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The first week of 2025 has seen 16 people killed in Bastar – one of them, a young, intrepid journalist, Mukesh Chandrakar. Five months after his report on irregularities in a road construction project in Bijapur district prompted a government inquiry, his body was found in a septic tank on the property of the road contractor.

Chandrakar’s murder for exposing embezzlement has caused a national furore – as it should. But few realise how intrinsically it is linked to the Maoist insurgency in the region.

It took another local journalist to point out the connection. Days after Chandrakar’s death, returning to the broken road built at a cost of Rs 120 crore, journalist Vikas Tiwari pithily summed up the tragedy in a piece to the camera.

“Union Home Minister Amit Shah has claimed that Bastar, which has been in the grip of Maoism for four decades, will be liberated by March 31, 2026,” he said, referring to the declaration that Shah made last year of an “all-out war” on the Maoists.

“How will this happen?” he asked. “By developing the area.” Tiwari was essentially spelling out the state’s argument: “And development will happen only when the area is covered with a network of roads to ensure basic facilities reach the village. Hence, the focus on building roads.”

“But Bastar is perhaps the only area,” he continued, “where apart from sand, gravel and asphalt, roads are irrigated with the blood of jawans, and now even of journalists.”

Tiwari was making the point that behind the facade of development and security, the state’s aggressive road building campaign was driven by greed. The politician-builder-contractor nexus profited from it at the cost of everyone else – the police personnel posted to provide security cover to the construction teams, the journalists who risked their lives to blow the lid off corruption, and the residents of the villages in whose name the roads were being built but many of whom did not want them.

Unlike the rest of India where people demand road connectivity, in Bastar, many Adivasi villagers fear it since they know once a road is built through the forest, it will be followed by a security camp, which will inevitably lead to an escalation of the war between the state and the Maoists. Many people suspect the state’s ultimate aim behind ousting the Maoists is to open up the area for mining which will devastate their lands.

Last year saw an intensification of bloodshed in the region. Chhattisgarh police claimed to have killed 217 insurgents in 2024 – the highest number for any year since the counterinsurgency began. In December, Shah visited the state capital Raipur and triumphantly reiterated that the police were on course to ending the insurgency by March 2026.

Laying down deadlines in any conflict is a recipe for disaster. It leads to shortcuts and missteps, as Scroll’s reporting has shown. While in a few major operations, the security forces managed to target the Maoist leadership with great precision, several encounters have been marred by allegations of the security forces killing low-level cadres, or worse, unarmed civilians in cold blood and presenting them as reward-worthy Maoists. Scroll contributor Malini Subramaniam’s latest ground report on a botched-up encounter that left four children injured brings out the horror of what is unfolding.

Even from the state’s point of view, this haste is counter-productive.

As we wrote in October, the state has steadily wrested the advantage in the war by recruiting local Adivasis in the police force as District Reserve Guards. Unlike paramilitary troopers from faraway places who are unfamiliar with the terrain and culture, these locals have lived in the jungle and know the ways of the insurgents. They are able to fight a guerilla war more effectively.

Ultimately, what matters in any insurgency is which side the local population picks. The recruitment of the DRGs showed a section of Adivasis is now willing to fight on behalf of the state. But, if the state uses them to unleash indiscriminate violence on unarmed people, it risks undoing the gradual gains it had made.

At the end of the day, the escalating violence in Bastar is consuming Adivasi lives.

The same week Mukesh Chandrakar was murdered for uncovering the truth about a road project, eight DRGs and their driver were killed when the security vehicle they were travelling in was blown up by the Maoists. The Adivasi policemen were returning from an operation in which five suspected Maoists, also Adivasi, were killed – “suspected” because only ground reporting can tell us who they actually were.

And this is the tragedy – the national media has almost entirely given up on reporting from the ground in Bastar. Most reports in major newspapers are largely based on the press statements of the police. It is as if the country no longer cares about the war in Bastar.

Brave local reporters, however, continue to do their work – as Chandrakar’s death shows, at a steep cost.

Also read: A dead body in the forest, injured children, and other unanswered questions about Bastar encounter