Mainstream WeeklyWhile the centrist-liberal Congress was unforgiving towards the Naxalites, but the right wing forces led by RSS and BJP are determined to wipe out the Maoists from the political map of the country and create a ’Maoist Mukta Bharat’ (Maoist Free India), as just they had pledged to create ’Congress Mukta Bharat’, soon after Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, which nonetheless could not be accomplished.
Ever since rightwing Modi government came to power eleven years ago at least 1000 hardcore Naxalite leaders, activists and Adivasi sympathisers have been killed by the state security forces. The future of the Naxalite movement has always been an important issue for discussion in political circles. For a long time, both the right and the centrist liberals have written an obituary of the movement. But after nearly sixty years of its emergence in the village of Naxalbari, Bengal, the insurgency continues to survive and spread, notwithstanding the state perpetrating the worst kind of repression and gunning down hundreds of its senior leaders over the years
Union Home Minister Amit Shah is confident of eliminating Naxalism by March 2026. For him, the killing of Keshav Rao alias Basavraju, general secretary of the CPI (Maoists) is a decisive blow to the movement. Surprisingly, it took ten years for him and his armed forces to track and kill Basavraju,