The Constitutional Test After Maoism

Ending an insurgency can restore the state’s control over territory. It cannot, by itself, restore the political relationship between the state and the people who live there.

Imagine a village where the guns have finally gone silent.

The roads are open. A school has returned. Government officials can enter without an armed escort. Welfare reaches households that once stood outside the administrative system.

By almost every conventional measure, the state has won.

But now imagine that the same village is told that its forest, land or mineral resources will be used for a project without its meaningful consent.

Has peace really been consolidated?

This is the harder question emerging from the retreat of Left Wing Extremism in central India.

The military contraction of the Maoist insurgency changes the security problem. The return of roads, welfare and administration changes the developmental problem. But neither automatically resolves the political problem: who gets to decide how the territory is governed?

That is why the post-Maoist transition is ultimately a constitutional test.

The central issue is no longer simply whether the Indian state can reach the forest. It is whether, once it reaches the forest, it can govern in a way that makes the Adivasi a rights-bearing participant rather than merely a beneficiary of government policy.

The insurgency exposed a problem that security alone cannot solve

The temptation after a military victory is to treat the underlying conflict as finished.

But the research surrounding India’s Maoist experience points to a more complicated relationship between security and governance.

The Fifth Schedule was conceived as a special constitutional framework for tribal areas—a form of social contract recognising that ordinary administrative arrangements were inadequate for communities with distinct social, economic and cultural conditions. It created institutions such as the Tribes Advisory Council and gave the Governor special responsibilities concerning Scheduled Areas.

The constitutional framework remains important because it shows that the problem was never simply the absence of formal protection. The Constitution itself created a differentiated institutional arrangement for Scheduled Areas.

Yet the same research records a persistent gap between constitutional design and institutional practice.

The Planning Commission’s 2008 Expert Committee documented serious failures of governance and implementation in tribal regions. The Mungekar Committee subsequently examined the standards of administration and governance in Scheduled Areas. The research also records the observation of former SC/ST Commissioner B.D. Sharma that administrative personnel in tribal areas were overwhelmingly outsiders who carried their own attitudes and biases into everyday governance.

The consequence was not merely administrative inefficiency.

It was a legitimacy problem.

When the constitutional machinery designed to protect tribal communities becomes distant from their everyday experience, the formal existence of rights and the lived experience of those rights begin to diverge.

That distinction is critical to understanding what comes after Maoism.

The question is not whether India possesses constitutional safeguards.

It does.

The question is whether those safeguards become credible institutions in the places where they matter most.

PESA changed the meaning of governance

This is where the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 becomes more than another piece of legislation.

PESA extended the Panchayati Raj framework to Scheduled Areas with specific modifications intended to recognise the distinctive institutional position of tribal communities. At its centre is the Gram Sabha and its role in local self-governance.

The deeper idea is simple.

A government office can administer a village.

A Gram Sabha allows the village to participate in governing itself.

Those are not the same thing.

The difference becomes particularly important when decisions affect land and livelihoods. The research identifies Gram Sabha authority and consent in matters affecting these interests as having the potential to produce the structural change necessary for positive peace—peace that goes beyond the absence of violence.

The Ministry of Panchayati Raj’s current PESA monitoring framework also makes implementation a measurable question rather than merely a constitutional aspiration. The Ministry has developed 10 indicators for assessing PESA implementation, while implementation itself remains primarily within the purview of State Governments. Chhattisgarh is recorded in the current framework with 5,552 PESA Panchayats covering 9,891 villages.

Those numbers demonstrate institutional reach.

They do not, by themselves, demonstrate substantive local autonomy.

That distinction is the point.

If peace means merely that Maoist fighters are no longer capable of controlling territory, then military contraction may be enough.

If peace means that citizens have confidence that their interests will be protected through legitimate institutions, then security is only the beginning.

The Gram Sabha becomes important precisely because it changes the citizen’s position.

The Adivasi is no longer simply someone for whom the government provides services.

The Adivasi becomes someone who participates in deciding what happens to the community.

The hardest test appears when development reaches valuable land

The contradiction becomes sharper because many of the regions affected by LWE are not simply remote.

They are also resource-rich.

This creates a structural tension that cannot be resolved merely through better welfare delivery.

The research records Walter Fernandes’ finding that more tribal people lost their land after economic liberalisation began than during any earlier period of post-Independence India. It also connects the historical governance crisis to the broader experience of dispossession in resource-rich tribal areas.

This creates a difficult institutional equation.

The state wants connectivity because isolation has made administration and development difficult.

It wants investment because resource-rich regions possess economic value.

It wants infrastructure because roads and other physical systems can connect remote communities to the wider economy.

But the same processes can threaten the land and forest relationships that make the constitutional protection of tribal communities necessary in the first place.

The problem is therefore not development versus no development.

It is who has the authority to define development, and under what constitutional conditions.

That is why the Gram Sabha matters.

Without meaningful participation, infrastructure can be experienced as state penetration rather than empowerment.

A road can connect a village to a market.

It can also make extraction easier.

A forest project can create environmental infrastructure.

It can also interfere with customary community use if implemented without local participation.

A mining project can create economic activity.

It can also reproduce the very land alienation that historically generated distrust.

The infrastructure itself is not the constitutional answer.

The institutional process through which decisions are made is.

The 2022 PESA controversy reveals the fault line

The sharpest illustration of this problem is the controversy over Chhattisgarh’s proposed PESA rules in 2022.

The proposal sought to replace the requirement of Gram Sabha “consent” with “consultation” in matters involving land acquisition and mining. The distinction may appear semantic.

Institutionally, it is enormous.

Consultation allows the government to hear a community’s position before proceeding.

Consent gives that community a materially stronger position in determining whether the decision can proceed.

The research treats this proposed shift as an example of the pressure placed on grassroots self-governance in resource-rich areas. It is important, however, to treat it as a proposed change, not as proof that the final legal framework permanently eliminated Gram Sabha authority.

This is precisely why the post-Maoist question cannot be reduced to whether government services are reaching villages.

A state can become more visible without becoming more participatory.

It can become more efficient without becoming more accountable to local institutions.

And it can become more economically active while reproducing the grievances that weakened its legitimacy in the first place.

The difference between consultation and consent therefore captures the larger constitutional question.

Is the community being informed about decisions made elsewhere?

Or does the community possess meaningful institutional power over decisions that reshape its own future?

The Forest Rights Act completes the other half of the equation

PESA addresses political participation.

The Forest Rights Act, 2006 addresses another part of the relationship: the rights of forest-dwelling communities over land and forest resources.

The significance of FRA in this context is that governance cannot be separated from the material basis of community life. Forests are not simply geographical spaces waiting to be administered. For forest-dwelling communities, they are tied to livelihood and resource access.

That makes the implementation of forest rights part of the legitimacy question.

The statutory framework recognises and vests forest rights and occupation in forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers whose rights historically went unrecorded.

If the state tells a community that it is now fully integrated into the democratic system but continues to leave legitimate forest claims unresolved, the contradiction becomes visible.

The constitutional promise exists.

The administrative experience does not match it.

The same tension appears in the treatment of compensatory afforestation.

The research identifies the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 as a major institutional contradiction because centralised forest administration can come into conflict with the local rights structures protected through PESA and FRA.

Again, the issue is not whether environmental protection or development is legitimate.

The issue is whether the institutions implementing those objectives respect the constitutional position of the communities living on the land.

This is why resource sovereignty becomes inseparable from post-conflict peace.

The Fifth Schedule’s problem was not the absence of constitutional imagination

There is an uncomfortable irony here.

India did not enter this problem without a constitutional framework.

The Fifth Schedule already represented a recognition that tribal areas required distinctive institutional protection. It created a special constitutional framework for Scheduled Areas, including the Governor’s responsibilities and the Tribes Advisory Council.

The problem was the distance between constitutional design and institutional behaviour.

The Governor, for example, was given special responsibilities concerning Scheduled Areas. The Tribes Advisory Council was similarly designed as a mechanism for tribal participation.

But formal institutions do not automatically create effective power.

A right written into a constitutional framework is not automatically an effective right.

It becomes effective when institutions have the authority, incentives and political support to enforce it.

That is why post-Maoist reconstruction cannot simply mean introducing more government programmes.

It requires making existing constitutional institutions work differently.

The Sixth Schedule offers a provocative comparison

The research makes this institutional problem particularly visible through the contrast between the Fifth and Sixth Schedules.

The Sixth Schedule provides for Autonomous District and Zonal Councils with substantially greater political and financial autonomy. The comparison is not a claim that the same constitutional arrangement can simply be transplanted from one region to another.

It is useful because it exposes the difference between representation and power.

A council can contain tribal representatives and still have limited ability to shape outcomes.

A Gram Sabha can formally exist and still be bypassed.

A constitutional office can possess significant powers and still remain institutionally inactive.

The post-conflict question is therefore not merely:

Are tribal institutions present?

It is:

Can they actually alter decisions?

That is the threshold at which constitutional protection becomes political reality.

Trust cannot be delivered like a welfare scheme

This is perhaps the most important distinction in the entire transition.

A government can deliver a house.

It can deliver tap water.

It can reopen a school.

It can establish a bank.

It can build a road.

These are important expressions of state capacity, and the preceding stage of the transition depends on them.

But trust operates differently.

Trust is built when citizens believe that institutions will continue to protect their interests even when those interests conflict with more powerful actors.

That is why the research distinguishes material development from political legitimacy. Development can demonstrate that the state is present. It cannot, by itself, demonstrate that the state will respect a community’s agency when interests collide.

A citizen who once experienced the state primarily through coercion does not necessarily develop institutional confidence simply because the same state later delivers services.

The relationship changes when the citizen begins to believe that the rules governing the state apply fairly—and that local people possess meaningful agency within those rules.

That is what positive peace requires.

The danger is reproducing the old conflict through a new language

The state now has an opportunity that was almost impossible during the height of the insurgency: it can bring administration, infrastructure and investment into places that were once difficult to govern.

But precisely because the security environment has improved, the nature of state power becomes more consequential.

During an active insurgency, the central question is often survival.

After an insurgency retreats, the questions become institutional.

Who owns the land?

Who controls the forest?

Who decides whether a resource can be extracted?

Who settles local disputes?

Who represents the community?

Who gives consent?

Who can challenge an administrative decision?

These are quieter questions than an encounter with an armed squad.

But they determine whether the political conditions that once allowed an insurgency to gain legitimacy are actually changing.

The research warns that bypassing PESA and FRA protections while pursuing resource extraction could reproduce alienation and create the conditions for a new form of radicalisation, even if the original armed insurgency does not return in its previous form.

The point is not that every unresolved grievance will produce another insurgency.

The evidence does not establish such a deterministic relationship.

The more important lesson is institutional: removing an armed challenger does not remove the governance choices that shaped the conflict.

The real meaning of “mainstream”

This is why the language used to describe integration matters.

The research offers a particularly powerful formulation: through genuinely participatory governance, the government should allow Adivasis to define the “mainstream” into which they are being integrated.

That reverses the usual direction of the post-conflict conversation.

The conventional question is:

How do we bring the margins into the mainstream?

The constitutional question is different:

Who decided what the mainstream should look like?

If integration means that remote communities must simply adapt to institutions designed elsewhere, then the end of insurgency may produce administrative incorporation without genuine political inclusion.

If integration means that communities gain meaningful power within the constitutional framework to shape their own development, resource use and local governance, then the state is doing something much more difficult.

It is not merely extending its authority.

It is sharing the exercise of that authority through constitutional institutions.

That is the difference between governing people and enabling people to govern.

The final test is therefore quieter than the battlefield

The Maoist insurgency forced the Indian state to solve one problem at a time.

First came the problem of territorial control.

Then came the problem of restoring administration.

Now comes the problem of legitimacy.

The first required security forces.

The second requires roads, schools, welfare systems, communications and functioning civilian institutions.

The third requires something neither soldiers nor schemes can provide by themselves:

credible constitutional agency.

PESA, FRA, the Gram Sabha, the Fifth Schedule and the institutions surrounding them are therefore not peripheral legal details in the post-Maoist story.

They are the mechanism through which the state can convert presence into legitimacy.

The significance of Gram Sabha consent is not simply procedural. It changes the relationship between the citizen and the state.

The significance of forest rights is not merely economic. It determines whether constitutional protection reaches the material foundations of community life.

The significance of tribal representation is not symbolic. It determines whether people participate in decisions that shape their future.

And the significance of the Fifth Schedule is not that India once promised special protection to tribal communities.

It is whether that promise becomes believable again.

The deepest lesson of the Maoist experience may therefore be that peace is not secured when the state becomes the only power left standing. It is secured when the people living in that territory acquire enough constitutional power to trust the state without needing an alternative power to protect them.

That is the difference between the end of an insurgency and the beginning of a durable political settlement.

And it is why the final mile of India’s LWE journey will not be measured by how completely the forest has been cleared of insurgents, but by whether the people of that forest can finally exercise the constitutional power that was meant to make insurgency unnecessary in the first place.