Outgunned, outnumbered and on borrowed time, Papa Rao emerged from the jungle of central India wearing a faded checkered shirt, dusty trousers and scuffed sports shoes. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a US$26,000 bounty on his head.
Behind him, in single file, trailed a troop of men and women carrying decades-old L1A1 and Lee-Enfield rifles. In sandals, and carrying Puma-branded sports backpacks, this group were some of the world’s last Maoist rebels, heirs to a global revolutionary movement that fought capitalism for control of the 20th century. They were on their way to surrender.
Fired by the teachings of China’s Mao Zedong, they had spent decades battling to overthrow the Indian state, and install in its stead a classless utopia. The rebellion they helped wage killed thousands. At its height nearly 20 years ago, India’s leader described the Maoists as the country’s biggest internal security threat, a blight on its status as the world’s largest democracy and its aspirations of becoming a global power.
Now the revolution is in its death throes.
In recent months security forces have killed a string of top Maoists and the rank-and-file are laying down their weapons. India’s capitalist economy is booming, and the ruling Hindu-nationalist government is crushing its above-ground leftist opponents at the ballot box. Maoism will be eradicated completely from the country this year, it has proclaimed.
Hours after they came out of the jungle, Papa Rao and his 17 comrades stepped onto a stage. In front of them was a row of cameras. Behind, a backdrop announced their “return to the mainstream,” in English and Hindi. Their surrendered, antiquated weapons were laid out and labeled, like museum exhibits; on tables covered in blue cloth, clips of ammunition were arrayed to form the Hindi word for “sacred vow.”
As the cameras rolled, each former insurgent was handed a rose and a copy of the Indian constitution: a symbolic pledge of a new allegiance. They listened to local politicians make speeches and stood for photos with members of the security forces, and then they were ushered off the stage and into the embrace of the Indian state.
The journey to this point began almost a century ago and hundreds of miles away in China, when Mao Zedong reshaped Marxist–Leninist theory to fit the pre-industrial conditions of his country. His new doctrine fueled a decades-long war – one that ultimately carried the communist movement to victory and state power in Beijing in 1949.
In the years following, Beijing funded or armed fellow communists in Vietnam, North Korea, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia, causing panic in Washington and other Western capitals as the ideological struggles of the Cold War rippled across Asia.
In India, Maoist guerillas are known by a different name: Naxals. That moniker comes from a violent 1967 peasant uprising against oppressive landlords in Naxalbari, a village in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills in northeast India. Its success inspired more uprisings, and in 1970 the Peking Review, the English-language mouthpiece of Mao’s government, wrote approvingly of how Indian peasants were following “Mao Zedong Thought” and had “smashed the feudal yoke and overthrown the crushing tyranny.” Beijing’s support does not appear to have extended to directly arming the Naxals, however.
A CIA report the same year gave a more sober assessment: “Their hit-and-run tactics and their spectacular exploits – bombings; murders; book burning; attacks upon police stations, movie houses, and libraries – have given the Naxalite movement newspaper headlines from which it derives both inspiration and new recruits.”
Over the following decades – despite splits and infighting – the Naxals cemented their hold in what became known as the “Red Corridor,” a huge swathe of rugged territory stretching across several states in central and eastern India and home to many Adivasis – tribal communities often marginalized by the Indian state. For many people in those communities, the Naxals’ message hit home.
Sukhmati Dhruv, 45, was one. Growing up in rural Chhattisgarh state, she witnessed local forest officials piling pressure on a village already grappling with poverty, and was inspired to join the Naxals when she was in her teens.
“They used to collect tax on building houses, they used to collect tax on chopping wood,” she told CNN.
“They used to beat people up,” she says. “There was a lot of violence.”
Papa Rao’s story was similar.
“The reason for joining the movement was poverty, and the government’s Forest Department and the rural administrators used to trouble us a lot at the time,” he told CNN before he surrendered in March.
Against the might of the state, they followed the tactics espoused by Mao in China: surprise, mobility, deception.
Sukhmati described how her comrades would raid police stations to steal weapons.
“The mission would be to bring two weapons from the police force,” she said. “If we bring two weapons from the police force, it means we have succeeded.”
“Our strategies would evolve,” says Satish, another former Maoist CNN spoke with. “Depending on how many (security forces) were coming, in what formations, on what terrain, the geographical conditions we were in, the weapons and firepower we had.”
“Keeping in mind their strength we would try to find our opportunity and accordingly retreat, or if it’s an offensive action then we would use their weakness.”
The rebellion reached its height in the early 2000s, a bloody rejoinder to the booming economy fueled by the rise of outsourcing in IT and software, and optimism about India’s future.
In 2003, the chief minister the state home to Hyderabad, one of the cities driving the new IT boom – narrowly escaped assassination. Across India by 2007, the Naxals had influence over 92,000 square kilometers – roughly the size of the US state of Indiana – according to a Home Ministry estimate.
In 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the Naxals the “single biggest internal security challenge to the Indian state.” The following year, in one of the most notorious incidents of the war, Naxals killed 76 members of the security forces in an ambush in Chhattisgarh.
According to government estimates, left-wing extremism claimed nearly 9,000 lives across the country between 2004 and 2025. Accompanying the violence, both the Naxals and the security forces – including local militia raised to combat the rebels – have been accused of horrific human rights abuses, including abductions, torture and rape.
Throughout the conflict, rights groups have accused Indian security forces of carrying out widespread extrajudicial executions of Naxals – and then claiming the killings took place in self-defense, or in an alleged “encounter.”
Dressed in combat gear, a squad of the District Reserve Guard (DRG) walk in single file along an empty road in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district, one of the last Naxal holdouts.
Bastar’s hills and woods have seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the insurgency. One security official told CNN that more than 1,500 security personnel have been killed by Naxals here over the past 30 years.
But there are signs the government feels more confident of its hold over the area. Over the highway leading into Bastar now hangs a banner promoting a nationwide public health campaign that has become one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signatures.
It’s reflected in the DRG squad too, some of whom hold their assault rifles with one hand, letting them dangle as they walk. The DRG, formed in 2008 to battle the Naxals, go out on two- or three-day patrols among the thick forests, rivers and hills. Their ranks are largely made up of former Maoists and Adivasis, enlisted because of their familiarity with the region – and Naxal tactics.
“There are a lot of tough conditions,” says DRG member Dhansai Kashyap. “There are life-threatening dangers, but we have been taught well.”
In his office in the district capital of Jagdalpur, Bastar’s Inspector General for Police Sundarraj Pattilingam told CNN he was confident the fight would be over soon. As of March, the number of Naxals in the district was down to “double digits,” he said.
Around two weeks later, Pattilingam would be present at Papa Rao’s surrender in front of the cameras.
Many Naxal commanders are not taken alive.
In the interview with CNN, Pattilingam reeled off a list of names of people who had been killed in recent months, killings that he says have severely impacted the rebels’ ability to operate.
The state has thrown resources and personnel at the mission, which has helped, Pattilingam says. Information gleaned from surrendered Naxals has also fed into momentum, he says, helping security forces to mount further operations.
He denied his forces have committed atrocities against the local tribal populations, adding that any operations were conducted “according to the rules, laws and constitutional regulations.”
“We have clear instructions for our security personnel,” he says. “They have been sensitized.”
Sukhmati was one of those who surrendered, in October 2025, as the central government ramped up operations. She’s since been kept at a government facility as part of a rehabilitation program, along with other former Maoists CNN interviewed for this story. Speaking at the facility, in the presence of government officials, she was reluctant to go into details on the state of the rebellion when she decided to leave it.
“According to the changes, our struggle became weary in the new situation and taking the movement forward then was difficult,” she said.
The Maoists’ shrinking realm sits atop rich veins of coal, iron, and bauxite – resources essential to India’s modernization and growing energy demands; Modi’s pledge to bring electricity to every household; and his broader ambition to transform India into a developed nation.
Pattilingam, the policeman, says as well as killing or arresting Naxals, part of the need is to “support development” and “create an opportunity for internal forest people and youth to be introduced to the outside world.”
In March, India’s home minister declared that the fight against Naxalism had been won – to thunderous applause in parliament.
It’s not just Naxal rebels who are on the back foot. In state elections this month an alliance led by above-ground communist parties was voted out in the southern state of Kerala, the first time in decades that Marxist political parties are not in power in any of India’s states or territories.
But some are skeptical. A Naxal threat, real or imagined, is also a convenient way for the government to tar any local protests against the push to open mines, said academic Nandini Sundar.
“This artificial deadline (the government has given itself to eradicate Naxalism…) it’s never going to be full,” she told CNN.
“Because if anyone protests against the mines, they’ll say ‘Oh, you know the Maoists are still there.’”
In March, before he reached the spot where his surrender had been arranged, Papa Rao sat down under a tree to talk to CNN.
His rifle was propped up against its trunk. Around its barrel was a bracelet bearing the word “Peace.”
“Our aim was to liberate the country,” he told CNN, his voice thin and lilting.
“The government has a lot of weapons and they threaten a lot of people. The Maoist party… was a small party and had fewer weapons.”
Dhruv Tikekar, Rhea Mogul, CNN
