#JustIn: CPI (Maoist) Announces Ceasefire Across Core MMC Zone From January 1
CPI (Maoist) declares unilateral ceasefire, calls it “strategic shift,” not defeat.
In a seismic announcement that has sent shockwaves through security corridors, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has declared a complete cessation of armed operations across its core Maad-Malkangiri-Motur (MMC) zone in South Chhattisgarh with effect from January 1, 2026. The directive, issued by Senior Spokesperson Anant from deep within the Abhujmaad Forests, represents the most explicit public acknowledgment in decades that the outlawed organisation is willing to temporarily suspend its protracted people’s war without formally disbanding or surrendering its ideological moorings.
The detailed press note circulated among cadres and sympathisers strictly prohibits individual surrenders under any circumstances and warns against misinterpreting the ceasefire as capitulation. Anant emphasised that engagement with the Chhattisgarh government’s Puna Narkom rehabilitation and surrender policy—if it happens at all—will be undertaken collectively, on the organisation’s own terms, and only after securing guarantees of dignity and political respect. He framed the decision as a mature strategic recalibration forced by changing socio-political dynamics rather than battlefield reversals.
In a move that has left intelligence agencies scrambling, the Maoists have for the first time openly published a new BaoFeng two-way radio frequency to streamline internal communication across scattered platoons and area committees. This breach of operational secrecy is being interpreted as both a confidence-building measure toward potential interlocutors and a signal of internal consolidation. The statement also contained an unusually pragmatic political line: the outfit will “extend cooperation to whichever government—state or central—accords us greater attention and respect,” effectively floating the possibility of conditional talks.
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Seeking to prevent demoralisation within its shrinking cadre base, Anant devoted significant portions of the message to ideological reassurance, insisting that temporarily setting aside armed struggle does not betray revolutionary principles. He reiterated the classic Maoist position that armed action is a means to an end, not the end itself, and argued that the current national and regional conjuncture demands tactical flexibility, mass work consolidation, and political overtures over continued military escalation.
Security officials and Maoist watchers are treating the declaration with guarded scepticism while intensifying ground verification. Should the ceasefire hold even partially across the MMC zone—one of the last bastions of hardcore Naxal resistance—it could dramatically slash encounter fatalities, ease civilian distress in Bastar, and potentially trigger the largest wave of de-escalation in India’s 58-year-old Left-wing extremism conflict since the 2004 failed Andhra Pradesh talks.
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