First Person | New Year, Old Challenges

 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 encounter. According to them, Hidma and Raje were arrested on November 15 and killed later in a staged encounter.

Activists also allege that to notch up the numbers, the security forces have frequently presented hapless tribal people—sometimes as dead and sometimes as surrendered Maoists. Clearly, in the forest of Dandakaranya, where even the sunlight doesn’t penetrate the dense foliage of the trees, the truth depends upon whose version you wish to believe—the government or the ground level activists who work among the dispossessed tribal people.

However, one truth is in public domain. On 11 January 2025, NDTV, which is owned by Adani Group, reported that its parent company plans to invest Rs 75,000 crore in Chhattisgarh in power and cement plants, healthcare, skill development, education etc., over the next four years. Adani is not the only corporation investing in Chhattisgarh’s abundant natural resources. In the last one year alone, several big corporates have pledged nearly Rs 7.8 lakh crore investment in the state.

Statistics are impressive, but they don’t always tell the full story. Activists who are reluctant to be named, believe that the deadline and the euphemistic ‘ground clearance’ by the security forces in Chhattisgarh are in preparation for the corporates to move in. According to them, establishment of new police posts, battalion headquarters and company operating bases inside Dandakaranya and Abujmadh--the inhospitable heart of the forest which for decades provided haven to the insurgents—are part of corporate ambitions. They have little to do with the welfare of the tribal people, who have been victims of both the state and the insurgents—former wants to take away their jal, jangal and zameen (water, forest and land) in the name of development, and the latter fights in their name without their consent.

And in this lies the challenge of Naxalism. Amit Shah is not the first minister who has sworn to end LWE through the barrel of gun. In the Seventies, the Congress government of West Bengal did the same. Through sheer state power it crushed the Naxalbari movement. But the ensuing peace was a chimera. Within a few years, the idea of a revolution was supplanted in Bihar with the birth of Maoist Communist Centre. 

The history of revolution in Telangana/ Andhra region goes back to the Forties. Therefore, this romance of a revolution by the peasants against landed autocracy has sustained for nearly 80 years. The tribal revolt goes even further back in history to the legacy of Birsa Munda in the closing decade of the 19th century. The cause then, as it is now, was the same. Protection and preservation of tribal jal, jangal, and zameen. While Munda fought the British to safeguard what the tribal people deemed as theirs and earned the sobriquet of a freedom fighter, his successors, fighting the government of India for the same have been labelled as extremists. Predictably, the State’s response, whether colonial or independent India, has been the same. Appropriation of resources in the name of national development and criminalisation of those resisting it.

Since the government has no talent for long-term thinking, dazzled as it is by statistics, it is sanguine about the future. It refuses to acknowledge that no problem can be resolved if its root cause is not addressed. No development can be imposed upon the people unless they develop stakes in it. With or without the Maoists, the tribal resistance has not subsided. In fact, in many places, the tribals are taking recourse in the judiciary to preserve their culture, religion and their traditional way of living. The government would do well if it didn’t see this as a war with extermination of resistance as the only option. A magnanimous and patient outreach to India’s most marginalised people might yield a more sustained peace.

Valley of Woes

From October 28 to 31, former Union minister, and now in wilderness politician, Yashwant Sinha led a Concerned Citizens’ Group (CCG) comprising fellow travellers to the Kashmir valley. The idea was to understand the Kashmiri sentiment towards India after two events--the Pahalgam attack of April 22, in which 26 civilians, 25 of them Hindu tourists, were killed by terrorists after determining their religion, and the retaliatory Indian attack on Pakistan under the operational name Sindoor.

After speaking to some Kashmiri politicians, both mainstream (referred to as Unionists by the locals), Separatists and civil society members, the CCG reported that anti-India sentiment has been rising in Kashmir. Moreover, those disenchanted with Pakistan earlier have changed their positions and are looking at that country with new admiration after Operation Sindoor. Sinha’s team also noticed a blanket of fear over the people, many of whom told his team that they have been silenced by the government. Absence of jobs and bleakness of future were other complaints that the locals made. However, the most disturbing thing that Sinha’s team observed was the growing radicalisation among the educated, but unemployed young, through online engagement, most probably from across the border.

The CCG linked its findings to the abrogation of Article 370 and demotion of the erstwhile state into two Union territories of Jammu-Kashmir and Ladakh. The report observes that people are resentful that the promised statehood has not been restored yet. And in the name of democracy, a powerless chief minister of the UT has been foisted on them.

Probably well-intentioned, the CCG report only reiterates what the government already knows. If it didn’t, it would not have hesitated in restoring statehood. And it would have eased on the information clamp down on the Valley. Even six years after the revocation and despite a token UT government in place, all journalists are closely watched, everything they write or speak is scrutinised and frequently, mobile phones and laptops of some journalists are seized, all data erased to send a message to the rest of their fraternity. Anonymous foot-soldiers from the Intelligence Bureau (IB) keep a watch on all public places in Valley, eavesdropping on conversations, making notes on outsiders who don’t look like tourists.

But there is another reason why the CCG’s report amounts to nothing. Once some semblance of peace was restored in the Valley in the first decade of 2000, government of India started engaging with Kashmiri people to understand their grievances and how their aspirations could be met. Sometime these conversations happened directly between the Kashmiri politicians (of all hues), civil society and the government, and sometimes through the government appointed interlocutors. Each conversation resulted in huge compendiums, all of which simply gathered dust in the ministry of home affairs (MHA) building. The government’s interest lay only in the process of the conversation, not its aftermath.

The present government is not interested even in the process. It doesn’t need to understand what the Kashmiris want. It only wants the Kashmiris to understand what it wants. And that process has been underway, though without much success. The reason for that is the mysterious word, which most Kashmiris also cannot fully explain—sentiment. Loosely, sentiment encompasses everything from free-will to self-rule. The problem in Kashmir therefore is not the abrogation of Article 370. The problem, according to them, is government of India’s consistent refusal, irrespective of the political party, to see Kashmir from the perspective of Kashmiris; and its complete disregard of the political aspirations of Kashmiris since 1947.

Most people tend to see Kashmir through the lens of 1989, when unfulfilled aspirations turned into violent insurgency. They do not see the existence of separateness with which the people of the Kashmir Valley regarded themselves vis-a-vis the rest of India since 1947. This separateness was the result of the historic sentiment of independence, or self-rule. In the early post-Independence years, the government of India tried to accommodate this sentiment through Article 370, which gave the Kashmiris a semblance of self-governance. But as successive governments started to whittle down the provisions of Article 370, the sentiment took flight. Remember Maqbool Butt was hanged to death in Tihar jail in 1984, but rose thereafter to become a local hero, embodying the undying spirit of the ‘sentiment.’

Despite smothered by fear, Kashmiris remain among the most politically sharp and voluble people. Their sullen silences and strategic pauses often speak more than their words. They don’t need a new conversation. They just want the threads of the old ones to be picked up again and to be taken to their logical conclusion. Perhaps, in that process of the conversation moving towards conclusion, both Kashmiris and the government may have clarity about what the word sentiment could mean today.

Eastern Frontier

In February 2025, the Union government finally dismissed Manipur government of N. Biren Singh, nearly two years after the state was thrown into ethnic violence between the Meities and the Kukis. Since then, Manipur has been under President’s rule, which is maintaining a semblance of calm through military force. The inter-community wounds remain, and the absence of mass violence does not suggest return of peace. Sporadic violence continues to take place, and rival militias continue to hold arms.

However, what makes the situation even more volatile is India’s hostile eastern neighbourhood. India’s free-falling foreign policy remained directionless in 2025, converting grievances against Bangladesh’s interim government into unmasked hostility. As a member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Bangladesh not only has Beijing’s full support, but has of late warmed up to Pakistan as well. With this background, when the chief advisor of the caretaker government in Dhaka, Mohammad Yunus suggested during his visit to China that his country could become the gateway to the ocean for India’s Northeast, the government of India saw it for what it was—a grave provocation, especially at a time when several parts of the region, Manipur, Nagaland and Assam, are restive. An eastern frontier is the last thing India can afford given the state of relations with China and Pakistan.

Invisible Military Reforms

In January, the ministry of defence (MoD) had declared 2025 the year of reforms, the centre point of which were Integrated Theatre Commands (ITCs). This has been work in progress for the last five years. Given that the Indian Air Force (IAF) continues to disagree even on the need for theatre commands and the army insists that it will have to be the lead in not only the integrated command structures, but also in any future war, it is unlikely that this reform will take place even in 2026!

As far as other reforms, such as incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in military platforms and systems, and inducting high technology in weapons, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and communications were concerned, there was much talk through the year. Each service held multiple seminars/ conferences on future technologies, and both the defence minister and Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) frequently repeated terms like AI, Machine Learning, Quantum Computing, Hypersonics, cyber and space at every forum.

Operation Sindoor presented a reality check, and the MoD saw the distance between the talk and the walk. Hence, it continued with the talk. For the rest, it was back to the reliable French and Russian original equipment manufacturers who are happy to supply the goods under the rubric of Aatmanirbhar Bharat. Whatever happens, ‘talk’ has to be right. After all, how else will projection happen. Happy 2026!