Raipur: Security bosses have prepared a blueprint to take control of Abujhmad, a 4,000 sq km- Naxal stronghold extending from south Bastar in Chhattisgarh to Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, by the end of December 2025.
The blueprint is likely to be placed before the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in the first week of January for endorsement, a senior police officer told this newspaper on Tuesday, requesting not to be quoted.
Sources said that the counterinsurgency strategy has been completely overhauled in the blueprint.
“Abujhmad will be surrounded from all sides by security forces before launching the counterinsurgency campaign in a massive scale to flush out Maoists from the region”, the police officer said.
A military training base is going to be established at a strategic place inside Abujhmad leading to sanitization of a vast area in the region, the police officer said.
Abujhmad is the only un-surveyed area in the country and is reportedly used by top Maoist leaders as their safe haven.
Security forces have already started advancing into the interior of Abujhmad by setting up Forward Operating Bases (FOB), which ensure that logistic supplies to the security forces are not disrupted, during the counterinsurgency operations.
“We are entering Abujhmad from north, south, east and west sides to free the region of Maoist influence completely”, a senior police officer posted in Narayanpur district in south Bastar said.
Security forces have already launched three major counterinsurgency operations in Abujhmad in the last four months in which around 75 Maoists were killed.
The top-level officers of police and paramilitary forces will be asked to tour Bastar once in a fortnight and spend two or three days in FOBs in core areas of Maoists to plan and supervise the anti-Naxal operations in the particular areas, sources said.
The Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) rank police officers will be assigned the task of monitoring movement of senior Maoists in their respective areas as per the new strategy, sources said.
Union home minister Amit Shah has already announced that the Leftwing extremism would be completely wiped out in the country by March 2026.