Left-Wing Extremism (LWE), as it is officially called, began in 1967 as an armed peasant revolt in West Bengal and, by the mid-2000s, had spread to nearly a third of India's districts. In 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it the country's "greatest internal threat". Last year, the Indian government set a March 2026 deadline to end the insurgency and launched intensified security operations under its "ruthless" containment strategy.
Between January 2024 and September this year, security forces killed more than 600 alleged rebels, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP). This includes several senior members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).
