Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday warned that the end of armed Maoist insurgency in India did not mean the threat had disappeared, alleging that what he called "dimagi Naxals" — ideological supporters of Naxalism — had infiltrated political parties and organisations and were continuing to instigate people against the Constitution and democracy.
The Prime Minister was speaking to security personnel at the Karanpur camp in Chhattisgarh's Bastar district, where he celebrated Diwali with the forces. It was the 13th consecutive year that he has spent the festival of lights with security personnel, a tradition he has maintained since taking office.
This time, the setting carried a particular significance: Bastar was once the epicentre of the Maoist insurgency in India, and the region was declared free of Naxalism on March 31 this year.
"The Naxals have been eliminated, but the danger has not yet passed. Armed Naxals have disappeared from the forests, but ideological Naxals have occupied several organisations. They are still instigating people against the country's Constitution and democracy. They have infiltrated several political parties and organisations. We must identify and defeat them," the Prime Minister said, addressing the personnel gathered at the camp.
He described the occasion as a historic Diwali, the first after what he called the country's decades-long battle against Naxalism and Maoist terror. "This is the first Diwali after the country has won its decades-long battle against Naxalism and Maoist terror. This is the first Diwali when every district is free from Naxalism," he said.
The remarks framed the visit as both a celebration and a warning: the guns in the forests may have fallen silent, but, in the Prime Minister's telling, the ideology behind them has moved into cities, institutions and political life.
The government had announced on March 31 this year that the country was free from the menace of Naxalism, following the elimination of many Maoist leaders and cadres and the surrender of hundreds of others. The declaration marked the formal end of an insurgency that had run for nearly five decades and had at its peak affected large parts of central and eastern India.
Bastar, the forested region in southern Chhattisgarh where the Prime Minister spent his Diwali, was for years the heartland of the movement, and the Karanpur camp where he spoke is a base of the Central Reserve Police Force's CoBRA unit, the specialist jungle warfare force raised to fight the Maoists.
Mr Modi used the visit to pay tribute to the security forces, noting that more than 1,000 jawans had sacrificed their lives in Chhattisgarh alone in the long fight against Left-Wing Extremism. He said that for the first time in 47 years, the Central Reserve Police Force had completed a year without losing a single jawan in operational duty, a statistic he presented as evidence of how far the security situation had changed.
Personnel of the Central Armed Police Forces and the Chhattisgarh Police are deployed across Bastar, and the Prime Minister's visit was as much a morale call as a political message.
To underline the scale of the threat the country had faced, he cited the 2010 Dantewada attacks, in which 76 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force and 44 civilians were killed in separate incidents. Those attacks, among the worst suffered by the security forces in the insurgency, became a symbol of the Maoist movement's capacity to strike deep inside the state.
Mr Modi told the personnel that the Maoists had at one point even snatched away people's right to cast their votes in the affected regions, a reference to the way the insurgents had enforced poll boycotts and threatened voters in their strongholds.
The Prime Minister credited the change in India's counter-insurgency fortunes to the political will demonstrated after his government assumed office in 2014, and to what he described as the country's right policies and strong political will.
He said his government had taken decisions that dealt a major blow to the funding of the Maoist movement, and he alleged that elements within the earlier political and administrative system had provided support to Left-Wing Extremism, which his government had worked to eliminate.
The phrase "dimagi Naxals" was not new to the Prime Minister's vocabulary. He had first used it in his address on the 80th Independence Day in August this year, when he said the country had succeeded in removing armed Naxalism from the forests but warned that its ideological supporters were seeking opportunities to promote violence and anarchy.
Sunday's remarks in Bastar developed that theme, naming the new front in the fight as one that runs through organisations, political parties and public life rather than through the jungles of central India.
The comments drew a sharp political reaction. The phrase was read by critics as a veiled attack on the opposition, and coverage of the visit noted that the Prime Minister had targeted his political opponents while speaking to the forces. The opposition has in the past accused the government of using the language of national security to brand its critics, and the "dimagi Naxals" remark is likely to feature in that argument in the days ahead.
The government, for its part, has maintained that the warning is about a real and continuing threat, and that identifying those who work against the Constitution is a matter of national security rather than partisan politics.
The Diwali visit to Bastar also carried a symbolic weight beyond the speech. For decades, the district was a byword for the Maoist insurgency, a place where the writ of the state ran thin and where elections, development works and everyday administration were conducted under the shadow of violence.
The Prime Minister's decision to celebrate the festival there, at a camp of the force that bore the brunt of the fighting, was presented as a marker of how completely that picture has changed. The message from the camp was twofold: the war in the forests is won, and the watch must now continue elsewhere.
Security officials have pointed to a series of indicators to support the claim that the insurgency has been broken. The surrender of hundreds of cadres, the elimination of senior leaders, the shrinking of the areas affected by Maoist violence, and the return of state institutions to districts that had long been out of reach have all been cited as evidence.
The March 31 declaration that the country was free of Naxalism was the formal culmination of that process, and the Prime Minister's Diwali visit was the first festival of lights since that declaration.
Yet the Prime Minister's own words on Sunday suggested that the government does not regard the task as complete. By warning that ideological Naxals have taken control of several organisations and infiltrated political parties, he shifted the focus of the campaign from the battlefield to the institutions of public life.
The call to identify and defeat such elements, he said, was necessary to secure the country, and the responsibility for it extends beyond the security forces to society at large.
The visit also fitted into the Prime Minister's long-standing practice of spending Diwali with the armed forces and security personnel rather than in the capital. Over the years he has celebrated the festival at border posts, in forward areas and with units engaged in active operations, using the occasion to acknowledge their service.
This year's choice of Bastar, a region that has come to stand for the end of the Maoist insurgency, gave the tradition a new resonance, tying the personal gesture to a larger claim about the country's internal security.
As the festival concluded, the political debate over the Prime Minister's words was only beginning. Whether the phrase "dimagi Naxals" becomes a lasting part of the political vocabulary, and how the opposition responds to a charge that the Prime Minister has now repeated twice in three months, will become clear in the coming days.
What is not in doubt is that the government regards the defeat of armed Naxalism as one of its defining achievements, and that it intends to keep the ideological argument alive long after the last gun has fallen silent in the forests of Bastar.
(Reporting based on The Times of India and The Hindu BusinessLine.)