New Delhi/ Bhopal, August 12, 2026

When you are fighting a war, you at least know which side you are on. When you are writing about one, those lines become dangerously blurred. Right and wrong cease to arrive in neat ideological packages. One man’s revolutionary is another man’s terrorist; one man’s security operation is another man’s oppression. And somewhere between these competing truths lies the uncomfortable responsibility of the writer: to look at what happened without first asking which side committed it.

That is the most difficult part of writing about Naxalism.

If I write about the suffering of a Naxal, I risk being pilloried by the Right for romanticising insurgency. If I write about the sacrifices of the police and the administration, sections of the Left may promptly dismiss me as a propagandist of the State, even paint me in convenient shades of saffron. In this deeply polarised discourse, neutrality itself can become an offence.

But I refuse to choose my outrage according to ideology.

A severed head does not become less gruesome because of the politics of the man wielding the axe. An innocent life does not become less valuable because acknowledging it is inconvenient to one side of the political spectrum.

During my travels through Bastar, I heard stories that refused to fit neatly into the narratives we have constructed around this conflict. There were stories of policemen killed in ambushes, of families who waited for men who never returned, of villagers accused of being informers, of young boys and girls drawn into an armed movement before they fully understood the ideology they were fighting for.

And there were stories of extraordinary brutality. One of them has stayed with me. An old man was killed with an axe. His head was severed from his body. There is no elegant way of writing that sentence. There should not be. Before he died, he asked for water.

Think about the terrifying simplicity of that request. At the very end, stripped of ideology, stripped of politics, stripped of every label that had been placed upon him, a man asked for a sip of water.

That image is difficult to reconcile with the romantic vocabulary that has sometimes surrounded armed revolution.

For decades, the discourse around Naxalism has been trapped between two convenient extremes. One side saw only terrorists. The other sometimes saw only revolutionaries. Between them stood millions of ordinary tribal citizens whose lives were far more complicated than either description allowed.

Many lived under a State that was historically distant from them. Roads were absent. Schools were inadequate. Healthcare was inaccessible. Development arrived late if it arrived at all. Exploitation was real. Alienation was real. These grievances cannot simply be erased because the Maoists eventually adopted extraordinary violence.

But neither can genuine grievance become a permanent moral licence for brutality. This is where the conversation about Naxalism becomes uncomfortable. To understand why a movement began is not to justify everything it later became. To acknowledge State failures is not to endorse Maoist violence. To recognise the sacrifices of the security forces is not to deny the suffering of tribal communities.And to tell the story of a surrendered Maoist is not to absolve him of the choices he made. Perhaps we have spent too many years demanding that people choose one truth and discard the other.

Bastar does not allow that luxury: The deeper I travelled into the region, the more I realised that almost everyone carried a different version of the same war. The policeman remembered the colleague he lost. The surrendered cadre remembered the friend killed beside him. The villager remembered the night armed men arrived at his home. The mother remembered the child who disappeared into the forest.

Everyone had a story. And everyone had a wound. This is also why the end of Naxalism cannot merely be measured by the number of Maoists killed, arrested, or surrendered.

The Government of India has set an ambitious deadline to end Left-Wing Extremism. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has repeatedly spoken of ending Naxalism by 31 March 2026. Security operations have intensified, senior Maoist leaders have been neutralised, cadres have surrendered in large numbers and areas once considered inaccessible are opening to roads, schools, telecommunications, and administration.

These are significant achievements. But the real victory will come later. It will come when a young tribal child sees a school before he sees a gun. When a village trusts a police station more than it fears a Jan Adalat. When surrender does not merely mean putting down a weapon, but getting a skill, earning a livelihood, and discovering an identity beyond the movement. When development is not something announced from Delhi or Raipur but something visible outside a villager’s home. And when the State does not merely enter the forest with security forces, but stays there with teachers, doctors, roads, jobs, and justice.

That is the final responsibility of anyone writing about this conflict as well. Not to romanticise the gun. Not to sanitise the State. Not to select victims according to ideology. But to tell the stories that make everyone uncomfortable. Because wars eventually end. Governments declare victories. Insurgencies collapse. Leaders are killed, arrested or surrender. Deadlines come and go.

But the moral record remains. And when we write that record, we should be able to look at a policeman killed in an ambush, a tribal child denied an education, a surrendered guerrilla trying to rebuild his life, or an old man on his knees, asking for one last sip of water and see, before anything else, a human being.

(Bhaavna Arora is a bestselling author known for transforming years of meticulous research into powerful human stories. Her work explores conflict not through battles alone, but through the lives, sacrifices, and resilience of those who endure it.)