GNV News May 28, 2025

On May 22, 2025, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah announced that Nambala Keshava Rao, the top leader of the insurgent group “Communist Party of India (Maoist),” was killed in fighting between security forces and the group in the central state of Chhattisgarh.

The Maoists are a movement that emerged under the influence of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideology in China. Their anti-government activities trace back to a peasant uprising in the late 1960s in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, after which they became known as “Naxals.” Since then, their activities have spread from Jharkhand in the east to Maharashtra in the west, spanning more than 1/3 of the entire country. That belt is known as the “Red Corridor.”

This conflict between the Indian government and the insurgents has continued for about 60 years. From 2000 to 2024, clashes involving the Maoists killed more than 11,000 civilians and security personnel combined, and statistics indicate that at least 6,160 Maoist fighters were killed by security forces. The government has set a goal of eradicating the Naxalite movement by March 31, 2026, and as part of this, it has intensified its offensive against the Naxals through “Operation Black Forest.”

 Learn more about the Maoists → “The fate of post-conflict justice: Nepal”

 Learn more about Indian politics → “Continued instability in India’s Northeast”

Photo: Symbol of the Naxalites (Shreyans Bhansali / flickr [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0])