New Delhi, March 28 (IANS) The gravest mistake one can make about Left Wing Extremism (LWE) in India is to treat it as a permanent social fact. Insurgencies often present themselves as historical inevitabilities. They claim to speak for the neglected, derive legitimacy from grievance, and then convert that grievance into a theory of destiny.

For years, CPI (Maoist) attempted precisely that in large parts of central and eastern India. It claimed to be the authentic political voice of deprivation. It argued that the Indian state was incapable of justice, that constitutional politics was a fraud, and that armed struggle alone could deliver dignity to tribal communities. That claim now looks considerably weaker than it once did.

This does not mean that deprivation has disappeared. It does not mean that every administrative failure has been corrected, or that every tribal citizen in former Maoist zones now experiences the state as fully responsive. It means something more important for the long arc of internal security: the ideological proposition that sustained Maoist violence is the natural or necessary vehicle of tribal emancipation is losing social traction.

The insurgency still has armed capability in pockets, but its political language has become increasingly stale.

The first reason is that the Maoist promise has always contained a contradiction that is now difficult to conceal. It claimed to represent the poor while systematically degrading the very conditions under which poorer districts could escape isolation.

Maoist formations targeted roads, schools, mobile towers, panchayat institutions, contractors, local transport links, and elected representatives.

Yet the state’s development push in LWE-affected districts is now creating hard evidence against the insurgent claim that infrastructure is merely a mask for dispossession.

By July 2025, the Union government told Parliament that 17,589 km of roads had been sanctioned under the two LWE-specific road schemes, of which 14,902 km had already been built.

In the same period, 10,644 mobile towers had been planned for LWE-affected areas and 8,640 had been commissioned. When roads, telecom and banking services arrive in places long accustomed to state absence, they do not settle every political question. But they do alter the terms on which politics is argued.

The second reason is generational. Maoist doctrine was forged in a language of revolutionary endurance, territorial contestation and armed vanguardism. Younger citizens in former insurgency belts increasingly inhabit a different social horizon. Even where poverty remains severe, the aspiration set has changed.

The state’s own data may be programmatic in tone, but the direction is difficult to ignore: 48 ITIs and 61 Skill Development Centres have been approved in LWE-affected areas, with 46 ITIs and 49 centres already functioning; 258 Eklavya Model Residential Schools have been sanctioned, of which 179 are functional; 5,899 post offices with banking services have opened in LWE districts, while the most affected districts now have 1,007 bank branches and 937 ATMs.

These are not abstractions. They create an ecosystem in which mobility, certification, salaried work, digital access and state-backed opportunity become imaginable in ways that insurgent literature cannot easily absorb.

The older Maoist grammar relied on monopolising interpretation. A district could be poor, under-administered and geographically remote; from that, the movement inferred that violent revolution had historical sanction. But once multiple pathways to mobility begin to appear, the monopoly collapses.

A road is not just a road. It reduces physical isolation, lowers transaction costs, raises the value of legal commerce, improves access to schools and health facilities, enables policing, and deepens the reach of welfare.

A mobile tower does not merely improve phone reception. It inserts citizens into informational worlds that insurgent control cannot fully regulate. A bank branch does not resolve tribal distress. But it weakens a political economy built on coercion, extortion and dependence.

There is a third reason for ideological decline: democratic India, for all its imperfections, has proved more absorbent than the Maoists expected. The movement’s argument depended on showing that constitutional politics could not mediate grievances from the periphery.

Yet the Republic has done precisely that, unevenly and often belatedly, through welfare expansion, electoral competition, tribal-targeted schooling, panchayati institutions, financial inclusion, forest rights processes, district-level development packages, and the capacity of states to recalibrate policy under political pressure.

The Maoists have not merely been challenged by force. They have been challenged by the state’s ability to learn, expand and remain politically legitimate.

Official violence trends reflect this deeper political erosion. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the LWE-related incidents have fallen from 1,936 in 2010 to 222 in 2025, while civilian and security-force deaths declined from 1,005 to 95 over the same period. The number of affected districts contracted from 126 to 11, with only three now classified as most affected. These figures should not be read only as metrics of tactical success. They suggest something more structural: the insurgency is losing not merely ground, but also the social density that once allowed it to regenerate.

This is where ideology matters. A guerrilla movement can survive adverse conditions if it still possesses a convincing political story. The trouble for CPI (Maoist) is that its story has narrowed even as the expectations of the governed have widened.

An ideology built around permanent armed struggle finds it harder to recruit when the young want roads, sports, credit, teachers, phones, jobs and predictable access to the state. One may dismiss such aspirations as bourgeois or compromised; the insurgent literature often does. But that is precisely the point.

The Maoist frame increasingly asks young tribal citizens to inhabit an older hierarchy of sacrifice, while the wider society is offering, however unevenly, an alternative hierarchy of possibility.

This does not justify complacency. Deprivation, land alienation, administrative abuse and legal contestation remain real in tribal India. Any triumphalism that denies these realities will create openings for future extremism. The correct conclusion is not that ideology no longer matters, but that bad ideology cannot indefinitely survive contact with changing social aspirations.

The state still has to deliver justice, not merely presence. It has to protect tribal rights, not just extend roads. It has to remain accountable, not only armed. Yet even with those caveats, the broad conclusion is hard to escape: CPI (Maoist) is no longer losing only gunfights. It is losing the argument about the future.

(The writer is a social development leader with over two decades of on-ground experience. He specialises in women’s empowerment, rural development, CSR, WASH, and large-scale social initiatives aligned with national priorities and the SDGs.)

--IANS

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