Story in numbers: Maoist movement losing steam, leadership concedes

According to Home ministry data, there has been a 52.6% drop in incidents of Maoist violence between 2010 and 2016

There has been a 52.6% drop in incidents of Maoist violence between 2010 and 2016, according to an analysis of Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) data. Incidents of Maoist violence fell 22.5% in the first nine months of 2017 compared to the same period last year. 

In a review meeting in early 2017, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) concluded its armed struggle was undergoing a "difficult" phase. This fall in Maoist violence can be explained by a crackdown against left wing extremist groups. 

The spread of the Maoist movement across India, which grew in the last decade, appears to have been arrested, according to CPI (Maoist) documents. The party's traditional bastions, once considered unshakeable, have been affected as well. The party's central committee oversees the functioning of four regional bureaus — northern, eastern, central, and south-west. 

The central committee's assessment is that in the northern bureau, comprising Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, the party's grip is "very weak". In the eastern pocket —Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Assam — it is "weak/(suffering a) setback". 

In central areas, the forested Dandakaranya area in central Chhattisgarh, once considered an unbreachable Maoist stronghold, has been declared "difficult" for extreme left wing activities. Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Telangana have been categorised as "weak" or "setbacks". Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, states in the party's south-western bureau, are all down to "stagnation with only mass organisation activity".
Data and text: IndiaSpend