The Red Crack-Up

 IT BEGAN AS A RUMOUR. SOMEWHERE DEEP inside Bastar, the heart of the Maoist movement in India, a letter was circulating among its cadres. It was said to be twenty-two pages long, written by a man who had spent nearly five decades underground. His name carried weight across the Maoist arc, from Bihar to Telangana. For years, Mallojula Venugopal Rao, better known as Bhupathi or Sonu, had been one of the guiding lights of the Maoist guerrillas who landed in Bastar and adjoining areas in 1980. As the party’s polit­buro member and a strategist whose words were once treated like scripture, a word from him in the form of a “biscuit,” the Maoist code for a letter, was nothing extraordinary. But this time it was different. It was not a call to arms; it was a confession.

“We have lost our way,” Bhupathi wrote. “The revolutionary party has weakened because we forgot to remain invisible.”

Within weeks, the letter would tear through the organisation like shrapnel; it divided the Maoist leadership, shook its rank and file, and signalled perhaps the beginning of the end of India’s longest-running Left insurgency. It finally culminated in Rao’s surrender to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on October 14.

“His decision to surrender came from the conviction that we will not harm those who are willing to come to this side,” said Neelotpal, Gadchiroli’s Superintendent of Police.

Born in undivided Andhra Pradesh, Bhupathi had followed his brother, the legendary Maoist leader Kishenji, to the guerrilla zone. Over the decades, he rose through the ranks, becoming one of the pillars of the CPI (Maoist). To cadres in Bastar, he was the voice that kept them steadfast on the path of what they construed as revolution.

But by early 2025, Bhupathi was a man watching his world collapse.

Successive operations by security forces had decimated the guerrilla structure in Dandakaranya, the region which consti­tutes the core area of the Maoists, including Bastar and Gadchi­roli. Dozens of senior leaders had been killed. Supplies had dried up. Support among Adivasi communities, for whom the Maoists claimed to be fighting against the Indian state, had eroded. As the state forces led what looked like a final push against the Maoists, Bhupathi’s letter surfaced. Written in Telugu and translated in­ternally into Hindi and Gondi, it read like the reckoning of a tired revolutionary. Addressed to fellow cadres and senior leaders, it ac­cused the party of losing touch with the very people whose cause it claimed to serve. After half a century of guerrilla war, he admitted the Maoist movement had been hollowed out by fatigue, isolation, and its own rigidity. “Without the people,” he wrote, “the people’s army becomes just an armed detachment.” For a movement that looks down upon any kind of difference of opinion, such candour borders on blasphemy.

The letter’s tone is neither defiant nor apologetic. It is a mix­ture of exhaustion and realism. Bhupathi calls for a “pause and rectification” for the sake of ideological clarity and to reconnect with the masses. He does not renounce violence; rather, he ques­tions its meaning in a country that has changed faster than the revolution ever did.

“We fight everywhere,” he observes, “but win nowhere.” The CPI (Maoist), once active across large swathes of India, has retreated to scattered pockets. A hand­ful of them are still active, but morale has drained away. In parts of Bastar, local units have quietly withdrawn; surrenders have surged. “Half the cadres want to stop fighting,” Bhupathi conceded, “half want revenge.”

His critique is not aimed at the Indian state but at his own comrades. The leader­ship, he says, has become dogmatic, sup­pressing dissent and equating debate with betrayal. Decades of sacrifice have ossified into habit; ideology has hardened into ritual. What remains, he implies, is an army without politics — in other words, a revolution without renewal.

Bhupathi’s letter acknowledges what few Maoist leaders had ever dared to say aloud: that the movement is in decline. “We have lost our secret mode of operation,” he wrote. “The enemy knows our routes, our faces, our voices. The people no longer fear or follow us. Without secrecy, revolu­tion becomes theatre,” he said.

Bhupathi blames the organisation’s obsession with militarisation — the idea that the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) could substitute for a mass political movement. “We confused the gun for the party,” he observed. “We al­lowed the gun to dictate politics.”

Bhupathi accused the leadership of clinging to old formulas — the “base-area model,” the idea of expanding liberated zones — even as the world around them changed. “Capitalism has entered the villages,” he told his interrogators shortly after his surrender. “The state now travels by road and by mobile network. We remained in 1970 while India moved to 2025,” he said.

 He described how the forest had turned against them by virtue of geography. Surveillance drones, road networks, and local police stations had stripped away the isolation that once protected them, he said. “We must retreat,” he said. “Rebuild trust among the people. To persist blindly in armed action is not bravery; it is suicide.”

He proposed that the CPI (Maoist) rebuild its political founda­tion; he said the need was to re-enter villages not as soldiers but as organisers, focusing on rights and mobilisations rather than ambushes. “Only then,” he wrote, “can the dream of revolution breathe again.”

He recalled that for many years, the party’s focus on “politico-military work” helped it survive repression. But in his view, the same emphasis has now become counterproductive. The move­ment, he says, cannot be preserved by repeating the same line. “To defend the party, we must also defend truth,” he reportedly told some of the guerrillas working with him days before his surrender.

Bhupathi described how regional and zonal committees once maintained a balance between political education, mass contact, and armed activity. That balance, he argued, has collapsed. Units now operate largely in isolation, following directives that come from above but lack context. “We have entered a stage,” he notes, “where even correct criticism is treated as deviation.” The result, he writes, is fear within the ranks and stagnation in work.

According to police sources, Bhupathi also talked about ideo­logical fatigue among the cadres. Many fighters joined as teenag­ers and had spent years in the jungle without contact with their families or the outside world. They still believed in the movement but no longer understood its larger purpose. “They fight bravely,” he said, “but they do not know for what.” This loss of perspective has turned courage into routine and faith into habit.

He describes how the relationship between the party and the PLGA has grown strained. The army, he says, now dominates; political committees have withered. In earlier years, every opera­tion was accompanied by meetings with villagers and political explanations; now, he says, armed activity often precedes or replaces political work. “The gun has begun to command the party,” he said, “instead of serving it.” He warned that a revolution sustained only by weapons becomes a purely military organisation, not a people’s one.

The letter also notes growing mistrust between higher and lower ranks. Orders from the Central Committee are often ig­nored or misunderstood; communication failures are frequent. Field cadres, he says, suspect that senior leaders are disconnect­ed from ground realities, while the leader­ship accuses field units of indiscipline. This mutual suspicion, he warns, is more dangerous than enemy bullets.

He adds that mass organisations that were supposed to strengthen the movement have shrunk. Fear of state reprisal and internal rigidity have both played a role. Where villagers once participated in meetings and local committees, they now avoid contact.

When the letter reached the CPI (Maoist)’s Central Commit­tee, the response was swift and furious. The leadership denounced Bhupathi as a traitor. An official statement called his note “a docu­ment of surrender, crafted by counter-revolutionary weakness.” The Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee accused him of spreading “bourgeois defeatism.” But not everyone agreed. Within weeks, several divisions — including the Maad Division in Abujh­maad — openly backed Bhupathi’s call for a ceasefire. They said it was time to “reconnect with the masses” and “save lives.”

FOR THE FIRST time in decades, the Maoists were at war with themselves.

In New Delhi, officials of the Ministry of Home Affairs saw Bhupathi’s letter as vindication of years of counter-insurgen­cy. “We always believed fatigue would do what firepower could not,” said a senior officer. “This letter proves it.”

Home Minister Amit Shah publicly cited the letter as “proof that the end of leftwing extremism is near.” Security forces stepped up surrender programmes, particularly in Bastar and Gadchiroli.

Bhupathi’s letter, they believed, had done what years of opera­tions could not: broken the insurgency’s morale.

In Bastar, according to police sources, the split has played out unevenly. In some villages, local Maoist units have quietly with­drawn. Surrenders have surged. “They are confused,” says an intel­ligence officer based in Bastar. But in some pockets, the hardliners are digging in. They see Bhupathi’s defection as proof of infiltration. “They believe he was captured months ago,” says a police source, “and that the letter was dictated by the state.” Maoist sympathisers have also gone after Bhupathi. On social media, many have put his brother Kishenji’s photo — he was killed in West Bengal in 2011 — next to Bhupathi’s, calling him a hero while terming Bhupathi a traitor.

The paranoia resulting from his sur­render has also triggered purges inside the camps, according to police sources. Cad­res are being interrogated, some executed, for suspected disloyalty. “The jungle has turned inward,” said a surrendered guer­rilla. “Now the fear is not of the police, but of each other.”

For half a century, the Maoists survived every kind of pressure: police campaigns, internal schisms, and ideological crises. But they were sustained by belief — the conviction that they were fighting a just war against a corrupt state. Bhupathi’s letter punctures that belief. By admitting that the insurgency has lost its purpose, it drains the oxygen that kept it alive.

For the state, Bastar remains both a victory and a wound, but with the Union Home Minister’s deadline of March 2026, it wants the victory to be the dominant sentiment. The numbers, the maps, and the intelligence briefings all suggest the same. But on the ground, it may take a little more time.

In villages once dominated by red flags, schoolchildren now sing the national an­them in classrooms guarded by security camps. Roads once considered suicide tracks are now asphalted.

“The insurgency is collapsing,” says an officer in Sukma. “But peace is not auto­matic. You cannot fill decades of neglect with asphalt alone.” Indeed, the challenge now is post-insurgency governance. Unless the state provides education, healthcare, and fair forest rights, the ghosts of rebellion will linger — with or with­out Bhupathi’s letter.

In the days since his surrender, Bhupathi has disappeared from public view. Officials say he is under protective custody; others claim he is being used as a mediator to encourage more surrenders. Inside the movement, his name is banned. But his words survive in whispers, copied by hand, circulated among disillusioned cadres. “Comrades,” one passage reads, “the war for justice cannot be waged forever in the dark. Sometimes, to reach the people, one must first put down the gun.”

If the government uses this moment to consolidate not just territory but trust, Bastar could finally move beyond the war. But if the state mistakes the insur­gency’s collapse for peace, the cycle may begin again, under a new banner, for the same old reasons.

As one surrendered guerrilla put it: “The gun may rust, but the anger behind it does not.” He says he has scars from shrapnel and old bullet wounds and has lost at least one family member to the war. “When you live in the jungle too long,” he said, “you start talking to ghosts.”

It is not just the cadres who are tired. The villagers, too, are exhausted. The young no longer want to inherit a war. They want phones, education, roads; these are things that the revolution, ironically, could not deliver.

The people of Bastar have lived too long between two guns. As the Maoists fracture and the state claims victory, it is worth remembering that peace cannot be declared; it must be built. In the end, the war may end not with surrender, but with listening — to the forest, and to those who never left it.