The massacre in Chhattisgarh’s Jhiram Ghati on May 25, 2013 was among the most audacious attacks carried out by Maoists. While there had been attacks with higher casualties — the 2010 Tadmetla attack, for instance, killed 76 CRPF personnel — Jhiram Ghati had a different impact. For the first time, Maoists had virtually wiped out an entire generation of a state’s political leadership in one strike.

Among those killed were then Chhattisgarh Congress president Nand Kumar Patel and his son Dinesh, former Leader of Opposition Mahendra Karma, former Union Minister Vidya Charan Shukla and former MLA Uday Mudliyar.

The attack came at a crucial point in the evolution of the counter-Maoist strategy and, according to security establishment officials involved in operations in Bastar at that time, ended up reinforcing rather than disrupting that strategy.

By then, the Centre had already begun mounting sustained pressure on the Maoists. In 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had described Maoist violence as the country’s biggest internal security threat. When P Chidambaram became Union Home Minister in 2008, the government’s resolve to tackle the insurgency had hardened.

The strategy that emerged was broadly described as “clear, hold and develop”. Security forces would enter Maoist strongholds, push them out, establish camps to hold the territory and allow the civil administration to follow with roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure.

In Bastar, however, this was a slow and difficult process. In early 2013, security forces had set up a camp at Minapa in Sukma. It was a sign that security forces were beginning to move into the Maoist core areas. The Maoists were increasingly being forced into battles inside territory they had traditionally dominated.

It was against this backdrop that Jhiram Ghati took place.

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“The Jhiram Ghati massacre was planned as a way to disrupt this forward march by rattling the political establishment. But it only solidified the resolve as the Centre was now convinced that the strategy of setting up bases inside Maoist core areas was right,” said a senior security establishment officer who was in Chhattisgarh then.

The attack also had a particularly symbolic target in Mahendra Karma, who had been closely associated with Salwa Judum, the controversial anti-Maoist mobilisation launched in 2005 in which tribal civilians were armed and organised to fight Maoists.

In 2011, the Supreme Court restrained the state from continuing the practice of arming tribal youth as Special Police Officers to fight the insurgents, effectively striking down the model.

The Jhiram Ghati incident also exposed another weakness in the “clear, hold and develop” approach: the state’s security footprint was expanding faster than its administrative footprint.

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Security camps could be established deep inside the forests, but roads and communications often did not follow. In 2022, the CRPF said 331 km of roads sanctioned in the Sukma-Bijapur-Dantewada region in 2010 remained only about 50 per cent complete. Some projects sanctioned in 2012 had barely progressed.

“The Jhiram Ghati attack quickened the pace. It convinced the political class that they too could come under attack and so the matter was taken more seriously,” another security establishment officer said.

There were also more immediate operational lessons. One was the need for night evacuation. Helicopters had earlier generally not flown into these areas at night because of the difficult terrain and poor visibility. But following the Jhiram Ghati attack, the victims were evacuated through the night. Security forces subsequently pushed for similar capabilities for their own personnel, and night sorties gradually became routine.

The larger transformation, however, came later.

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A senior CRPF officer said the campaign acquired a sharper momentum after Amit Shah took charge as Union Home Minister in 2019. “He took keen interest in injecting pace. The Maoists were already fighting a losing battle, but he wanted to make their defeat decisive and quick. He would personally speak to Chief Ministers and state police, extend full support to the Central forces and give them a free hand in dealing with Maoist violence. He personally drove coordination between the Central and state forces and the civil administration,” the officer said.

The results of that sustained strategy are now visible. More than 15,000 km of roads have been built to take security forces into forested interiors, over 9,000 mobile towers have been installed and nearly 200 new security camps have come up in core Maoist areas. Left Wing Extremist-related incidents and deaths have fallen by more than four-fifths since 2010.

While Jhiram Ghati was not the beginning of the end of Maoist violence, the incident was a turning point in the political understanding of the conflict. The attack demonstrated that Maoists could retaliate spectacularly when the state pushed into their core areas. But instead of forcing the state to retreat, it convinced the political establishment that retreat was no longer an option.