Battered in Chhattisgarh, the Maoists are moving in small groups towards the forests of Odisha, where security forces have been put on high alert, sources said on Friday.
“Having suffered heavy losses in Chhattisgarh, the Maoists are decentralising their armed units and spreading themselves in small groups towards and across the vast forests of Odisha,” a security official attached to the Union home ministry told
The Telegraph.
An Intelligence Bureau official said security forces in Odisha had been alerted about the rebels’ movement to the forests of Budanai, Koraput, Boudh, Nuapada, Malkangiri, Kalahandi and Kandhamal. It’s believed that the Maoists might try to slip into Jharkhand from Odisha.
“The forces have been directed to intensify area domination and combing operations in these areas, besides setting up forward bases and camps,” the official said.
It’s such forward bases, he said, that had restricted the Maoists’ movements in Chhattisgarh and helped the forces carry out counter-offensives inside the Abhujmad forest, once dubbed a “liberated zone”.
Sources said that in Chhattisgarh, the Maoists were now believed to be confined to only a handful of places, “particularly the Sukma-Bijapur and Abhujmad regions”.
They said the rebels faced an uphill task to regroup as their base area had shrunk and fresh recruitment had almost dried up. Their commanders are believed to have gone underground, they added.
The security forces, which launched a massive operation against the Maoists in Chhattisgarh in September-October last year, have made repeated inroads into rebel strongholds since January, killing more than 250 Maoists, including key leaders.
Several Maoist leaders had initially moved towards the “MMC Corridor” — the forested areas at the trijunction of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh — to try and evade the crackdown.
However, the sizeable force deployment and regular combing operations in these areas forced them to look for an alternative escape route, and they turned their attention to Odisha where things had been quiet for a while, the IB official said.
The Maoists had created the “MMC Corridor” in 2016 to provide a retreat for their leaders if their forested headquarters of Abhujmad, between the Narayanpur and Dantewada districts in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region, came under a threat.
Last month, the forces gunned down Nambala Keshavrao alias Basavaraju, the country’s topmost Maoist leader, during an encounter inside the Abhujmad forest.
“Since January, several central committee members of the banned organisation have been eliminated. Our main focus is now to track down the remaining most-wanted Naxal leaders,” a CRPF official posted in Chhattisgarh said.
A fact-finding team of a civil rights group had late last year accused the forces of victimising Adivasi communities in Bastar. It said the forces had illegally set up a large number of camps on tribal land on the pretext of “area domination”.
The team also alleged rampant human rights violations by the forces close to the camps, with the Adivasis not “allowed to move freely and even the weekly market, which is the lifeline for the communities, and the regular purchases are subject to monitoring and under police control”.
Shah visit
Union home minister Amit Shah, who has declared March 31, 2026, as the deadline to wipe out Maoism from the country, will visit Chhattisgarh on June 22 to review the anti-rebel operations.