Operation Green Hunt

Operation Green Hunt is the popular and media-coined designation for the intensified, centrally coordinated counter-insurgency campaign launched by the Government of India against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) beginning in late 2009. No government order, statute, or cabinet decision ever formally christened any operation by that name; the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has repeatedly disowned the label, with then–Home Minister P. Chidambaram stating in Parliament that "there is no operation called Green Hunt." The campaign's legal and institutional basis rests instead on the constitutional division under which "police" and "public order" are State subjects (Seventh Schedule, List II, Entries 1 and 2), while internal-security coordination, deployment of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), and funding flow from the Union under the MHA. The CPI (Maoist) itself was proscribed as a terrorist organisation under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, in June 2009, furnishing the statutory predicate for the offensive.

Procedurally, the campaign operated as a multi-state, multi-agency push rather than a single time-bound military operation. The MHA designated a cluster of districts in the so-called Red Corridor as priority theatres and surged battalions of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), including its jungle-warfare specialist CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) units raised from 2008–09, alongside the Border Security Force and state armed police. Operations followed an "area domination" logic: CAPFs and state forces would clear Maoist-held forest tracts, establish forward operating bases and security camps, and attempt to hold ground long enough for road-building and development administration to follow. Intelligence coordination ran through the MHA's newly strengthened machinery, including the multi-agency apparatus reorganised after the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

The campaign was layered onto a pre-existing policy architecture. The MHA's integrated action and the parallel Integrated Action Plan (IAP), approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs in 2010 for an initial set of Maoist-affected districts, channelled block-level development grants to address the governance vacuum that the Maoists exploited. The Saranda forest of Jharkhand became an early showcase, where security clearance in 2011 was followed by the "Saranda Development Plan." The Greyhounds, Andhra Pradesh's elite anti-Naxal commando force established in 1989, served as the tactical model that several states sought to replicate. Surrender-and-rehabilitation schemes, cash rewards for senior cadres, and the controversial state-sponsored vigilante mobilisation set the broader counter-insurgency context within which the post-2009 surge unfolded.

The principal theatres were the contiguous forest districts of Chhattisgarh (Bastar, Dantewada, Sukma, Bijapur), Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Maharashtra (Gadchiroli), and West Bengal's Jangalmahal. The campaign's costliest single reverse came on 6 April 2010, when Maoists ambushed a CRPF column in Dantewada district, killing 76 personnel—the deadliest single attack on Indian security forces by the insurgency. Other landmark incidents include the May 2013 Jhiram Ghati ambush in Bastar that decimated the Chhattisgarh Congress leadership, and the April 2017 Sukma ambush that killed 25 CRPF men. Over the following decade the MHA reported a sustained decline in violence and a shrinking of the geographic footprint, with the number of "most affected" districts falling progressively under successive reviews.

Operation Green Hunt must be distinguished from Salwa Judum, the state-backed civilian militia in Chhattisgarh that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in Nandini Sundar v. State of Chhattisgarh (5 July 2011), ordering the disbandment of Special Police Officers deployed against Maoists. Green Hunt denotes the regular-force offensive, not the irregular vigilante experiment, though critics conflate the two. It is also distinct from later, more narrowly defined operations such as the SAMADHAN doctrine articulated by the MHA in 2017 and named operations like Prahar and the 2024 offensives in the Abujhmaad–Kanger Valley area. Whereas SAMADHAN is an official strategic framework, Green Hunt remains an unofficial umbrella term for the surge phase.

The campaign drew sustained controversy. Civil-liberties organisations, the People's Union for Civil Liberties, and writers such as Arundhati Roy characterised it as a war waged on India's poorest, adivasi-majority districts, alleging extrajudicial killings, fake encounters, and the use of mineral-rich tribal land as the underlying stake. The MHA countered that the Maoists imposed parallel governance, levied extortion, and obstructed schools, roads, and health posts. Debates over the deployment of the Army and Air Force were resolved by confining the military to training and limited transport and casualty-evacuation roles, preserving the principle that the response remained a police-led internal-security matter rather than a war. More recently, the government set a publicly stated target of eliminating Left-Wing Extremism by 31 March 2026, intensifying operations in the core Chhattisgarh forests.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant preparing General Studies Paper III, a home-ministry desk officer, or an analyst of internal security—Operation Green Hunt is a case study in the federal mechanics of counter-insurgency, the development-security nexus, and the limits of a kinetic approach absent local administrative penetration. It illustrates how Centre-State coordination, CAPF deployment, proscription under the UAPA, and parallel development planning interlock, and why the official-versus-popular nomenclature itself matters: the government's refusal to own the name reflects a deliberate framing of the response as routine policing rather than internal war, a distinction with real legal and constitutional consequences.