Sixty years after the first armed Maoist cadres emerged from the forests of Naxalbari, BJP MP Anurag Thakur is marking this Diwali 2026 as a watershed — declaring that India has finally won its decades-long war against Naxalism and Maoist terror.

Posting on Sunday, 8 November 2026, Thakur wrote in Hindi: 'Yeh pehli Diwali hai jab desh, Naxalwad aur Maowaadi aatank ke khilaf dashakon purani ladai jeet chuka hai.' ('This is the first Diwali when the country has won its decades-old battle against Naxalism and Maoist terror.') The statement frames the festival of lights as a moment of genuine national reckoning — one lit not just by diyas, but by what he calls a decisive security triumph.

A 59-year insurgency and the long road to this claim

The Naxalite movement was born in 1967 in the Naxalbari village of West Bengal, a peasant uprising that grew into one of India's most persistent internal-security crises. By 2004, disparate armed groups merged into the Communist Party of India (Maoist) — the CPI(Maoist) — and extended their influence across a vast swath of central and eastern India, a corridor spanning parts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra and beyond.

The state's fightback has been long and costly. Operation Green Hunt, launched around 2009–10, deployed central paramilitary forces at scale into Naxal heartlands. Since 2014, the Ministry of Home Affairs has tracked a consistent, publicly reported decline in Naxal-related incidents, affected districts, and territorial control — driven by a twin strategy of intensified security operations and infrastructure investment in remote tribal districts.

What 'victory' looks like on the ground

Violence metrics have trended sharply downward over the past decade, with several states progressively removed from the official red-zone list. Roads, mobile towers, and welfare schemes reached villages that had been battlegrounds. Tribal communities, long caught between the state and armed cadres, have been the central — and often overlooked — stakeholders in every phase of this conflict.

Thakur's post does not detail a specific operation or government order; it is a political and symbolic declaration, timed to Diwali, that the BJP frames as a civilisational milestone. The claim of complete victory by November 2026 goes beyond what publicly available pre-2024 data confirmed — pockets of Maoist activity persisted in parts of Chhattisgarh and neighbouring states in those records. Official MHA updates and parliamentary statements in the coming weeks will be the place to watch for verification.

The politics of declaring a war over

Declaring an end to an insurgency is as much a political act as a security one. It signals to voters, to affected communities, and to the international community that the state has prevailed. For the BJP, closing the chapter on left-wing extremism would sit alongside border infrastructure and anti-terror operations as a pillar of the party's internal-security narrative. The timing — a festival synonymous with the victory of light over darkness — is deliberate and unmistakable.

India has carried this fight for nearly six decades. If the claim holds, the lights this Diwali mean something far larger than the season.