New Delhi, August 26, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
From rifles to Kosa silk, the journey of surrendered Maoist women raises a larger question: after decades of conflict, who gets to decide what freedom should look like for them?
There is a video from the National Handloom Day programme held in Raipur on August 7 that I have watched more than once.
At the event, nine surrendered women Maoists from Bastar and Sukma, now undergoing rehabilitation, walked the ramp alongside professional models wearing Chhattisgarh’s traditional handloom and Kosa silk. The fashion show was presented as a symbol of rehabilitation, confidence and a return to mainstream life.
It isn’t the ramp walk that stayed with me. It is a much smaller moment.
One of the women is getting ready. Someone begins applying nail paint to her fingers, and she becomes visibly emotional. The apparent simplicity of the moment is difficult to ignore.
We have spent years discussing Naxalism through encounters, operations, casualties, weapons, ideology and territory. Yet behind this enormous conflict are people whose lives have been profoundly restricted. Many women entered the Maoist movement very young. Some may have been recruited, some followed relatives or trusted people, some believed in the ideology, while others grew up in places where Maoists were the dominant presence.
Once inside an underground armed organisation, ordinary choices can disappear.
Then imagine coming out of that world and discovering things most of us consider completely ordinary.
A little nail paint suddenly does not seem so ordinary.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah referred to a similar experience in Parliament earlier this year, recalling a surrendered Maoist woman who broke down while applying nail polish for the first time. He said she had been taken away as a child and had spent years wearing clothes prescribed by the movement. He also spoke of women discovering things such as mehendi and lipstick after leaving the forests.
There is something deeply sad about a woman being moved to tears by something as commonplace as nail paint. It tells us something about the ordinary life she may never have had.
And months later, similar emotions could be seen around another group of surrendered women from Bastar.
The Raipur event was intended to promote Chhattisgarh’s handloom traditions, but it quickly became a debate about whether the women had genuinely chosen to participate.
The Wire reported that four former Maoists said they had been told they were travelling for tailoring training and were not informed beforehand that they would participate in a fashion show. A policewoman accompanying them also reportedly said they had not known about the modelling event in advance.
The state government’s account is different. Officials said the women’s participation was voluntary and that written consent had been obtained from all nine participants. The government also described the initiative as part of confidence-building and rehabilitation.
That disagreement cannot simply be brushed aside.
If women living in a closely supervised rehabilitation facility were genuinely not told what they were being asked to do, that raises a legitimate question about informed consent. Consent is meaningful only when a person knows what she is consenting to and can say no without fear of consequences.
But there is another question that deserves equal seriousness: what if some of these women actually enjoyed the experience?
That possibility should not be dismissed either.
A tribal woman is not obliged to fit a predetermined image of tribal identity. She can value her community, culture and land and still enjoy fashion, music, cosmetics or a public stage. She can have suffered exploitation and still want to experience something new. She can be grateful for rehabilitation and still question how that rehabilitation is being conducted.
Most importantly, she can change her mind.
That is where the debate over the Raipur ramp walk becomes much larger than one fashion show.
It is tempting to turn surrendered Maoist women into symbols — either symbols of the State’s success or symbols of the State’s oppression. Both approaches risk overlooking the individual woman standing behind the symbol.
Ask her what she wanted.
Ask whether she knew where she was going.
Ask whether she enjoyed the experience.
Ask whether she would do it again.
Ask what she wants to do next.
And then allow her answer to matter, even if it complicates the politics of the person asking the question.
There is also another purpose of the event that risks being forgotten: the sarees themselves.
Kosa silk, a distinctive form of tussar associated with Chhattisgarh, is part of a larger handloom economy that supports weavers and other workers involved in cocoon rearing, spinning, dyeing and weaving. Chhattisgarh has more than 20,000 handlooms, according to available industry data.
That is why the fashion show mattered beyond the symbolism.
Traditional textiles need markets. Visibility can create demand, and demand can eventually translate into income for the people who produce them. A fashion platform can introduce Kosa silk and Chhattisgarh handloom to buyers who might otherwise never encounter them.
The women were therefore not simply being dressed for an evening. They were also presenting the textile heritage of their region to a larger audience.
If such visibility helps a weaver sell another saree, helps a self-help group find customers or creates employment in a region that has suffered from decades of conflict, it should not automatically be dismissed as frivolous.
For years, policymakers and security experts have asked what economic alternatives can weaken the appeal of Naxalism.
Rehabilitation is not complete when a weapon is surrendered.
It requires skills, employment, social acceptance, mobility and, ultimately, the ability to make decisions about one’s own life.
That is why the controversy over the ramp walk deserves a nuanced answer.
If the women were misled about the purpose of their trip, the government should acknowledge it, investigate it and ensure that future rehabilitation programmes obtain genuine informed consent.
But if some of the women liked the experience, their enjoyment should not be invalidated simply because it does not fit an ideological narrative about tribal life.
The two things can be true at the same time.
A woman can be vulnerable to institutional power and still possess agency.
She can need protection and still make choices.
She can be a former Maoist and still simply be a woman discovering parts of ordinary life that were previously unavailable to her.
For decades, the failures of the State in Bastar deserved scrutiny. Tribal communities have faced poverty, displacement, exploitation and inadequate governance, and those realities must not be erased.
But understanding why an insurgency emerged cannot become a permanent excuse for sanitising the violence and coercion associated with it.
The CPI-Maoist waged an armed campaign against the Indian State. Civilians accused of being informers were targeted, Jan Adalats were used to enforce Maoist authority, infrastructure was attacked and young people were drawn into an armed underground ecosystem.
That history matters too.
The physical geography of Maoism may be shrinking, but rehabilitation presents a different challenge. Former cadres have to rebuild relationships, acquire skills, find livelihoods and return to a society that may have changed substantially while they were underground.
More than anything, they have to rediscover the ability to choose.
Sometimes that process begins in ways no official rehabilitation document can fully capture.
A woman looking at her freshly painted nails.
A saree she likes.
A skill she wants to learn.
A job she chooses.
A stage she decides to walk onto — or refuses to walk onto.
That is what freedom should ultimately mean.
Not that the State decides what her new life should look like.
Not that commentators decide what her tribal identity permits her to enjoy.
Not that an ideological camp decides whether her happiness is politically convenient.
But that, after years in which others may have made fundamental choices for her, she gets to make them herself.
The real test of rehabilitation is not whether surrendered Maoists can be displayed as symbols of victory.
It is whether they can eventually live as citizens whose choices no longer need anybody’s permission.
(The writer is a bestselling author known for transforming years of research into human stories. Her work explores conflict through the lives, sacrifices and resilience of those who experience it.)
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