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How did Bastar become the epicentre of India’s Maoist insurgency? ‘Rebel Bastar’ by Shantanu Nandan Sharma traces the region’s history of tribal resistance, colonial intervention, governance and Maoism.
In March 2026, the Government of India announced that the Maoist insurgency had been effectively defeated in Bastar, after almost two decades of violence. But to understand why and how Bastar became the epicentre of one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies in the first place, we must go deep into the region’s history.
Colonial Origins and the Bhumkal Rebellion (1910)
The Maoist insurgency did not emerge in a political vacuum. Bastar had a long history of resistance to outside control over land and forests. Under colonial rule, the British progressively brought forests and natural resources under state control, restricting customary Adivasi access to forests. These policies contributed to the Bhumkal rebellion of 1910, associated particularly with the Adivasi leader Gunda Dhur. Although the rebellion was suppressed, resistance to external control over forests and land remained part of Bastar’s political memory.
The Post-Independence Years (1947-1967)
Many of the structural problems persisted even after Independence: weak state institutions, exploitation by traders and contractors, restrictions on forest use, debt, displacement, and limited access to education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Scholars have consequently argued that the Maoists were able to establish themselves partly because they entered a landscape where the relationship between the state and Adivasi communities was already deeply strained. Maoism was not the cause of Bastar’s grievances of external control over “jal, jangal and zameen” — the water, forests and land — which made Bastar such fertile ground for insurgency; it was the outcome of them.
Naxalbari and the People’s War
The Naxalite movement began with the 1967 Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal, but by the 1970s one of its most important centres had shifted to Andhra Pradesh. In 1980, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah founded the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War, usually called the People’s War Group (PWG). In June 1980, the PWG sent its first small armed squads across the Godavari into Dandakaranya, the enormous forest belt extending across parts of present-day Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Odisha. Bastar constituted a major part of this territory.
The guerrillas spent years establishing relationships with villages, organising peasants and Adivasis, intervening in disputes and challenging local exploiters. They established organisations such as the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangh, while gradually building armed formations. This combination of social work, political mobilisation and guerrilla warfare was crucial to their success. By the late 1980s, the PWG had developed a substantial presence in Bastar and the wider Dandakaranya region.
The 1990s were the period in which the Maoists became deeply embedded in parts of southern Bastar. The organisation increasingly filled the vacuum left by an absent state. In some villages, Maoist structures became the institutions through which disputes were settled, taxes or levies collected, forests regulated, and development decisions made.
But this period also marked the beginning of a more systematic militarisation of the region. The Maoists began attacking police and government infrastructure, recruiting increasingly large numbers of local cadres and constructing a guerrilla army. By the mid-1990s, they had established their first platoons in Dandakaranya.
At the same time, the state was becoming increasingly interested in Bastar’s vast mineral and forest wealth. The region contains deposits of iron ore, bauxite, coal and other minerals. Roads, mining projects and industrial infrastructure became increasingly important sources of conflict. In September 2004, the People’s War Group merged with the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), another major Naxalite organisation, creating the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
This was a major turning point in Bastar’s history of insurgency and counter-insurgency. The new organisation possessed a much broader geographical network and a more unified military and political command. Bastar became its most important stronghold.
The Maoists established what they called 'Janatana Sarkars' or people’s governments in areas where the formal state had little presence. They operated courts, collected levies, recruited cadres, and maintained armed formations. By the mid-2000s, large parts of southern Bastar had effectively become contested territory.
Salwa Judum (2005–2011)
In 2005, a movement called ‘Salwa Judum’ emerged in the Dantewada region of Chhattisgarh. It was initially presented as a popular Adivasi mobilisation against Maoist coercion. Some villagers genuinely did oppose the Maoists and participated voluntarily. But the movement rapidly became intertwined with the state security apparatus.
The Chhattisgarh government armed and recruited local young men as Special Police Officers (SPOs) and used Salwa Judum as part of its counterinsurgency strategy. Villages were divided between people perceived to be pro-Maoist and those aligned with the government. Villagers were moved into roadside camps; others fled into forests or across state borders. The result was catastrophic.
Human-rights investigations documented killings, sexual violence, burning of villages, forced displacement and abuses committed by both Maoists and Salwa Judum/security personnel. The Maoists responded with their own campaign of assassinations, attacks and reprisals. Bastar’s villagers increasingly became the terrain on which two armed projects fought each other. In 2011, the Supreme Court, in ‘Nandini Sundar & Others v. State of Chhattisgarh’, ordered the disbanding of Salwa Judum and held that the state’s arming of civilians as SPOs violated constitutional principles. The judgment became one of the most significant judicial interventions in the history of the conflict.
Operation Green Hunt
Following Salwa Judum, the state moved increasingly toward a conventional counterinsurgency model. The Centre deployed large numbers of CRPF and other paramilitary forces, while Chhattisgarh expanded its police and specialised counterinsurgency units.
The period from 2009 to 2011 is commonly associated in public discourse with 'Operation Green Hunt'. The term was used widely by journalists and commentators, although government officials disputed the idea that there was a formally designated operation by that name.
The Maoists responded with increasingly sophisticated ambushes, landmines and attacks on security forces. On 6 April 2010, Maoists ambushed a large CRPF contingent in the Tadmetla/Chintalnar area of Dantewada. 76 security personnel were killed. It was one of the deadliest single attacks on Indian security forces in the history of the insurgency and demonstrated how powerful the Maoist military apparatus had become. The attack also exposed the limitations of sending relatively inexperienced security personnel into extremely difficult terrain without adequate local intelligence. The following years saw some of the worst violence of the conflict.
On 25 May 2013, Maoists ambushed a Congress political convoy in the Darbha Valley of Bastar. Among those killed were senior Congress leaders, including Mahendra Karma, the principal political face of Salwa Judum, and Chhattisgarh Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel.
The Final Offensive
The final phase of the conflict began around 2024. The Union government set 31 March 2026 as its target for eliminating Left-Wing Extremism. Chhattisgarh consequently intensified operations dramatically. The campaign involved large-scale deployments, intelligence-led operations and the construction of additional forward operating bases. According to government and security-force accounts, the result has been a dramatic reduction in Maoist strength. An Indian Express assessment published in March 2026 reported that 531 Maoists had been killed in Chhattisgarh during the preceding two years, while numerous senior members of the CPI (Maoist) leadership had been killed or surrendered.
Among the most consequential developments was the killing of Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju, the CPI (Maoist)’s general secretary, in May 2025. Senior commanders subsequently surrendered or were killed, including figures who had spent decades operating in Dandakaranya. By March 2026, government estimates suggested that the number of active Maoist cadres in Chhattisgarh had fallen to roughly 100. There is now widespread agreement that the Maoist insurgency in Bastar has been severely weakened.
The Long Shadow of Human Rights Violations and Extrajudicial Killings
This apparent success came with allegations of widespread human rights violations and extrajudicial killings of Adivasi youth under the pretext of being Maoist insurgents from controversial “encounter” operations conducted by state security forces. Local tribal communities, human rights groups, and independent investigation bodies have frequently challenged official accounts, asserting that innocent Adivasis are often falsely branded as Maoists after being killed or detained in dense forest zones.
In 2012, 17 Adivasi people were killed in Sarkeguda village, and in 2013, eight were shot in Edasmeta. A judicial inquiry led by High Court judges found all victims to be innocent, unarmed civilians, and noted that security forces opened fire unilaterally. In June 2021, security personnel in Latehar, Jharkhand, reported killing a Maoist during a gunfight. However, a fact-finding report by the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha (JJM) identified the victim as 24-year-old Bramhadev Singh, who was out with his family for a traditional festival hunting ritual. He was shot during a panicked retreat when the group saw the officers. The police later admitted the killing was a case of mistaken identity. In May 2024, paramilitary forces killed 12 people in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh, declaring them members of the banned CPI (Maoist). Local villagers and tribal activists organised mass protests, stating the deceased were ordinary Adivasi civilians dragged from the forest while gathering traditional tendu leaves.
Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India’s Heartland
Senior journalist and historian Shantanu Nandan Sharma examines this larger history in ‘Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India’s Heartland’. Drawing on more than three decades of journalism, extensive field reporting and historical research, Sharma moves beyond the familiar narrative of encounters and counterinsurgency to trace the forces that shaped Bastar across centuries.
The result is an attempt to understand Bastar not only as the site of an insurgency, but as a historically distinctive region whose relationship with power, governance, development, and its natural resources has been repeatedly contested. In doing so, Sharma asks a question that remains relevant even after the guns have fallen silent: what histories and unresolved questions made the insurgency possible in the first place?
