In the dense forests of Bastar, women once moved under the cover of canopy and ideology, rifles slung across their shoulders, part of an armed struggle that claimed to fight for the tribal poor. This August, on National Handloom Day, nine of those same women walked a very different path. Dressed in Chhattisgarh’s signature Kosa silk and traditional handloom sarees, they strode down a ramp in Raipur’s Deen Dayal Upadhyay Auditorium to sustained applause. The transformation was not cosmetic. It was the visible face of a deeper shift: the collapse of Left-Wing Extremism’s stranglehold on one of India’s most troubled regions and the opening of space for genuine empowerment.
The women, drawn from surrendered cadres in Sukma and rehabilitated under the state government’s “Puna Margem” (rehabilitation to rejuvenation) initiative, had held real roles in the Maoist structure. Some worked with the Pamed Area Committee. Others served as gunners for commanders in Battalion Number 1. One had functioned as a school teacher inside the organisation. One participant, Poonam Devi, had joined in November 2007 and surrendered only in July 2025 after nearly eighteen years. Another spoke of six days of training in Raipur by professionals from Mumbai — the first time, she said, she had done “something like this.” They enjoyed it. The audience’s applause was not merely for the clothes. It was recognition of a journey from isolation and violence to visibility and choice.
For decades the Naxalite movement presented itself as the defender of Adivasi rights against the state and capital. In practice it held development hostage. Roads were mined or repeatedly destroyed because they facilitated the movement of security forces and the arrival of administration. Schools were burned or forced shut; more than a thousand government schools across the region were reduced to rubble or abandoned. Teachers fled. In Sukma the gross enrolment ratio for higher secondary classes collapsed, and female literacy hovered near one-third. Health centres and anganwadis were targeted or abandoned; institutional deliveries remained abysmally low and infant mortality high. Mobile towers were toppled, power lines sabotaged, and contractors threatened. PDS shops stayed closed or were looted. Industry stayed away. The result was not liberation but prolonged isolation. Communities were cut off from markets, medical care, education and the simple possibility of aspiration. Women and youth paid the heaviest price: girls lost schooling, young people were recruited or coerced into the ranks, and economic agency remained almost non-existent.
The ideology that claimed to empower the marginalised systematically denied them the instruments of empowerment. Education was treated as a threat because literate minds might question the permanent revolution. Connectivity was treated as infiltration. Livelihoods outside the movement’s control were treated as collaboration. The forests became both sanctuary and prison.
That prison is now breaking open. Sustained security operations, combined with a clear rehabilitation policy and a deliberate development push, have pushed Maoist influence to the margins. Mass surrenders — including large groups of women cadres — have become regular. Security camps are being converted into service centres. Roads are reaching interior habitations. Schools closed for years are reopening. Health camps and digital health profiles are covering large populations. Skill-training programmes, banking services and livelihood schemes are appearing in places that once saw only the movement’s parallel structures. Under schemes such as Niyad Nellanar, benefits that were theoretical for decades are becoming tangible.
The Raipur ramp walk is one elegant symbol of this change. Handloom is not incidental. Chhattisgarh’s weaving traditions, particularly Kosa silk, represent both cultural continuity and economic possibility. By placing former combatants on a stage celebrating indigenous craft, the state is signalling that identity and livelihood need not be subordinated to armed ideology. These women are no longer defined solely by the weapons they once carried; they are being invited into the economic and cultural mainstream as citizens with agency. Similar opportunities in tailoring, food processing, animal husbandry, banking correspondents and small enterprises are being extended to other surrendered cadres and to the broader youth of the region. The message is straightforward: the path out of the forest leads to skills, markets and dignity, not permanent exile.
Empowerment here is practical rather than rhetorical. When a young woman from a once-inaccessible village can walk confidently in traditional attire before ministers and the public, when she can speak of training and enjoyment rather than fear, the psychological architecture of the old order is undermined. When schools reopen and girls enrol, the pipeline of forced or coerced recruitment begins to dry up. When roads and mobile connectivity arrive, information flows that the movement once monopolised. When skill centres and self-help groups take root, economic dependence on the armed group weakens. Youth who once saw only the forest or the gun now see alternatives.
The work is unfinished. Trust must still be built. Land and forest rights questions remain sensitive. Last-mile delivery of services in remote habitations will take time. Yet the direction is unmistakable. The Naxalite project kept Bastar underdeveloped by design, using violence to freeze the region in a state of permanent grievance. The emerging alternative is imperfect but concrete: security that enables governance, rehabilitation that offers second chances, and development that treats tribal communities as citizens rather than permanent revolutionaries or permanent victims.
The women who once carried weapons in Bastar’s forests and now walk the ramp in Raipur embody that shift. Their applause is not the end of the story. It is evidence that the long night of enforced isolation is lifting, and that women and youth are finally being allowed to claim the ordinary powers of education, skill, livelihood and public presence that every Indian citizen should take for granted. That is the real defeat of the insurgency — not merely the silencing of guns, but the restoration of possibility.
