Maoist era is ending but Bastar’s Adivasis need a new dawn

There is a video in which the soldiers of the Chhattisgarh Police’s District Reserve Guard (DRG) are seen celebrating after they killed the top Maoist leader, Basavaraj. The DRG has worked hard in the last few years, and their celebration is well deserved. But once they go back to the barracks, one must think about the irony of a group of Adivasis working for the state killing another set of Adivasis working against the state. It won’t even be surprising if some of the hunters and the hunted came from the same village. The hunted are now in body bags and will be buried away from the gaze of our iPhones.

That is the real tragedy of Bastar, which we must keep in view even as we look forward to a time when the sun will set over a movement that a former prime minister called India’s biggest internal security threat. It’s not to blame one govt or the other; it’s about how the Indian state since Independence neglected a vast chunk of its people, leaving a void. Forty-five years before the police killed Basavaraj, his contemporaries entered Bastar for the first time. Their mission was clear: the man who had sent them — Kondapalli Seetharamaiah — wanted them to create a rear base in these parts. This was to ensure that when the state came after them, they would have a place to hide. Bastar and the other contiguous Adivasi areas around it provided just the right sanctuary. But in the process, they also exposed the utter neglect and apathy of the state. No development had reached here. The area, abundant in natural resources, was only a way of making money for the town businessmen and the big industrial houses. The state’s petty representatives like forest guards and revenue officers would harass and exploit the poor and the marginalised. The Maoists came in, promising an ideal state.

This should have brought the state’s benevolence. But instead, it brought more brute force. Soon, the Maoists also turned against the very people they had sought to protect and fight for. The Adivasis got caught in a vicious war between the guerrillas and the state. No matter which side one was on, it became very difficult for any reasoned individual to justify the violence. In the name of killing Maoists, the state committed many atrocities. In the name of fighting the state, the Maoists began brutal killings of the same people on suspicion of them being police informers. It is this recklessness that has finally brought us to the point where Adivasis, used to living in peace since the dawn of time, have been set against each other.

In the last few years, things began to change rapidly in left-wing extremism areas. The change was brought about by the laying of roads and cellphone networks. In the urban areas, if anyone from middle-class India had any sympathy for Maoists, it dissipated as their overground sympathisers began to hobnob with radical Islamists and began lending their support to sub-nationalism utopias, from Kashmir to the Northeast. The horrific killings of paramilitary forces whose body bags went to all corners of the country also created repugnance for them.
Basavaraj’s killing is a signal that the Maoist movement is in its last throes. Victory in the fight against the Maoists may as well be declared much before home minister Amit Shah’s March 2026 deadline. In the absence of old, committed cadres like Basavaraj, it will be impossible for the Maoist party to regroup or reassert themselves. Most of their experienced leadership is gone. Men and women like those who entered Bastar in 1980 are rare to find. They were radicalised in the ’70s and the ’80s and spent most of their adult life in the jungle or furthering the Maoist cause in urban areas, living clandestinely among the poor in slums and colonies. They had hoped, as the former top Maoist leader, Ganapathi, told me once, that the “revolution” would reach Gurugram from Giridih. But instead, the Maoists have been driven out of their last bastion.

Once they are gone, there is no excuse left for the state to not function at least at its basic level. The Adivasis have gone through hell in the vicious war, especially in the last two decades. It has been heartbreaking for some of us to see an Adivasi woman lying by the corpse of her husband or son, her hands behind her head, in silent mourning, but one whose sound is more piercing than the collective sorrow of the whole universe. The state must bring succour to Bastar. Development should not only mean roads and mobile towers. It should also not mean reckless mining and land grab of Bastar’s natural resources.