From Naxalbari to the End of Armed Naxalism: History and Legacy of India's Naxalite Movement
Author
Malay Khan
Abstract
Why does a revolutionary movement that never captured state power, and that has, according to the available evidence, lost its centrally organized armed capacity, remain historically significant? This article addresses that question through the case of the Naxalite movement, from its origins in the 1967 Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal to the reported collapse of its principal successor organization, the CPI (Maoist), in 2025–2026. It argues that the movement's significance lies in a paradox: an insurgency that failed militarily nonetheless reshaped the political environment in which agrarian reform, tribal rights, left politics, and state security practice subsequently developed, and its history therefore poses an open question—explored throughout the article and returned to in the conclusion—of whether the end of organized armed Naxalism represents the resolution of the conditions that produced it, or only the disappearance of their principal organized expression. The argument is developed through historical and interpretive synthesis of secondary scholarship, descriptive analysis of official conflict data for 2010–2025, supplemented by reported developments through March 2026, three heuristic formal models adapted from the civil-conflict literature, and a case study of the security operation—Operation Kagar—that preceded the movement's dissolution. The article finds that the movement's long-term legacy is best understood as three partly distinct strands—material (agrarian policy), political (left strategy and state security practice), and cultural (literature, cinema, and collective memory)—each of which persists independently of the armed organization's fate, and it treats the still-unfolding 2025–2026 record as provisional contemporary history rather than settled fact.
Keywords
Naxalbari; West Bengal; Maoism; agrarian politics; tribal rights; Left-Wing Extremism; insurgency
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