After the killing of 31 Maoists in an encounter at Indravati National Park in Bijapur district on Sunday took the total number of them killed in Chhattisgarh escalated to 81 already this year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah reiterated his promise of extinguishing ‘ Left-wing extremism’ in the country by March 2026.. This was the second-largest Maoist casualty count in a single security strike, after 38 guerrillas were gunned down in Narayanpur's Thulthuli on October 3 last year.
The leaders of the anti-Operation Green Hunt Democratic Front, Dr. Parminder, Prof. Ak. Maleri and Buta Singh Mehmoodpur in no uncertain terms condemned the brutal killing of 31 Naxals, including 10 women, in the façade of an ‘encounter' in the National Park area of Chhattisgarh.
They summed up that the armed conflict with the Indian state in the form of Maoist and other armed insurgencies is the direct result of social upheaval stemming out of the anti-people policies and practices of the present political system based on grave injustice and chronic inequality.
The attack was crippling blow to the very foundation of the people’s lives and democratic resistance in Bastar, and not only on the Maoist forces. It epitomised the creation of a pro-corporate state governed by Hindutva neo-fascism.
Instead of treating the issue as a political problem, the Indian rulers have been adopting the policy of executing merciless killings of their own people by making the forest-mountain areas a vast hunting ground or base of security forces and security camps for decades. In a span of one year since January 2024, more than 350 extrajudicial killings in the name of 'encounters' have been executed by security forces in the Bastar region alone under ‘Operation Kagaar'. It is even more disturbing that tribal and other working-class youth are being drawn into the ranks of the state-run legal and illegal forces and used as pawns in the false pretext of ‘restoring law and order ‘to submerge the just struggles of the oppressed in cold blood.
The BJP's policy of ‘extinguishing Nasalism by March 2026’is a neo- fascist policy of paving the path for corporate projects to sprout in the name of so-called development. This policy jeopardises the interests of the country and hinders progress of the people. In fact, it is an anti-people conspiracy to install corporate projects by robbing the forest and hilly areas rich of natural resources, by supressing the democratic resistance for the protection of the natural right of the adivasi people over the water-forest-land, which cannot be accepted under any pretext. They appealed to all democratic and justice loving forces to raise their voice against such organised genocide.
The Indian rulers have turned the forest belt of central India into a slaughterhouse for Naxalite/Maoist revolutionaries and tribals. Bastar is particularly heavily militarized because it is considered a stronghold of the Maoist movement. Hundreds of security camps have been set up and the entire area is tightly cordoned off. In most parts of Bastar, a security camp has been set up every four to five kilometers.
Illegal arrests, detentions, looting, sexual terrorism, kidnapping and killings in encounters are a routine occurrence.
A narrative has been manufactured that the tribal areas are not being ‘developed’ due to Naxal violence because the Naxals preventing roads and bridges to be built; it is also propagated that the Naxals are not even allowing schools to be built because they do not want the tribals to be educated. The truth is that schools have never been constructed in most areas, with the institutions that were built, been paralysed due to government terrorism. To mask the real motive of laying a trap for paramilitary forces, this false propaganda is being spread that they are being built to sponsor and protect ‘development’ projects. The truth is that the sole objective of ‘modernisation’ of the police forces is to crush tribal resistance.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah has been repeatedly declaring that Maoism will be eradicated by March 31, 2026. It is clear from the repeated incidents of a few dozen Naxalite being rounded up and killed by thousands of security forces/special forces that the prime objective of the Indian rulers is to physically extinguish the Naxalite revolutionaries and they do not want to find a political solution to the issue at all. The government and the fake media are camouflaging the root cause of the issue through the trumpeting of vulgar celebrations of the success of the 'anti-Naxalite campaign' and through false government narratives. The so-called 'mainstream' of Indian politics justifies these extrajudicial killings claiming that Naxalite 'violence' endangers the rule of law and that since Naxalite violate the Constitution, it is justified to even break their own laws to wipe them out.
All democrats must demand termination to fake encounters, drone attacks and other forms of killings in tribal areas, the removal of security camps and the immediate withdrawal of special security forces from tribal areas; the eradication of the pro-corporate economic model, which is a an instrument of displacement and corporate control; the recognition of the natural right of tribal people to water, forest and land; stopping the suppression of mass movements and their fabrication,; and an end to the policy of crushing dissent rights activists by implicating them in false cases for questioning the anti-people policies of the ruling class.
Organised democratic protests involving all strata of society, are imperative and the very need of the hour, all over the nation, to expose the link of such massacre with corporate loot and Hindutva neo-fascism as a whole.
Harsh Thakor is freelance journalist. Thanks information from Parminder Singh of Democratic Front against Operation Greenhunt and Buta Singh Mehmoodpur in ‘Naxalbari movement facing brutal suppression in Bastar ’ in journal Surkh Leeh.
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