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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay |Divya Gandhi
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
Dear Reader,I stay away from poetry. It might be an effect of growing up in Kolkata, where one composes poetry on everything, from cloudy skies to yellow taxi to Gelusil. For the same reason perhaps, poetry stalks me, no matter how much I run away from it. It whispers, nay screams, inside my head at the most inopportune moments, leaving me red-faced. A few days back, some lines from the poetry of Larkin started haunting me.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
Brigadier (retd) Basant K. Ponwar, a veteran of the 1971 Bangladesh war, has extensive experience in counter-insurgency operations across India. Having served in Nagaland, Punjab, Tripura, and the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, Ponwar has trained police personnel from 10 Maoist-insurgency-affected States, as well as members of the Border Security Force, Indo Tibetan Border Police, Sashastra Seema Bal, and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), in guerrilla warfare tactics since 2005.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Amey Tirodkar |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
On the first day of 2025, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was in Wangeturi, a village in Gadchiroli district that is known for its dense tropical forests covering 70 per cent of its area and for its strong naxal presence. He flagged off a Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation bus that would ply between Wangeturi and remote Gatta via Gardewada, the first bus service on the route.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
In the late 1980s, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, leader of the People’s War (PW), dispatched Maoist squads to Khammam, Karimnagar, Warangal, and Adilabad (in present-day Telangana). Driven by Mao Zedong’s belief that “power flows from the barrel of a gun”, the PW waged an armed struggle, extending operations across the Godavari to Gadchiroli in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh’s Bastar (then in Madhya Pradesh), aiming to establish guerrilla safe zones.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
Bela Bhatia, a Bastar-based lawyer, researcher and writer, has been working for years on issues related to human rights abuses and state repression, particularly in conflict-torn areas. With a postgraduate degree in social work from Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, she blends academic rigour with on-the-ground advocacy.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
On January 8, six naxalites who were active in Karnataka surrendered in the presence of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. At the event, the Chief Minister announced that with this, Karnataka had become “naxal-free”. The last naxalite who remained active surrendered three weeks later, on February 1, reinforcing the government’s declaration that the armed struggle of the naxalites had ended in Karnataka after its four-decade-long journey since the 1980s.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy |Ayesha Minhaz
It has been quite some time since the Maoist movement faded into irrelevance in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Yet, news reports of security forces killing, arresting, or facilitating the surrender of Telugu-origin Maoists in other States routinely serve as reminders of the region’s radical history and its role in the Indian Maoist movement. Some of the most determined, feared, and violent revolutionaries of the movement were from this region.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ashutosh Sharma |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
In 2012, a CBI team, directed by the Supreme Court to investigate the March 2011 assault on Swami Agnivesh by Special Police Officers (SPOs) of the Chhattisgarh Police and Salwa Judum, came under an extraordinary attack from the State’s SPOs. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) intervened to protect the CBI officers, who had locked themselves inside a guest house at Dornapal in Sukma district.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy |Meena Kandasamy
The Central government’s Operation Kagar, Home Minister Amit Shah’s cherished project to eliminate naxalism and burnish his political credentials, has unleashed unprecedented bloodshed in Chhattisgarh. In just the first three months of 2025, security forces have killed 140 alleged Maoists in the State (according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal website), already more than half of Chhattisgarh’s entire kill count for 2024 (235).
