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On the morning of Diwali, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced he was heading to Bastar, the forested heart of Chhattisgarh that was, for decades, the epicentre of India's Maoist insurgency — his first visit to the state for the festival. "Heading to Bastar to celebrate Diwali with our brave security forces," he wrote on X. "This is an area where Naxalism once held sway, and now, development is flourishing."
The choice of destination is the message. Modi has spent every Diwali since 2014 with soldiers and security personnel — this is his 13th consecutive year doing so — but Bastar is not a border post or a forward base. It is a region the Indian state spent the best part of forty years fighting to reclaim. Celebrating Diwali there is a victory lap, and a statement that the fight is over.
Why Bastar?
Bastar was for decades among India's most challenging internal-security theatres. Its dense forests sheltered Maoist guerrillas, and its seven districts were the core of the Left-Wing Extremism insurgency that at its peak affected swathes of central and eastern India. The central armed police forces and Chhattisgarh Police, including the CRPF, its elite CoBRA commandos and the District Reserve Guard, spent years dismantling the insurgent strongholds village by village.
The government says the transformation is now complete. On 31 March this year, it announced that the country was free of the menace of Naxalism after the elimination of several leaders and cadres and the surrender of hundreds of others. Union Home Minister Amit Shah later declared Bastar itself Naxal-free, saying the Centre's target of ending Left-Wing Extremism by 31 March 2026 had been achieved. Nearly 200 security camps have been established across Bastar's seven districts as part of the campaign.
The CRPF Milestone Behind the Visit
Ahead of the visit, Modi praised the Central Reserve Police Force for a milestone that gives the trip its emotional core: 12 consecutive months without an operational fatality. The force recorded its last operational fatality on 30 October 2025. For a force that has borne the brunt of the anti-Maoist operations in Bastar, a full year without losing a jawan on operations is the kind of statistic that turns a festival visit into a tribute.
"I am going to salute our brave security personnel for their sacrifices, selfless service and unwavering devotion to the nation," Modi wrote in his announcement. The precise location of Sunday's programme has not been officially disclosed, but he is expected to interact with personnel deployed in the region.
What the Visit Signals
The political signal is aimed in two directions. Domestically, it tells voters that the government's hardest internal-security problem has been solved — not managed, but ended — and that development, not counter-insurgency, is now Bastar's story. The language of the announcement, "development is flourishing" where "Naxalism once held sway," is the language of a completed mission, and it is no accident that it comes from a prime minister who has built his Diwali tradition into an annual demonstration of solidarity with the forces.
There is also a quieter, institutional signal. A visit like this only works if the ground is genuinely secure; a prime minister does not spend Diwali in a region his own security establishment considers unsafe. The trip is, in that sense, the government's own confidence vote in its Bastar claim — a claim that will now be judged by whether the peace holds after the cameras leave.
The sceptical view is worth stating plainly. Declarations of victory over insurgencies have a habit of ageing badly, and the recovery of arms dumps in Bijapur district in just the last few days — hundreds of detonators and grenade shells unearthed from Maoist caches — is a reminder that the hardware of the old war is still buried in those forests. Security forces say those recoveries are the mop-up of a defeated movement, not evidence of a living one, and the surrenders of recent months support that reading. But the difference between a defeated insurgency and a finished one is measured in years, not announcements.
For now, though, the symbolism is hard to argue with. A festival of light, celebrated in a place that spent decades in the shadow of an insurgency, with the soldiers who ended it. India's own military reforms show how seriously New Delhi takes its strategic competition, and the gold rally Indian buyers are watching is a reminder of how much of the country's mood is set by confidence at home. Whether Bastar's transformation endures will be decided in the months ahead — but on this Diwali, the prime minister's choice of where to stand says everything about the story India wants to tell about itself. News18 and the Times of India both reported the announcement on Sunday morning.