Name: Nand Kishor Dehary, Danendra & Suraj Sahu
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Volume-11, Issue-1, January-June 2026
Page Number: 363-373
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19946299

ABSTRACT
The Naxalite–Maoist insurgency in Chhattisgarh's Bastar division has claimed nearly 12,000 lives since 2000, including 4,138 civilians, 2,723 security personnel, and 5,063 insurgents. India has responded with over 14,000 kilometres of new roads, hundreds of residential schools, and thousands
of captured or killed cadres. The insurgency continues anyway. This paper reads the conflict through Marcel Mauss's concept of the fait social total: a phenomenon that cannot be isolated into any single register. We argue the conflict operates across six dimensions at once. Three are structural: material
(land and resources), institutional (governance, law, health), and corporeal (bodies and displacement).
Three are psychosocial: relational (trust and attachment between state and communities), moral (frameworks of right action), and existential (meaning, identity, purpose). These dimensions interact through feedback loops that absorb and redirect any intervention reaching only one or two of them. Four historical episodes are examined across all six dimensions: the colonial forest enclosures, the Maoist entry, the Salwa Judum, and the current phase of counterinsurgency. The pattern is consistent. Security-first and development-first approaches both fail because the dimensions they leave alone reconstitute the conditions for insurgency. Durable peace requires intervention across all six, and it requires recognition of Adivasi identity rather than assimilation into the mainstream.

Keyword: Naxalism; Bastar; fait social total; moral injury; Adivasi; peacebuilding