Maoist ranks decimated, only 14 leaders remain alive

The grainy pictures do not do justice to the men and women they capture. These are some of the most wanted and dreaded Maoists who have roamed freely across the length and breadth of Central and Eastern India. They terrorised people living in the country’s remote and far-flung villages for decades on an end. Now, the hunters are being hunted systematically by India’s security forces.

The latest data on these Maoists show that only four members of the Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) or CPI (Maoist) are alive. At the top of the list is the former General Secretary of the party, Mupalla Laxman Rao alias Ganpati. He was replaced by Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basvaraju as the General Secretary in 2018. The latter was killed in the Indravati National Park area of Bijapur district in Chhattisgarh last month.

The other three are Mallejula Venugopal alias Vivek. He is the man who usually issues communiques on behalf of the party’s Central Committee (CC). The other two are Thippri Tirupati alias Devji—the man speculated to take over the reins of the party after Basvaraju’s death—and Misir Besra alias Bhaskar. By definition, these four members of the Politburo are also part of the CC of the party.

It is interesting to note that among the four, three hail from Karimnagar district of Telangana; only Besra is a non-Andhra/Telangana zone leader in the Politburo and is from Giridih district in Jharkhand.

Until recently there were 11 surviving members of the CC. But after the elimination of Thentu Lakshmi Narasimha Chalam alias Sudhakar—again in Indravati National Park area—only 10 members of the CC remain alive. If one includes the four Politiburo members, the CC has been reduced to just 14 members. In the past two odd decades 37 members of the Politiburo and the CC have been killed or have surrendered to security forces and law enforcement agencies.

The geographic distribution of those who have died or have surrendered is also interesting. Many members in this list belonged to the Bihar and West Bengal region where Maoism was wiped out some time ago. The list also includes persons like Kobad Gandhy—who was arrested from New Delhi—who hailed from Mumbai. His wife, Anuradha Gandhy, too, was a Maoist and she died in 2008 after contracting falciparum malaria. Later, the Maoists constructed a memorial for her in a village in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

Many of these Maoist leaders either perished from disease—cardiac ailments and diabetes are two common afflictions—in the deep forests of Bastar where medical help is impossible to secure. Others either died in security operations—a more recent phenomenon as the space for movement was drastically reduced—even as others simply gave up.

The “movement” is now close to an end and given the pace of decimation of top ranks of CPI (Maoist), and the epitaph may be written well before the  March 31, 2026 deadline given by the Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

BastarBasvarajuChhattisgarhkillingMaoistMupalla Laxman Rao alias GanpatiNambala Keshava RaoWeb Exclusive