2026 is weighed down by the burden of earlier years

Ghazala Wahab

We have entered the New Year with the baggage of previous years. And this will collectively shape 2026. It’s an irony that despite a single-party majority government with strongman leadership at the helm for over a decade, India has never been more vulnerable internally and more inconsequential externally at the same time since Independence. The reason for this is that 2014 onwards, government of India progressively replaced policymaking with projectionism, compromising both security and defence. So, here’s stocktaking of some security challenges that are going to carry forward into the New Year.

Forest Fire

Last February, Union home minister Amit Shah declared through a post on X that his government is committed to end the menace of Naxalism (Left-Wing Extremism) by 31 March 2026. The 9 February 2025 post was celebrating the killing of 31 LWE ultras in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh. Hence, in the same celebratory tone, the home minister set the deadline for eliminating the LWE insurgency from India.

Given that the context of the deadline was the encounter killing of 31 ultras, the message to the state police and the central armed police forces (CAPFs), such as the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and the Border Security Force (BSF) deployed for counter-LWE operations, was unambiguous. The deadline had to be met through the killing of as many Naxal/ Maoist ultras, belonging to the Communist Party of India (Maoist) as possible. According to data sourced from news reports by South Asia Terrorism Portal, nearly 400 Maoists were killed in 2025 and over 2,000 surrendered.

The New Year began with more deaths in the forest. Fourteen Maoists were killed on 2-3 January 2026 in two separate encounters in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. Among the dead were senior commanders Vetti Mangdu and Madvi Hitesh. Last November, Maoist commander, Madvi Hidma and his wife Raje, were killed in an encounter with Andhra Pradesh police at the trijunction of Chhattisgarh, Andhra and Telangana. While the government insists that the two, along with some other ultras, were killed during an intelligence-based encounter, tribal leader and former MLA from Bastar, Manish Kunjam, alleged that Hidma’s encounter was staged by the police and arranged by a Telangana-based Maoist leader Devji.

This contention was based on the fact that despite Chhattisgarh being the centre of Maoist activities for several years, the main leadership of the group has always come from Andhra Pradesh/ Telangana region. Hidma was the only commander from Bastar to have been inducted into the central committee of CPI (Maoist), a fact resented by many in the Andhra/ Telangana region. Internal politics aside, many human rights activists, including People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) decried Hidma’s killing in a fake