Modi Marked The Festival Of Lights Where India Spent A Generation Learning To Fear The Dark
The Indian Prime Minister spent the festival of lights in a forest clearing, handing sweets to men in olive green at a commando base that until recently was a launch pad for operations against Maoist guerrillas in Bastar and the dense interior of Abujhmad
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| Image Via: @kumar_talukdar1 on X |
Diwali, which fell on Sunday, is the largest festival in the Indian calendar and the simplest in its central idea. Households clean and then everything gets illuminated — rows of small clay lamps along parapets and doorsteps, fireworks, patterns of coloured powder laid on floors to welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune. The oldest thought in it is that light is something you put deliberately where the dark is.
That was perhaps also the point of the venue. On 8 April the home ministry wrote to nine state governments to say that no district in India any longer falls within the category of those affected by left-wing extremism, and discontinued the classification altogether. As recently as 27 March the list had held two names, Bijapur in Chhattisgarh and West Singhbhum in Jharkhand. Thirty-seven districts have been redesignated “Legacy and Thrust” areas, needing sustained attention against any resurgence, and West Singhbhum alone is now a “District of Concern” — watched, in other words, but no longer counted.
The scale of what has closed is easier to grasp in the older numbers. At its height the insurgency reached more than 230 districts across some twenty states. After sunset, in large tracts of central India, people did not leave their homes. There were years with as many as two thousand attacks. More than a thousand security personnel died in Chhattisgarh alone, and in April 2010, not far from where the prime minister stood on Sunday, Maoists killed 76 members of the Central Reserve Police Force in a single ambush at Dantewada.
Against that, the figure the Prime Minister chose to dwell on: in the past year, he said, not one CRPF soldier lost his life on duty — the first such year in 47. “This is the victory of the country’s correct policies and firm resolve,” he told the assembled troops. “This is the victory of your bravery, your courage, and your restraint.”
He reached for an old Sanskrit line to explain why he thought the occasion belonged with these particular soldiers rather than with those on the frontiers — that where a country’s internal security holds, external enemies can do little, and where it weakens, they stir. The forces he thanked were the CRPF and its CoBRA commandos, the border and armed police organisations, state police, the Bastar Fighters raised from local recruits, and the women among them.
Alongside the fighting there was building, much of it done under armed protection: more than 15,000 kilometres of road, over 9,500 mobile towers, around 175 residential schools for tribal children, some fifty industrial training institutes, skill centres, post offices, bank branches. Modi listed what the Maoists had prevented — schools burned, doctors turned back, medicine shops disallowed, polio vaccination teams stopped, railway track blown apart — which is the clearest account of why the roads and towers are counted as victories at all.
In Bastar this week there are games. The Bastar Olympics, begun in 2024, drew more than 165,000 young people across eleven sports in its first year. “Children are no longer picking up guns,” Modi said. “They are trying their hands at sports.” At the divisional finals last December a competitor named Veti Ganga told reporters he had surrendered as a Maoist that same year. “Now I am feeling very good,” he said.
For the welfare schemes of the past twelve years he borrowed the festival’s own imagery: a rangoli, the floor pattern that begins as a few disconnected lines and resolves into a picture — bank accounts, houses, collateral-free loans, support for street vendors, health cover, free grain, sanitation, piped water. Free medicine, free schooling, a free kitchen, as he put it. He cited the World Bank’s finding, published days before the festival, that 500 million Indians have left extreme poverty in twelve years. The bank attaches that figure to its lower-middle-income line of 4.20 dollars a day; on the stricter measure of extreme poverty the share of Indians below it fell from 27.1 per cent to 2.6 per cent between 2011 and 2023.
This was not his first Diwali in uniform company. He has marked it at Kargil in the Himalaya, at Lepcha, at Sir Creek on the Arabian Sea and aboard the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. “All of you are a part of my family,” he said.
The rest of his day was quieter. He called on President Droupadi Murmu, and visited former President Ram Nath Kovind and his family. He wrote a tribute to L K Advani, who entered his hundredth year on Sunday — a survivor of Partition who rebuilt his life from nothing, helped found the party now in government, was imprisoned during the Emergency, led the Somnath-to-Ayodhya procession that reshaped Indian politics, served as deputy prime minister and was awarded the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian honour.
And he singled out Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, for spending the festival in Lohari Sawanga, a village in Nagpur district, staying the night at the home of a farming couple, Arunabai and Rambhau Balpande. It was a pointed choice of gesture to praise. Maharashtra’s farmers have had a punishing season, and in the same week the lamps went up, many of them may have been counting what the rain had taken.