Erstwhile Naxal-impacted districts going to be torchbearers of Viksit Bharat: BJP’s Tuhin Sinha

As the Centre has claimed to have freed the country of Naxalism in March 2026, an internal security threat that has plagued the country for decades, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national spokesperson Tuhin Sinha who has penned a book on this issue, has expressed optimism that these areas which have been affected by Left Wing Extremism can emerge as torch-bearers of Viksit Bharat.

In an exclusive conversation with The Statesman, Sinha said, “Today, when we talk of Naxal-free Bharat, obviously it means, the generation of unprecedented opportunities in the Naxal-impacted areas. So the hundred-plus erstwhile Naxal-impacted districts are now going to be the torchbearers of development going ahead.”

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The BJP spokesperson has claimed that since India’s city’s are nearing exhaustion in terms of growth, these areas which have been freed of Naxalism can emerge to be growth engines in a developed nation.

“When we talk of economic opportunities, our tier one, tier two cities are nearing exhaution. So the onus of development now needs to shift to the smaller centers, and eventually to the villages, eventually to the places least explored. That is where these hundred districts are going to play a very crucial and a pivotal role in India’s Viksit Bharat ambitions and goals going ahead,” Sinha said.

Sinha has recently penned his latest book, ‘Naxal Terror Vanquished: The Long War against Maoism, and the Doctrine That Ended It‘ on this grave internal security problem which the government has claimed to have finally eradicated.

Explaining the human toll of Naxalism, which has been a threat to our country’s internal security for decades, Sinha said, “Naxal terrorism in India has taken more than twenty-five thousand lives in the last five decades. In fact, nobody was spared. The son of Babulal Marandi, the ex-CM of Jharkhand, was brutally murdered by Naxals at one point of time.”

“Senior-most Congress leaders like Vidyacharan Shukla, who has been a cabinet minister, was ambushed by Naxal terrorist in 2013. So probably this generation has not seen that dark phase when Naxal terrorism would kill hundreds of people. In fact, I gave the example of Midnapur railway line sabotage, which ended up killing one fifty people. So that was the quantum of fear, the terror which existed because of Naxalism,” Sinha said.

Sinha admitted that the ethnic flare up in Manipur remains a problem in the country and should be addressed by the government. However, he pointed out that the rest of the north-eastern states have remained largely peaceful in the last few decades.

“I don’t think it would be fair to club the entire Northeast as a disturbed zone at this point of time. Rather, the last twelve years have witnessed unprecedented peace and transformation for the better in the Northeast. In fact one of my books is around the transformation of northeastern states,” he said.