Communist Party of India (Maoist)

The Communist Party of India (Maoist), commonly abbreviated CPI (Maoist), was constituted on 21 September 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) People's War, known as the People's War Group, and the Maoist Communist Centre of India. The organisation traces its ideological lineage to the Naxalbari uprising of May 1967 in West Bengal, an armed peasant revolt led by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal that gave the broader movement its enduring name, Naxalism. The party professes Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and explicitly rejects parliamentary democracy, electoral participation, and the Indian Constitution, seeking instead to seize power through a protracted armed struggle modelled on Mao Zedong's strategy. It was formally proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the Government of India under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, in June 2009, and stands listed in the First Schedule of that Act.

The party's organising doctrine is the protracted people's war, a phased strategy that progresses from a strategic defensive through strategic equilibrium to a strategic offensive culminating in the encirclement of cities from the countryside. Operationally this is executed by building base areas in remote forested and tribal districts, establishing parallel administrative structures known as Janathana Sarkar (people's governments), and raising military formations. The armed wing, the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, was founded on 2 December 2000 and is structured into platoons, companies, and battalions, supplemented by local guerrilla squads (dalams) and a village-level militia. The party is governed by a Central Committee and a Politburo, with regional, zonal, and divisional committees beneath them, and it sustains itself through extortion, levies on tendu leaf and mining contractors, and seizure of weapons from security forces.

A defining feature of CPI (Maoist) operations is the concept of the Red Corridor, a contiguous belt of affected districts historically running across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal. Within this geography the party concentrated its strongest base in the Dandakaranya region, particularly the Bastar division of Chhattisgarh and the Abujhmad forests. The movement exploits genuine grievances over land alienation, displacement by mining and dam projects, denial of forest rights, and the weak penetration of state institutions among Adivasi populations, positioning itself as a defender of jal, jangal, zameen (water, forest, land) while simultaneously coercing those same communities.

Contemporary counter-insurgency has measurably shrunk the movement. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs reduced the number of districts officially designated as affected by left-wing extremism from 126 in 2010 to far fewer by the 2020s, and Union Home Minister Amit Shah set a public deadline of 31 March 2026 to eliminate the insurgency. Major reverses for the party include the killing of senior leader Cherukuri Rajkumar (Azad) in 2010, the death of military chief Nambala Keshava Rao (Basavaraj), the party's general secretary, in an operation in Chhattisgarh in May 2025, and the steady attrition of cadres in Bastar. The 6 April 2010 Dantewada ambush, in which 76 CRPF personnel were killed, and the 25 May 2013 Jhiram Ghati attack that wiped out much of the Chhattisgarh Congress leadership, remain the movement's most lethal strikes.

CPI (Maoist) must be distinguished from the constitutional parliamentary left. The Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) are legal electoral parties that contest elections and have governed states; CPI (Maoist) is a proscribed underground organisation that condemns them as revisionist. It is equally distinct from the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation, a separate Naxalite-origin party that abandoned armed struggle and entered electoral politics. The label "left-wing extremism" used in official Indian discourse refers specifically to the armed Maoist stream, not to lawful communist activity, and the term Naxalite, though historically broad, is now used synonymously with the CPI (Maoist) insurgency.

The organisation generates persistent controversy over the conduct of counter-insurgency itself. The Salwa Judum, a state-supported vigilante militia raised in Chhattisgarh in 2005, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of India in the Nandini Sundar v. State of Chhattisgarh judgment of 5 July 2011, which ordered its disbandment over the deployment of underage and inadequately trained Special Police Officers. Debates also surround the designation of activists and lawyers as "urban Naxals" or overground workers, the use of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in such cases, and the balance between security operations and development under schemes such as the Aspirational Districts Programme and the Security Related Expenditure scheme. Surrender-and-rehabilitation policies have drawn thousands of cadres out of the movement.

For the working practitioner, the CPI (Maoist) remains a central reference point in Indian internal security policy and a recurring theme in civil services examinations, particularly under General Studies Paper III. It illustrates the doctrinal architecture of an insurgency, the federal coordination required between the Union and the states under the constitutional placement of "police" and "public order" in the State List, and the dual track of kinetic operations and socio-economic development. Analysts tracking South Asian security, governance in tribal regions, and the trajectory of the 2026 elimination target treat the party's residual strength in Bastar and Jharkhand as the bellwether for whether India's longest-running internal armed conflict is approaching its end.