Where is India's forgotten war headed?

A clump of long hair glistened in the damp undergrowth of Kohameta hill. Four days after a nine-hour long gunbattle here left 35 dead, rain had swept away the blood and left everything else, including empty bullet shells, looking uncannily fresh.

On the morning of October 4, company number six of the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army, the armed wing of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), was encircled and outnumbered by security forces in this corner deep inside the forests of southern Chhattisgarh that it considers a base area, or safe zone. The battle ended with no losses to the security forces, and 35 insurgent deaths – 13 of them women.

Had the hair of a woman insurgent come unstuck while her corpse was dragged on the forest floor? “We had to drag and collect the bodies at one place before packing them,” said Smruthik Rajanala, a tall, lean Indian Police Service officer who led the operation.

The security forces carried back 31 bodies in plastic bundles strung on bamboo poles, and displayed them for press cameras the next evening on the lawns of a police campus. As the plastic parted from the putrefying faces, one of them looked like a boy not older than...