Modi’s Deepavali in Bastar: When the Lights Reach the Red Corridor

Ten years ago, travelling the single-lane asphalt south of Jagdalpur after sundown was an invitation to disaster. Felled sal trunks blocked the roads, iron spikes hid beneath dry leaves, and police stations sat huddled behind two-metre-thick perimeter walls, wrapped in concertina wire like fortresses under siege. This Deepavali, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lands in the forested interior of Bastar to share festival sweets with the troops holding those very outposts.

Since 2014, the Prime Minister has spent every festival of lights with the armed forces. He has climbed the Siachen glacier in bone-shattering cold, walked the desert dunes of Longewala, and shared tea with jawans along the Line of Control in Nowshera. Those visits focused outward, facing cross-border adversaries across barbed wire. Bastar is something entirely different.

This is internal soil. Forty thousand square kilometres of dense canopies, red soil, and tribal hamlets that constituted, for nearly four decades, the command centre of India’s Maoist rebellion. Bringing the highest office in the country to celebrate a national festival here is not merely a morale stop for tired jawans. It is a calculated declaration that the state now controls ground it once conceded.

The Shrinking Perimeter of the Red Corridor

To grasp the scale of the moment, look at what this district used to represent. Between 2004 and 2014, the Dandakaranya forest belt functioned as a parallel republic. Insurgents ran kangaroo courts, levied taxes on tendu leaf contractors, blew up bridges, and staged devastating ambushes against central forces. The 2010 massacre in Tadmetla, where 76 security personnel were ambushed in an early-morning patrol, left an indelible scar on the national psyche.

That map has collapsed inward.

Over the last eighteen months, the Centre and the Chhattisgarh government launched a relentless, coordinated push into the deep south—the tri-junction where Chhattisgarh meets Telangana and Maharashtra. Home Minister Amit Shah laid down an explicit deadline: eliminate Left-Wing Extremism from Indian soil by early 2026. Security agencies did not wait for the calendar to turn.

The tactic was simple, brutal, and physically gruelling: build Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) straight inside the insurgent heartland. Bases in Silger, Karigundam, and the untracked wilderness of Abujhmad cut off Maoist supply corridors one ridge at a time. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), its elite CoBRA strike units, and the Border Security Force (BSF) stepped forward into territory where even survey teams had never set foot.

Alongside them walked the District Reserve Guard (DRG). Mostly local tribal youth, many of them former insurgents who surrendered, they know the hill tracks, speak the Gondi dialects, and understand the jungle rhythm better than any insurgent commander. That familiarity tipped the balance. In 2024 and through 2025, counter-insurgency operations dismantled senior leadership ranks, resulting in record numbers of surrenders and combat fatalities across South Bastar.

Beyond the Guns: What the State Brings In

A military push clears a road, but a military push cannot hold a society. The real test of whether Bastar has turned a corner sits in its weekly village markets, known locally as haats.

In places like Sukma and Bijapur, tribal farmers once carried two bags of produce to town: one to sell, and one to pay the mandatory levy to rebel couriers waiting at the edge of the clearing. Today, those couriers are largely gone. Instead, mobile bank vans pull into village squares, and fiber-optic cables snake alongside newly laid single-lane macadam roads.

Consider the bridges over the Indravati river. For a generation, that river served as a natural moat. Cross it heading west, and civil administration vanished completely. There were no clinics, no ration shops, no power lines. Today, prefabricated bridges cross the water, followed immediately by school buses and mobile towers. In the most recent regional polls, villagers queued at polling booths erected right in their own primary schools, rather than walking fifteen kilometres under armed escort to cast a ballot at a highway outpost.

Security is the prerequisite. Development is the glue. When the state provides an institutional market for forest produce—like mahua, tamarind, and harra—at minimum support prices, it strips the insurgency of its most potent recruiting pitch: economic abandonment.

The Fragile Nature of Peace

Still, no one on the ground pretends the job is finished. You do not erase fifty years of social friction with a few road projects and high-profile visits.

Maoist remnants remain holed up in pockets of the northern Abujhmad hills, capable of planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) along dirt tracks. The casualty lists, while lower, still claim the lives of young constables and local civilians caught between rival fires. The shadow of violence has thinned, but it has not vanished.

There are also civil friction points that require steady political handling:

• Restoring Trust: Decades of crossfire left deep wounds among local indigenous communities. Rebuilding faith in local administration and the police requires strict accountability on human rights and genuine civic engagement.
• Forest Rights Implementation: Land title claims under the Forest Rights Act remain a critical demand for Bastar’s tribal households. Swift, transparent settlement of these titles gives families a permanent stake in constitutional processes.
• Rehabilitation: Hundreds of young men and women who recently laid down weapons need genuine, sustainable vocational alternatives, not just temporary stipends. If the peace economy fails to absorb them, old patterns risk returning.

A Festival in the Forest

When the Prime Minister sits down with jawans in a forward camp in Bastar this week, the image will carry immense political and emotional weight. It validates the immense sacrifices made by local police and central paramilitary forces who spent years living out of corrugated-sheet shelters, battling cerebral malaria alongside insurgent ambushes.

More than that, it marks a psychological turning point for central India. For decades, the name Bastar was shorthand for tragedy, isolation, and endless war. Seeing it illuminated by festival lamps, guarded by confident forces, and connected back to the national mainstream tells the people of Chhattisgarh that the darkness is finally lifting.

The weapons may not be completely silent yet. But in the quiet forest clearings where fear once dictated every sunset, Deepavali is arriving on time.

References

• Press Information Bureau — Official updates on central security reviews and infrastructure initiatives in Left-Wing Extremism areas
• The Hindu — Reporting on counter-insurgency operations, forward operating bases, and local administration in Bastar
• The Indian Express — Ground reports on tribal outreach, surrenders, and village developments across South Chhattisgarh