No place for extremists and violent movements in society

Left Wing Extremism (LWE) received a major blow on Wednesday when security forces gunned down Nambala Keshav Rao, general secretary of Communist Party of India (Maoist), in Ambujmar forest area, once an impregnable fortress of the banned outfit in Chhattisgarh. Along with him, 26 other Maoists were killed in the fierce encounter with police. That the Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself tweeted about the encounter shows Keshav Rao’s importance in the outlawed outfit. Known as Basavaraju and an engineering graduate from Regional Engineering College, Warangal (now NIT), the 71-year-old joined the banned outfit nearly four decades ago and rose to the top through ranks.

A hardliner to the core, the Srikakulam native had been the key military strategist for CPI (Maoist) and the brain behind its major attacks, including the claymore mine assault on Nara Chandrababu Naidu in Tirupati in 2003. Quite ironically, Telugu people headed the extremist outfit from the beginning. Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, a noted communist leader from Krishna district, founded the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) - People’s War in April 1980. Popular as the People’s War Group (PWG), the outfit believed in armed struggles to achieve social and economic equality in society.

It formed area-wise armed teams called dalams and fought against landlords in rural areas, especially in north Telangana, north Andhra and some parts of Rayalaseema. Seetharamaiah was at the helm of PWG till his ouster in 1991. Muppala Laxman Rao (Ganapathy), who replaced him, aggressively expanded PWG’s activities beyond the Telugu-speaking region. He played a key role in the merger of the PWG and Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) to form the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. Belonging to a tiny village near Peddapalli town, he is said to have fled India after handing over the reins to Keshava Rao in 2018. It is to be seen who will lead the Maoist outfit following Basavaraju’s death.

Frankly speaking, there is no place for violent movements in Indian society as the country is now aiming at a higher economic growth. This is evident in the way some areas have flourished after the exit of the Maoist movement. For example, north Telangana, which reeled under the violent activities of Naxalites for several decades, flourished after the banned outfit shifted its main base to Chhattisgarh. At some point of time, it ran a parallel government in some parts of north Telangana before being wiped out after peace talks held by the YS Rajasekhara Reddy government in 2004. They operated a parallel government in several parts of Chhattisgarh as well.

But the influence of Maoists has been on the wane in recent years. In January 2024, the Modi government launched Operation Kagar with 10,000 commandos with an aim to end Left Wing Extremism by March 2026. Post the launch of this biggest crackdown on the banned outfit, around 350 Maoists, including Keshava Rao, have been killed. That way, Operation Kagar dealt a big blow to the banned outfit whose activities led to the killing of 8,895 people in the last 20 years. In this age of widespread road networks and mobile communication systems, it is not easy for such armed movements to survive. Moreover, people are disenchanted with their ideology. Therefore, it’s time all the ultras belonging to CPI (Maoist) surrender and join the mainstream and be rehabilitated.