A joint operation conducted by 1,000 security personnel from the Special Task Force and the District Reserve Guard from the Dantewada and Narayanpur districts of Chhattisgarh in the forest of Abujhmad eliminated 31 Maoists on Friday and Saturday, making it the biggest success for the law enforcement agencies this year.
This is the tenth such encounter conducted by security agencies in Chhattisgarh this year. All of them together have resulted in the deaths of 188 left-wing extremists. That’s almost equal to the 206 killed in the last five years (2019-2023).
The present operation is a significant milestone in the government’s coordinated onslaught to smoke out Maoists from one of their last strongholds, the Abujhmad forest, spread across 6,000 square kilometres between Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra.
Aside from killing the largest number of Maoists in a year, the security personnel also recovered 4,000 square kilometres of thick forest land, three times the size of the Union Territory of Delhi. It has not been surveyed by the government since Independence.
The concerted efforts by several state governments with active support from the Centre have reduced the Red Corridor from nine states — Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal — in the early 2000s to two major hotspots in Chhattisgarh and Odisha plus some marginal presence in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar by 2024.
With left-wing extremism in India on its last legs, the governments must now focus on these extremely backward regions. They became the breeding ground for violent Maoist ideology for the very same reason in the first place. Since state governments do have a major role in improving the lives of people, the Centre must extend adequate financial support to develop these regions. The governments should also protect locals from being exploited by non-local profiteering enterprises and get them to enjoy the fruits of development in order to permanently end the scourge of left-wing extremism.
