GUMLA: On the highway lined with sal trees in the southern part of the Chota Nagpur

, five years ago, no vehicle would ply after 4pm. Passing through the most affected district in the 'red corridor' of the state, was a

.

As the government expedited the road building projects under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna and Road Requirement Plan (RRP) in Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected areas in

, extortion from contractors and transporters working in road construction, bauxite mining, and stone quarries became a major source of income for Maoists.

In one such case of extortion in 2013, Shahabuddin, a road construction contractor was killed along with his friend by People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI), an extension of CPI(Maoists), his widow Farida recalls.

"They were shot dead because my husband's friend Wasim bhai, refused to pay," says Farida who now feeds and educates her three children by working as a maid. The family lives in a half-built concrete house that Farida's husband was constructing at the time in a narrow lane of Muslim neighborhood in Gumla.

PLFI had left behind a pamphlet to claim responsibility for the killings. Though they were killed in Kolibera area of Simdega, another district that was deeply affected by the Maoist violence, Gumla used to be the worst hit.

"Such incidents had caused so much scare since the outbreak of Maoist insurgency that after 4pm, nobody would be seen driving through this highway. But along with aggressive counter-insurgency operations, demonetization broke the back of Maoists in this region," claims a driver who works with a Ranchi based cab agency. Now that a majority of them have been wiped out, extortion has also stopped, he adds arguing that this is why no one cribs about demonetisation in the area.

Radha, whose husband Sohan Kisan was killed by Maoists in Raidhi Parkhand in 2003, also claims that demonetization hurt Maoists economically. "We heard that they dumped their notes in the caves in the jungle because they couldn't get it back to the villages and deposit in banks. Their currency was of no use."

Now working as a grade IV employee at a local government office and raising her two children in Gumla town, Radha believes the administration with the help of villagers has been able to defeat Maoists in the region in the last five years.

Interestingly, soon after demonetization, massive number of Maoists surrendered and huge amount of currency was seized from them in all the states affected by Naxal violence. Data shows that in Gumla district, the incidents of killings came down from 16 in 2013 to only 1 in 2018 and in overall Jharkhand, it came down from 55 in 2013 to 30 in 2018.

A middle-aged woman owner of a dhaba in Basia believes peace in the area has been one of the biggest accomplishments of the Modi government. "There used to be violence and tension here all the time. Now its normal and one is not scared to run the shop here," she says adding that for this reason alone she would vote for the BJP.

Gumla is part of the Lohardaga parliamentary constituency which will go to polls on April 29. Though Congress voters admit that the BJP government curbed Maoist violence in the district to a huge extent, they believe it would be a tough contest between Sudarshan Bhagat of the BJP and Sukhdeo Bhagat of the Congress because of the considerable minority vote in the constituency.