Operation Kagaar has entered public discussion largely as a security campaign. That is accurate, but incomplete. In India’s long struggle against Left Wing Extremism, there have always been two theatres. One is territorial and kinetic: forests, hills, camps, routes, intelligence grids, patrol patterns, weapons recoveries, and the gradual destruction of insurgent logistics. The other is narrative: who gets to define violence, who claims the moral vocabulary of rights, and who succeeds in persuading outside audiences that state action is not counter-insurgency but persecution. Operation Kagaar must therefore be understood as a dual contest. It is being fought on the ground against an armed movement, and simultaneously in the information space against a transnational propaganda architecture that seeks to recast anti-Maoist operations as a “genocide” of Adivasis.

One should begin with facts. According to the PIB explainer on recent anti-Naxal operations, a major campaign in the Karreguttalu Hill region between April 21 and May 11, 2025 resulted in 31 Maoists being neutralised, including 16 women, with no casualties among security personnel. In May 2025, security forces also killed 27 Maoists in Narayanpur, including CPI (Maoist) general secretary Basavaraju. These are not minor tactical episodes. They indicate a high level of intelligence fusion, inter-force coordination and operational endurance in spaces that long functioned as insurgent refuge. They also signal something politically important: Maoist leadership is no longer as insulated by terrain as it once was.

Yet almost as soon as these gains were registered, a parallel campaign intensified abroad and online. Statements circulated by organisations such as ICOR, IPMSDL, Red Herald-linked platforms and activist networks associated with anti-state causes described Operation Kagaar as a “genocide” of Adivasis, a fascist war, or a campaign of indiscriminate extermination. Some demanded an immediate halt to operations; others framed dead Maoist leaders as “revolutionary fighters” and blurred the distinction between armed cadres and the tribal population among whom they operated. The vocabulary is revealing. “Genocide” is not being used here as a precise legal category grounded in evidence and adjudication. It is being used as a strategic amplifier: a word designed to erase the distinction between counter-insurgency, rights violations, civilian suffering, and revolutionary legitimacy.

This matters because propaganda succeeds not by being wholly false, but by exploiting asymmetries of attention. Maoist-aligned or Maoist-sympathetic narratives seek to do three things at once. First, they dissolve the political distinction between tribal communities and the armed cadre structure that claims to speak for them. Second, they replace the empirical complexity of security operations with a morally total description in which the state is the only agent of violence. Third, they shift the burden of proof entirely onto the Republic, while treating the insurgency’s own record as incidental. This is analytically dishonest. CPI (Maoist) has a long record of assassinations, landmine attacks, extortion, coercive recruitment, destruction of roads and schools, and attacks on civilians. To erase this record in order to preserve the insurgency’s moral image is not human-rights advocacy. It is political laundering.

The state, however, cannot answer this by mere rhetoric. It must answer it with precision. The first requirement is operational transparency consistent with security needs: disclosures on encounters, recoveries, arrests, surrenders, casualties, and judicial or magisterial review where applicable. The second is conceptual clarity: protecting Adivasi rights and dismantling Maoist violence are not contradictory aims. They are jointly necessary. The third is narrative discipline: every attempt to portray anti-Maoist operations as anti-tribal must be met with the institutional record of what the state is simultaneously doing in those areas.

That record is substantial. Parliament was informed in July 2025 that 17,589 km of roads had been sanctioned under LWE-specific schemes and 14,902 km completed; 10,644 mobile towers had been planned and 8,640 commissioned; 258 Eklavya Model Residential Schools had been sanctioned and 179 were functional; 5,899 post offices with banking services had opened in LWE districts, alongside 1,007 bank branches and 937 ATMs in the most affected districts. The Special Central Assistance scheme has released thousands of crores to fill critical public-infrastructure gaps. These figures do not prove that the state is above reproach. But they do prove that the strategic objective is not the abandonment of tribal India. It is its integration under conditions of security, service delivery and institutional access.

The best rebuttal to the “genocide” frame lies in refusing its false binary. It is entirely legitimate to insist that counter-insurgency remain within law, that civilian harm be minimised, that allegations of abuse be investigated, and that tribal communities not be treated as suspect populations. It is equally legitimate to insist that an armed insurgency cannot be granted moral immunity simply because it embeds itself within deprived geographies. Rights language cannot become a shield behind which revolutionary violence regains political legitimacy.

Operation Kagaar therefore teaches a wider lesson about internal security in the digital age. No major campaign now remains local. Every encounter can be narrativised globally. Every casualty can be detached from context and reinserted into a global template of oppression. Every difficult tribal question can be appropriated by networks that are less interested in justice than in preserving the symbolic capital of revolution. If the Indian state wins on the ground but allows this interpretive field to be ceded, it risks a strange outcome: tactical success coexisting with moral confusion.

The way forward is not censorship masquerading as confidence. It is statecraft. Publish more verified data. Preserve legal scrutiny. Communicate in plain terms. Distinguish civilians from cadres. Highlight rehabilitation, schools, roads, banking, panchayats and local participation. Most importantly, refuse to concede the tribal question to the Maoist lexicon. Adivasi dignity does not require Maoist tutelage. And a state that is serious about tribal rights must be equally serious about defeating the armed structure that has long used those rights as political cover.

Security campaigns are usually judged by territory held and leaders neutralised. Operation Kagaar should also be judged by whether India can prevent a familiar inversion: the insurgent becoming the moral plaintiff, and the Republic becoming the sole accused. That inversion has sustained Maoist politics for too long. Defeating it is not ancillary to counter-insurgency. It is part of the campaign itself.