After decades of bloodshed, is India winning its war against Maoists?

Maoists, also known as "Naxalites" after the 1967 uprising in Naxalbari village in West Bengal, have regrouped over the decades to carve out a "red corridor" across central and eastern India - stretching from Jharkhand in the east to Maharashtra in the west and spanning more than a third of the country's districts. But Marxist-Leninist movements have transcended such challenges when the top leadership of the Naxalites were killed in the 70s and yet we are talking about Naxalism," said N Venugopal, a journalist, social scientist and long-time observer of the movement, who is both a critic and sympathiser of the Maoists. At the heart of the failure, he argued, was a dated revolutionary vision: building isolated "liberated zones" beyond the state's reach and "a theory to strike the state through a protracted people's war".