NEW DELHI ¨C Early this century, as India was emerging as one of the global economy¡¯s shining stars, a shadow darkened its heartland: a violent Maoist insurgency. For a decade and a half, the area known as the Red Corridor gradually expanded, as revolutionary communist doctrine found a receptive audience in poverty-afflicted communities. The result was, according to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ¡°the single biggest internal security challenge¡± that India had ¡°ever faced.¡±
India has proven to be up to the challenge. The Red Corridor has shrunk dramatically, from its 2013 peak of 126 districts to a mere 11 last year, signaling a decisive, albeit incomplete, victory for the Indian state. Home Minister Amit Shah has declared that the ¡°Naxalite¡± insurgency ¡ª named for the Bengal village of Naxalbari where it emerged in the 1960s ¡ª will be eradicated within the next few months.
India does not owe this progress to the kind of cataclysmic violence that Sri Lanka¡¯s then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa unleashed in 2009 to defeat the Tamil Tigers, thereby ending a 40-year civil war. Nor did it employ the brutal tactics that Peru¡¯s Alberto Fujimori used to crush the Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in the 1990s. Instead, India¡¯s government devised a sophisticated strategy, which accounted for both the causes and consequences of the insurgency.
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