NAXALISM: FROM LENIN TO LINEN

A mudane day, the room was quite.. A tiny small thing given into her hand, almost embarrassingly small. A little bottle of colour, held between the fingers of the women who had spent years being told that there were much larger things to fight for. She looked at it for a while, then she opened it. The smell reached her first, she put the brush against her fingernail. One stroke… Then another and somewhere between the first and second, her shoulder suddenly began to tremble. She began to cry. The people around her did not understand. Why would something so ordinary cause such grief-It was the first time she had ever applied nail polish.

when someone placed a bottle of nail polish in her hand, she discovered that there were things a revolution had never taught her. How to adorn herself. How to be playful. How to be ordinary. Perhaps most importantly, how to choose. Resultantly she cried. That little bottle of colour is perhaps a more devastating indictment of an armed ideology than a thousand pages of political literature. Because behind every statistic on insurgency is a human being. Behind every “cadre” is somebody's son or daughter. And behind the woman holding a rifle may once have been a little girl who simply wanted to hold a doll. This is where the story of Naxalism needs to begin. Not with the gun. With the girl. I. THE ROAD FROM LENIN TO NAXALBARI Naxalism did not emerge in a historical vacuum. Its intellectual ancestry belongs to a much larger international history of revolutionary communism. Russia entered the twentieth century amid deep social inequality, political repression, economic distress and eventually the catastrophe of the First World War. The 1905 revolution and Bloody Sunday weakened the authority of Tsar Nicholas II; the First World War intensified shortages, inflation and social dislocation. In 1917, Nicholas II abdicated, and the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin ultimately seized power. China followed a different but related revolutionary trajectory. The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921. The May Fourth intellectual ferment had been influenced by the Russian Revolution, while China itself was weakened by foreign imperialism, unequal treaties, warlordism and economic hardship. The Communist-Kuomintang alliance collapsed in 1927, followed by the Shanghai massacre. Mao Zedong increasingly turned towards the peasantry and rural guerrilla warfare, eventually building revolutionary bases in the countryside. The Long March of 1934–35 became one of the defining episodes of the Chinese Communist movement. The significance of this history for India is that, Indian communism was simply “imported” from abroad and had nothing to with India and Indian. The revolutionary ideology that shaped Naxalism was unmistakably international in its intellectual genealogy-Marx, Lenin and, most consequentially for Naxalism, Mao. The Communist Party of India was formed in 1925. The CPI split in 1964, producing the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The Sino-Soviet split formed an important part of the international ideological context in which the Indian communist movement fractured. Then came Naxalbari. In 1967, a radical peasant uprising erupted in Naxalbari in West Bengal. Its leaders and ideological architects-including Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal became associated with a revolutionary current explicitly inspired by Maoist ideology.

In 1969, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was formed, not because of some drawback or incident that led to this but fight between CCP and Russian Federation led to this spilt. CPI (M-L) had no purpose of ‘development’ and ‘protection of rights’ for the people. Their constitution stated opposing parliamentary politics and launching armed revolution drawing parallel from Russia and China to fight against against aristocracy, which long ceased to exist in India. If it did so, Whose.. CONGRESS-ES ?! Only If they sought change in Republic, they could have contested the election, with people’s mandate they could have become a policymaker and a part of parliamentary democracy, instead they choose arms rebellion against the state.

II. INDIA ALREADY HAD A CONSTITUTION

There is an uncomfortable question at the heart of the Naxal story. If injustice existed-and it certainly did-why was armed revolution necessary? India in 1967 was far from the egalitarian republic its Constitution promised. There had been poverty. There had been land inequality. There might have been exploitation. There were enormous distances between Delhi and the most remote tribal hamlets. The newly independent Indian State itself was poor and institutionally young. Decades of colonial extraction had left the country with limited resources, low industrialisation, weak infrastructure and enormous developmental challenges. If poverty alone created Naxalism, every impoverished region of India should have become a theatre of Maoist insurgency. It did not. In the 1960s, Naxalbari had a literacy rate of roughly 35 per cent and a reported per-capita income of about ₹500, while Bastar's literacy was around 23 per cent and its per-capita income around ₹190. But Saharsa in Bihar, with literacy of roughly 33 per cent and per-capita income around ₹299, and Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, with roughly 31 per cent literacy and ₹374 per-capita income, did not develop into comparable Maoist theatres. Sansad Tv- Budget Session (30 March, 2026) Because geography mattered. The dense forests. The hills. The remoteness. The porous administrative presence. The possibility of guerrilla movement. And eventually, the ideological infrastructure. Poverty could create vulnerability. Geography created opportunity for Maowaad and Naxalwaad. But ideology converted both into insurgency.

III. BASTAR: WHERE THE FOREST BECAME A BATTLEFIELD

Bastar was not chosen accidentally. Its geography was extraordinarily favourable to guerrilla warfare. Dense forests and difficult terrain made it possible for armed groups to establish hideouts, move between villages and evade conventional security forces. But there was another tragedy. The people living in those forests had their own civilisational history. They had their own heroes. Their own traditions. Their own relationship with land and forest. Their own forms of community. For generations, Adivasi communities had looked towards figures such as Bhagwan Birsa Munda and Rani Durgavati Murmu as symbols of resistance, dignity and indigenous assertion. These revolutionary vocabulary offered them something very different: their inspiration was reduced to an ideology which had nothing to do with this counry but to Mao and Lenin.

IV. THE GREAT IRONY OF DEVELOPMENT

The Maoist narrative was built partly around an undeniable grievance: Development had not reached the forest. But the counter-question must also be asked: What happened to the institutions that could have carried development there? Schools were attacked. Roads were obstructed. Infrastructure was destroyed. Government buildings were targeted. Security personnel were killed. Banking and administrative networks were disrupted. And then the absence of development was cited as evidence of State failure. It was a vicious circle. Destroy the bridge. Watch the village remain isolated. Then accuse the State of isolation. The paradox is difficult to escape. An insurgency that claimed to fight underdevelopment itself become one of the forces that perpetuated underdevelopment.

V. THE RED CORRIDOR

At its peak, Left-Wing Extremism affected a broad belt across central and eastern India, including areas of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and parts of southern India. The human cost was enormous. Thousands were killed over decades. Families were displaced. Security personnel were ambushed. Government workers were threatened. Political participation was obstructed. And in many areas, the Maoists established what amounted to a parallel system of authority. Their own courts. Their own punishments. Their own levies. Their own rules. The citizen's constitutional rights became secondary to the verdict of whoever possessed the gun. And the moment a gun becomes the court, there is no longer equality before law.

VI. THE GUN THAT CAME FROM THE STATE

One of the most striking aspects of the insurgency is how it sustained itself militarily. Maoist groups looted weapons from police stations and security forces and used captured arms against the same State from which those weapons had been taken. Government statements have put the proportion of Maoist weapons originating from security-force stocks at extraordinarily high levels; such figures should be quoted with attribution rather than presented as an uncontested independent statistic. But the underlying phenomenon is well established. The insurgency attacked the State. Captured the State's weapons. And used those weapons to attack the State again. It was a cycle that fed itself.

VII. DEMOCRACY TRIED TO ANSWER A GUN WITH ANOTHER GUN

The Supreme Court in Nandini Sundar & Ors. v. State of Chhattisgarh, decided on 5 July 2011. Salwa Judum, which emerged in Chhattisgarh around 2005 as a mobilisation against Maoist violence, involved tribal youth being appointed as Special Police Officers and armed for counter-insurgency purposes. The Supreme Court held that deploying inadequately trained tribal youth as armed SPOs for counter-insurgency violated Articles 14 and 21. The Court emphasised that the effectiveness of a security measure cannot by itself determine its constitutional validity.

Salwa Judum and the arming of civilian SOPs (special Police Officer) for counter insurgency as unconstitutional ordered their disbanding and disarmament and reaffirm that state cannot violate article 14 and 21 in the name of combating Maowaad. Started in 2005, SOPs were also known as Koya Commando which was politically led and mobilized by Mahendra Karma, a senior congress leader and tribal politician from Chhattisgarh in Bastar- Dantewada region, later killed by the same Maowaadi and Naxalite. When court ordered to take their arms back from Koya Commandos, the Maoist killed them one by one and the bench; Justice B. Sudershan Reddy who was on the supreme court bench that delivered the 2011 Salwa Judum was later made Vice-President candidate from congress government.

VIII. THE WOMEN THE REVOLUTION FORGOT

What did Naxalism do to women? For decades, the public imagination has oscillated between two images: The heroic female revolutionary. And the helpless female victim. Reality is considerably more complicated. Mallarika Sinha Roy's scholarship on the Naxalbari movement documents women's political participation and the ways in which revolutionary politics could produce experiences of agency and emancipation, while simultaneously reproducing gendered hierarchies and violence. Her work points to women being pushed into supporting roles, such as courier work, healing or informant roles, rather than being treated as full political equals. Roy’s framing suggests revolutionary claims coexisted with limited women’s freedom. Srila Roy's Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and the Subjectivity in India's Naxalbari Movement goes even deeper. Her research examines women's lives in the underground, their political labour, marginalisation from key political tasks, sexual violence, trauma, memory and the difficulties of reconciling heroic revolutionary narratives with personal suffering. She argues that their participation was shaped by sacrifice, including disrupted education, financial strain, and burden of family responsibility. Revolutionary politics did not automatically free women from oppression. Instead many women found that their activism was filtered through masculine ideas where heroic policies, military and leadership were coded as male, while women were pushed into supportive roles. It highlights the gap between heroic public memory and private suffering especially sexual violence and betrayal within the movement, where women relied on silence withdrawal or selective forgetting to deal with painful memories that were hard to speak openly. The Book points out that revolutionary movements produces the same gender hierarchies they claim to destroy.

Revolutionary politics does not automatically liberate women. A movement can preach equality and still reproduce masculine hierarchies. A woman can be celebrated as a revolutionary symbol while remaining subordinate in actual structures of power. She can carry a gun and still not control her own life. That is the paradox.

IX. FROM SHRINGAR TO THE RIFLE

There is a line in Indian civilisation that has long associated women with shringar with adornment, beauty, jewellery, colour, mehendi, bangles, clothing. But the point is not that every woman must want these things. The point is choice. A woman may choose a sari or trousers. Mehendi or none. Jewelry or none. Domesticity or a profession. A political career or an apolitical life. A rifle, even, if she freely chooses military service. The essential word is: Choice. Because a woman is not liberated merely because someone replaces jewelry with a gun. She is liberated when nobody else decides what she must hold. And that brings us back to the nail polish.

X. THE FIRST COAT

She was seven when they took her. The years that followed were measured not in birthdays but in operations, movements, hiding places and orders. She wore trousers. She wore boots. She lived the life expected of a cadre. Then came rehabilitation. Someone gave her nail polish. She opened the bottle. Painted one nail. Then another. And began to cry. When asked why, she reportedly explained that it was the first time she had ever applied nail polish. Think about the cruelty contained in that sentence. Not because nail polish is important. Precisely because it isn't. It is trivial. Ordinary. Almost meaningless. And that is why it is so powerful. A child should not have to reach adulthood before discovering the ordinary. She should not have to surrender before discovering color. She should not have to leave an insurgency before discovering adornment. She should not have to be rehabilitated before being allowed to become a girl again. Somewhere between Lenin and Bastar, between revolution and guerrilla warfare, between ideology and the gun, someone had forgotten the smallest unit of the revolution: The human being. There is an image that should haunt every discussion of insurgency. A child who should have been playing with a ball instead holding a weapon. A future. And the freedom to grow into somebody without being told in advance who she must become.

XII. THE INTELLECTUAL ROMANCE OF REBELLION

There is another layer to the story the romanticisation of armed rebellion. Popular culture has often portrayed the rebel as morally superior to the institution. The famous line from Paan Singh Tomar“Bihad mein baagi hote hain, dacoit Parliament mein.” is memorable precisely because it turns conventional political morality upside down. Cinema can and should question Parliament, power and injustice. But the danger begins when aesthetic sympathy becomes moral absolution. The rebel may have suffered. The State may have failed. But suffering does not give anyone the right to kill an innocent person, take away someone’s family and further their suffering. And a murdered policeman is no less human because the person who shot him called himself a revolutionary. The widow of a security personnel does not grieve less because her husband's killer had a political theory. The child who loses a father does not receive compensation in the currency of ideology. A bullet does not become humane because the person who fired it had a cause.

In 70s, when Indira Gandhi was searching for a foot in party, she called to vote on line to listening of one’s consciousness. (aatma ki aawaz par nahi antaraatma ki aawaz par). So in her consciousness, she fielded V. V. Giri against Neelam Sanjeev Reddy; who was supported by communists and leftists. At that time, when maowaadi was looking for ground and building their base, they supported Indira Gandhi, which she ceased this establish her dominance in her party. And during 1970-80, when she was in office, Maoist grew their base, mobilized as she was influenced by Maoist ideology. During that time, the movement started from Naxalbari and spread across 12 states, 17% territory, 10% population. The security experts claim; These movements are ineffective unless government suppor

XIII. THE URBAN DISTANCE

“ Tum kitne Hidma maaroge, Har ghar se Hidma niklega. “ On the line of student protest at JNU “ Tum kitne Afzal maaroge, Har ghar se Afzal niklega” The same Afzal Guru who was convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack case and was executed in 2013. On the same line they sympathize with Hidma, who had a bounty of over ₹1 crore on his head. Lead and orgamzied several major ambushes against security forces. These include the 2010 Dantewada attack, the 2013 Jhiram Ghati/Darbha Valley attack, the 2017 Burkapal attack, and the 2021 Sukma-Bijapur ambush were endorsed in Protest at Delhi.

This phenomenon described in political discourse as the “urban Naxal”—the intellectual, academia or activist who is alleged to provide ideological or logistical support to armed extremism. They glorify them by sympathizing their struggle but shows no sympathy towards one who lost their brothers, fathers and sisters to same Naxalism. Their sympathy lies towards people who violates constitution by taking arms against state, but no humanity for the people who got killed by their bullets and child robbed of their childhood.

It needs human-rights defenders. But the principle must remain symmetrical. If one claims to defend human rights, one must defend the rights of all humans. The family waiting for someone who never returned. There should not be no hierarchy of grief.

XIV. WHEN THE STATE RETURNED WITH A SCHOOL

The most persuasive answer to insurgency is not merely a security operation. It is the return of ordinary life. Roads. Schools. Telecommunication. Banks. Post offices. Hospitals. Panchayats. Markets. Courts. The government has reported substantial infrastructure expansion in Left-Wing Extremism-affected areas since 2014: 17,589 km of roads approved under specialised schemes, of which around 12,000 km had been constructed; around 5,000 mobile towers installed at a reported cost of ₹6,000 crore; 1,804 bank branches, 1,321 ATMs, 37,850 banking correspondents and 6,025 post offices added in affected districts. The figures matter. It breaks dependence. And a functioning Panchayat tells the citizen: You have a voice here.

XV. THE OPERATIONS THAT CHANGED THE MAP

The security campaign against Left-Wing Extremism also evolved. Operations such as Operation Octopus in Jharkhand, Operation Double Bull, Operation Thunderstorm, operations around Bhimbandh and Chakarbandha, and later operations in the Telangana-Chhattisgarh border areas progressively reduced the geographical space available to Maoist formations. The larger transformation was not achieved by one operation. It was a combination of intelligence, local policing, CRPF and CoBRA operations, the District Reserve Guard, state police, development and-critically-local participation. The final battle against an insurgency is never won by outsiders alone. The people who live there have to choose the Republic. And that choice becomes easier when the Republic is visible. That is why the constitutional path matters.

XVII. FROM PARALLEL COURTS TO CONSTITUTIONAL JUSTICE

The Maoists' parallel systems of justice were perhaps one of the clearest examples of the insurgency's contradiction. A constitutional court has procedures. Evidence. Representation. Appeal. Rules. A revolutionary “people's court” can be nothing more than the authority of the armed group dressed in the language of justice. Villagers accused of being informers faced brutal punishment. Political participation was restricted. Elections was obstructed. That is the fundamental difference between justice and vengeance. Justice is accountable. Vengeance answers only to itself.

XVIII. WHO PAYS FOR THE REVOLUTION?

It is always worth asking this question of every revolution: Who pays? Usually, not the people writing about it. Not the theorists. Not the intellectuals sitting safely in cities. Not the politicians who invoke the suffering of the poor from podiums. The people who pay are usually the ones nearest the ground. The villager. The policeman. The tribal youth. The woman. The child. The mother. The widow. The family. That is why the romantic language of revolution should always be interrupted by the language of consequence. A revolution may sound magnificent in a manifesto. It sounds different in a mother's house when her son does not return.

XIX. THE FINAL VICTORY IS NOT THE SURRENDER OF A RIFLE

India's declaration of victory over Left-Wing Extremism in March 2026 marked a historic moment in the government's campaign against the insurgency. The government had set 31 March 2026 as the target for eliminating the phenomenon as a major security threat.

Because a Naxal-free map is not enough. With the former cadre trying to build a life. The objective should not merely be to clear, hold and develop territory. It should be to humanise it.

Thriugh PRAHAAR is India’s first comprehensive national counter-terrorism policy and strategy, unveiled by the Ministry of Home Affairs in February 2026. It is built on a seven-pillar framework focused on prevention, swift response, whole-of-government coordination, rule of law, counter-radicalization, international cooperation, and recovery/resilience.

The SAMADHAN Doctrine is India’s anti-Naxal strategy, introduced in 2017 to counter Left-Wing Extremism through security, intelligence, technology, and financial disruption. It is an acronym for Smart Leadership, Aggressive Strategy, Motivation and Training, Actionable Intelligence, Dashboard-based KPIs/KRAs, Harnessing Technology, Action plan for each Theatre, and No access to Financing. Development policy Backward Districts Initiative and BRGF. Integrated Action Plan for LWE-affected districts. PMGSY road connectivity projects in remote areas. MGNREGA, SSA, and housing and education support in tribal belts. Special Central Assistance for LWE districts. Tribal and rights-based policy Forest Rights Act, 2006. PESA, 1996 for greater gram sabha powers in Scheduled Areas. MSP support for minor forest produce and marketing support for tribal products. Ashram schools and welfare measures for tribal students.

Rehabilitation policy Surrender-cum-rehabilitation schemes for Maoists who give up violence. Financial aid, vocational training, and reintegration support. Public perception management and reintegration into mainstream society.

XX. FROM LENIN TO LINEN

And so, finally, the title. From Lenin to Linen. It is not merely a play on words. Lenin represents the beginning of a revolutionary intellectual tradition. Mao transformed that tradition into a rural guerrilla model. Naxalbari brought it into post-Independence India. Bastar became one of its most enduring theatres. And linen-or, more appropriately in Bastar's context, the handloom and Kosa silk worn by former women cadres-represents something entirely different: The return of choice. That is why the image of former women cadres walking a ramp in handloom should not be dismissed as a publicity event. Look carefully. The significance is not the ramp. It is the transformation. Yesterday, the woman was useful to an organisation because she could carry a weapon. Today, she can stand before society simply as a woman. Yesterday, her body belonged to the revolution. Today, it belongs to her. Yesterday, she was told what to carry. Today, she chooses. And perhaps somewhere in that journey is the little girl who was taken away at seven. The girl who never got to paint her nails. The girl who never got to decide what colour she liked. The girl who never got the ordinary things that we rarely notice because we have always had them. She is the reason this story cannot end with a statistic. THE REPUBLIC'S MOST BEAUTIFUL VICTORY Perhaps the final measure of India's success against Naxalism should not be how many extremists were eliminated.

A civilisation should ask: The State did not need to give her another ideology. It needed to give her what she should have had from the beginning: A school. A home. A market. A vote. A road. A livelihood. A family. And the freedom to choose. Perhaps that is what the little bottle of nail polish was really saying. That after decades of grand theories about liberation, the most radical thing a woman can finally possess is something no revolutionary can manufacture for her: The right to live an ordinary life on her own terms. And perhaps, then, the most powerful image of the end of Naxalism will not be a soldier emerging from the forest with a captured rifle. It will be a woman emerging from the same forest with nothing in her hands except a piece of handloom.