On Wednesday, security forces chalked up an important victory in India’s ongoing fight against Naxalism, neutralizing Nambala Keshava Rao, alias Basavaraju, the general secretary and supreme commander of the CPI (Maoist). Union home minister Amit Shah called him the “topmost leader, and the backbone of the Naxal movement” carrying 1.5 crore bounty on his head.
During Operation Black Forest (also called Operation Kagar), 27 dreaded Maoists were eliminated, 54 arrested while 84 more surrendered in Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Maharashtra. According to reports, in the first five months of this year, India’s security forces in an intelligence-driven anti-Naxal operation neutralized close to 300 Naxalites, marking the fastest annual pace of elimination of left-wing extremists since 2009.
As the minister said, India is on way to entirely eliminate the menace of this bloody insurgency by March next year, one which has over several decades bled India dry, killing tens of thousands, holding back development in some of India’s poorest pockets and spawning the toxic, left-wing extremist ideology that has taken deep roots in India’s politics, popular culture, media, and academia supporting violent insurrection against the Indian state. This has been a protracted, difficult battle but we are finally tasting sustained success.
Readers, I have started my assessment of Operation Sindoor with a report on India’s remarkable achievement against violent Maoist ideology because I want you to understand that while India has always been a hard state, it is only now that its capacities to deal with both external and internal threats are growing. These successes are linked to India’s rise.
The same resolve that was witnessed in decapitating the Naxal movement is evident in India’s dealing with the Pakistan problem, except now, as Operation Sindoor conclusively proved, India has more options in its arsenal in forcing Pakistan to accept painful conditions as a penalty for Islamabad’s persistent bad behaviour while avoiding major losses of its own.
What’s more, India has decisively shifted the Overton window of state response to terror perpetrated by Pakistan military trained, armed and sponsored proxies in such a way that kinetic retaliation against the Pakistani state is now ‘assured’.
Unlike Uri in 2016 or even Balakot in 2019 when India’s strategic restraint was the expectation and punitive action was the exception, resulting in constricted diplomatic space for conventional retaliation, the world has now come to accept that India will use military force under the nuclear threshold against Pakistan for instances of cross-border terror. As the diplomatic manoeuvres and statements from world leaders leading to Operation Sindoor showed, there’s even a tacit approval for India’s reprisal. This is the ‘new normal’.
To lay down such a doctrinal framework, as the prime minister did in his address to the nation, against a nuclear-armed state is an incredible achievement in itself but an even more incredible, if under-analysed, achievement is that Pakistan itself has come to accept the price it has to pay for carrying out sub-conventional warfare against India.
Despite suffering crippling damage on its military infrastructure and the military-terrorist complex through which India demonstrated its clear military superiority, escalation dominance and redrew its red lines, Pakistan focused its entire narrative on yet unproven claims of downing a few Indian fighter jets.
As RUSI’s Walter Ladwig, senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, writes, “That misleading narrative obscures a more consequential truth: despite Pakistani tactical successes, India appears to have largely achieved its stated objectives. On the opening day of strikes, the Indian Air Force (IAF) demonstrated a credible capacity to identify and destroy what New Delhi characterised as terrorist-linked infrastructure in Pakistani territory, employing stand-off weapons to deliver precision strikes at speed. In the following days, operations expanded in scope, penetrating Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defence network to target select forward airbases for the first time since the 1971 war.”
