Government approach, irrespective of which party is in power, has adopted extreme forms of repression as a way to quell and crush the Maoist insurgency in the rural hinterlands and later tribal zones of India. In line with this approach, the Union home minister of India, has yet again announced the ‘wiping out the Maoist menace’ by March, 2026, and more recently expressed surprise at the initiatives for peace talks as there is nothing to talk and Maoists need to lay down arms.In accordance with this securitised approach, operation Kagar was launched, and a great deal of success has been claimed, including the top general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju, being killed in an armed action.One cannot hold a grudge against an armed combat against a self-declared armed rebellion. It is well within the sovereign power of a state. Max Weber had declared sovereignty as the exclusive ‘monopoly of the state to use physical violence’. Use of physical violence, however, has to be always in accordance with the rule of law.Beyond the technical details, one has to also ask a historical question as to whether the repressive approach towards the Maoist rebellion worked. One could perhaps say, repression and actions by security forces could well have contained the spread of the movement but has it been successful in quelling it. How and why did the insurgency survive for 50 years, in spite of the repression?At the heart of this question is to ask whether or not Maoist insurgency enjoys mass support, earlier among the rural peasantry and later among the tribals of central India. Why does the state fail to win over the people? Is it the unwillingness to consider it as a political problem, or being unimaginative? One needs to ask this question because repressive methods have their limits.It is widely believed that in course of operation Green Hunt and use and launch of Salwa Judum (which was later struck down as illegal by the Justice Sudershan Reddy of the Supreme Court) there was in fact greater recruitment for the Maoists. State managed to antagonise tribals, rather than win them over. Is this not avoidable? Is this not a short-sightedness helping in spreading the support for the Maoists?Further, most counter-insurgency tactics end up at some stage justifying collateral damage to the civilian populations. Killing of the armed militants in course of combat and combing operations is a security operation but justifying killing of civilians comes dangerously close to undermining the rule of law and the logic of democracy itself.If extra-judicial killings are justified then the state begins to use such actions not just for the Maoists but in due course for the bahubalis in Uttar Pradesh, rapists, and finally to every petty crime that is committed. To avoid such an eventuality, and to discard the justification of collateral damage, the state needs to think beyond the repressive methods.It was at some point after the 2004, the state began to toy with the idea of two-pronged strategy of security and development. But can violence and governance go together? Can violence and development go together? Maoists have often been rightly accused of blowing up of telephone towers and roads built but the literature on security affairs suggests that such armed actions are not possible without local support.And as long as the possibility of violence exists capital and corporates refuse to venture and invest. Forget, the Maoists, corporates in Karnataka threatened to walk out, if there is too much of communal disturbance. Communal disturbance not only undermines institutions but also creates vigilante groups that then go out of control. Something similar happened in Maoist areas, where repressive methods create vigilante groups that spin out of control.The example of the surrendered Maoist leader Naeemuddin in Telangana is a glaring example. He eventually became a henchman and a law unto himself where he did not hesitate to threaten to liquidate top political leaders and members of their family. It was widely believed that he was actively brokering land deals and active in real estate. His operations were later traced to wide scale corruption within the state police too. Naeem was finally ‘eliminated’ in an ‘encounter’.Public reasoningPolitical leadership and public representatives are expected not only to abide by the law but also instill and encourage public reasoning for a healthy and open democracy. If public reasoning and discussion on such problems as the Maoist insurgency are curbed and sought to be dealt exclusively through repressive means they not only undermine democracy but also fail to solve the problem.It is time Indian democracy moves beyond violence as the only means, instead look for political solutions to put an end to such problems.The Indian state failed in this. There have been many committees such as the Bandopadhyay committee in 2006 that suggested developmental solutions to the Maoist problem but ruling elites have mostly neglected them. Neglect of such suggestions then spills over into accusing those concerned about the spiraling violence themselves begin to be suspected and persecuted. The cause and concern for human rights defenders has emerged as a global initiative in the recent past.Every social activist against extra-judical killings, whether they are sympathetic or not to the Maoist cause are seen as easy cases to run a political narrative and media trials. In the recent past they have been accused of being ‘urban naxal’. The epithet is so vague that almost all of political opposition to the ruling dispensation can be targeted by such pointless neologisms.Controlling the Maoist insurgency has become a mode of targeting wide range of social activists in India. In course of time, there will be no independent voices to inform of what is happening in the interior areas of Maoist insurgency and we lose the grip over what common tribals are feeling. This is undemocratic and also in strategic terms unworkable. For a democracy flow of information and interpretation of issues by independent voices, including academics, journalists, think tanks, among others, remains important.There is no historical evidence of insurgencies being killed by repression. Maoists have more recently lost support because of the inter-generational shift. Younger generations are not aligning with the Maoist imagination. This has happened because of various reasons and repression is the least of them. If some of these changes were actively initiated, Maoists could have been contained without the bloodshed.Ajay Gudavarthy is an associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies at JNU.