“How India’s overcoming of Naxalism denies China its covert strategic leverage”, First Post, April 04, 2026

“The impending end of Naxalism is not merely the story of a successful police campaign. It is the story of a state finally overpowering a violent insurgency that fed on India’s internal fractures while drawing ideological legitimacy, and at times material sustenance, from the long shadow of Maoist China.

For decades, the Naxalite movement presented itself as the voice of the oppressed. In reality, it became one of the most destructive instruments of anti-state violence in modern India: murdering policemen, extorting tribals, sabotaging development, and holding entire districts hostage to armed dogma. Its defeat is therefore not simply a security achievement. It is a civilisational correction. India has reclaimed territory, authority, and the moral right of the Republic to govern every inch of its own soil.

And this is why the China angle matters. Naxalism was never just an ‘internal rebellion’. It was born in the ideological furnace of Maoism, animated by the mythology of “people’s war”, and sustained by a transnational revolutionary imagination that traced its roots to Beijing. China did not have to issue commands over a telephone line for its influence to be real. In insurgencies, ideology is often as potent as money, and myth can be as powerful as weapons. Beijing supplied the myth…….”

Read full article at firstpost.com