In the past week, India’s Maoist story has changed

When India’s Maoist story is written, two days in this past week are going to be seen as seminal, with far-reaching consequences beyond just the immediate

New Delhi: There are many accounts of the beginnings of India’s Maoist insurgency, the most popular being that it started in 1967 from Naxalbari in West Bengal, which gave birth to the word “Naxalism.” But irrespective of how and when one pins down the exact roots, the conflict between the Indian State and the Maoists, famously called India’s single largest internal security threat by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006, has lasted upwards of five decades.

Milind Teltumbde was younger, in his late 50s, but was also a member of the central committee, and on the NIA’s most wanted list as well (ANI)

There are several recent milestones that are counted as important inflection points in its history, from the unification of two major Maoist formations in 2004 into the Communist Party of India (Maoist) or CPI(Maoist) as we know it today, to the excesses of the Salwa Judum, to the death of the face of Indian Maoists, Mallujola Koteshwara Rao alias Kishenji in 2011.

Yet, when India’s Maoist story is written, two days in this past week are going to be seen as seminal, with far-reaching consequences beyond just the immediate — the arrest of Prashant Bose by the Jharkhand Police on November 11, and an encounter in Gadchiroli which left 26 alleged Maoists dead, including top leader Milind Teltumbde.

The significance of Prashant Bose

Eighty-two-year old Prashant Bose or “Kishan da” has widely been known as one of the ideological fountainheads of the guerilla organisation for the past 50 years.

Bose first joined a labour movement in Jharkhand in the 1960s, and was once arrested in 1974. Four years later, after his release, he founded the Maoist Communist Centre of India in 1978. He built and ran the Maoist cadre in Jharkhand and West Bengal, and for the last 30 years, was widely regarded as the second biggest Maoist leader in the country, second only to Muppala Lakshman Rao or Ganapathy.

In 2004, when the People War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre of India merged to form the CPI(Maoist), there were two signatories. Ganapathy of the PWG, who became general secretary until 2018, and Bose of the MCCI. He is a member of the CPI(Maoist) Politburo, its highest political body, member of the Central Committee, its highest operational body, and secretary of the Eastern Regional Bureau, which oversees its activities in the states north of Dandakaranya, or Chhattisgarh. Bose was on the National Investigation Agency (NIA)’s most wanted list, and carried a bounty of over ₹1 crore. In all this time, in the last 43 years, Bose had escaped the state agencies — until November 11, where he was arrested with his wife Sheela Marandi, the only woman cadre in the central committee.

Why Teltumbde mattered

Milind Teltumbde was younger, in his late 50s, but was also a member of the central committee, and on the NIA’s most wanted list as well.

From Yavatmal in Maharashtra, Teltumbde worked in the western coalfields in Chandrapur before joining the Maoists in the 1980s and led operations in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. He was also key in the organisation as the only Dalit member of the central committee.

State agencies had never come close to him either — until November 13, when he and 25 other Maoists were killed in what is India’s most significant encounter in the last decade. There have been higher numbers of Maoists killed before, notably 40 in Gadchiroli in April 2018. But there have been very few where a central

committee member has been killed in an active gunbattle. The last of such significance — Kishenji, in 2011.

The operational setback

In April 2017, in the forests of Rajnandgaon district, the Chhattisgarh Police found documents on a raid that alerted them to the creation of a new zone by the Maoists, called the MMC(Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh). The papers spoke of expansion plans that had been on for well over a year, looking for new territories in a densely forested trijunction that spanned parts of Gadchiroli and Gondia in Maharashtra, Balaghat or the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, and Rajnandgaon, Kabirdham and Mungeli, along Chhattisgarh’s western border.

Being squeezed in Bastar in southern Chhattisgarh and their traditional bases of Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, with their presence already skeletal in the old bastions of West Bengal and Bihar, this was the first big expansion of Maoists out of Dandakaranya. Such was the seriousness that the Maoists were giving to the MMC expansion that more than 200 fighters, in various vistaar dalam (expansions teams), had been dispatched from their Bastar stronghold, to win over people, organise and strategise, and create a base.

The man leading these operations was Milind Teltumbde. And it was in the MMC zone that this Saturday operation took place, right on the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border. That zone is now without a leader.

Bose, despite his advancing age, was the man who held the Maoists together in Jharkhand and Bihar, the lynchpin of an organisation that has been weakening in those states. He lived in the forests of Saranda, and has been described by the police as the “institutional memory” of the Maoists, agile of mind despite his age.

The impact on morale

But even more than the operational brasstacks, the damage these two events will have on the Maoists psychologically is deeply significant. That “Maoist morale will be hit” is almost a tired trope, used every time there is an encounter, or a surrender, or an arrest by the state police or paramilitary. This time, it genuinely means something.

The cadres on the ground sustain themselves on folk tales of leaders such as Bose and Teltumbde. The stories of their escapes, of their impenetrability, their invincibility, create almost mythical identities, stories that sustain the movement. They hold in them, for the cadres spending days in the forest, the promise that if they stay long enough and fight hard enough, their stories will become legendary too.

In 1970 for instance, surrounded by the police, Bose escaped the authorities by floating down the Hooghly river on a raft. In 2017, a senior police officer based in Rajnandgaon told this writer that they thought they were once close to Teltumbde, but he got wind and escaped. How did they know he was there? There was a stack of print editions of Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), right up to December 2016. For the cadre, he was the man that slung an automatic rifle along his shoulder, slept and ate with them, but read deeply, and was there of ideological conviction, not compulsion.

The Maoists are a top-down hierarchy, and all power stems from a strict chain of command. Deeply conscious of this, their top leaders are always fiercely protected. In the forests, central committee members are usually covered by concentric rings of spotters and sentries, layers of security that provide cover fire if the security forces approach. All travel is carefully planned, and nobody uses mobile phones. This exhaustive security detail adds to the idea of indestructibility.

That aura now stands broken. That two men, who lived and escaped the State all their lives, are now in jail, or dead, will cause immeasurable consternation. The question will be asked among the Maoist cadre, that if Prashant Bose can be arrested, and Milind Teltumbde killed, what chance do the rest of them have? Maoist units have crumbled under this duress before. To be sure, there were other factors that contributed, but within years of Kishenji’s death, the Maoist organisation in West Bengal was torn asunder.

Two paradoxical years

These events come in the backdrop of two somewhat paradoxical years for the movement.

South Chhattisgarh, or Bastar remains a strong bastion of the Maoists, constantly in conflict, with the movement’s strongest commanders and military battalions operating in Dantewada, Sukma, and Bijapur, and most of the ageing central committee leaders safely ensconced in Abujhmaad, 4000 square kilometres of forests and hills, still unmapped by the government.

Yet, the last three years have seen at least three central committee members die of age and physical infirmities- Ravula Srinivas, famously known as Ramanna who led operations in Bastar, Dev Kumar Singh or Arvind ji, a close aide of Bose in Jharkhand, and Akkiraju Hargopal or RK along the Andhra Odisha border, one of the original band of Maoists from Andhra and Telangana that have ruled the roost for decades.

Then came Covid-19, reversing the tactical advantages of demography and isolation that are key to Maoist strategy. Throughout the year, there have been reports of the virus affecting the cadre, with multiple deaths and desertions. In June came the evidence. The Maoists confirmed the death of commander Vinod, one of those who had been sent to the MMC zone, of Covid. Days later, there was even a bigger blow. Central committee member Haribhushan, the last standing leader of the Maoists in Telangana, who carried the stature and a sense of legend akin to Bose and Teltumbde also died of Covid in Bastar.

The Maoists pride themselves on their organisation, a structure that can deal with medical emergencies from bullet wounds to malaria and dengue, with most formations carrying a team of indigenously trained doctors. Treat cadres they can, from years of practice and training. But deep in the forests that protect them, there are no oxygen cylinders. Strength turned to weakness.

But Covid brought with it disadvantages for the State agencies too. In districts across Bastar, since 2005, the government set up residential schools, realising that students needed to be kept in school through the year, instead of at home in their relatively inaccessible villages where they were susceptible to recruitment in the cadre. The fear among the administration now is that when the schools reopen, there will be dropouts. Not because the children went to work, but also because the Maoists will have come knocking on the door, and in the villages, saying no is close to impossible.

What lies ahead

What will be crucial for the government now, in the next few years, that will dictate the length, ferocity and future of this conflict, is how the Maoists plug these gaping holes in their leadership. Most of the existing central committee members are now old and infirm, and the organisation is famously slow in making decisions — not just because of resistance, or a lack of trust in the second rung, but of logistics too.

Most central committee-level decisions, particularly appointments, take place in physical meetings in secure locations, for written or digital messages run the risk of interception by the State. The Maoists now navigate an arena where even their forested bastions are increasingly connected with telephones and the internet. The arrest of Bose, and the killing of Teltumbde, will likely make them even more unsure because they indicate a failure in Maoist intelligence. Any movement will be seen as increasingly unsafe. In Bose’s case, for instance, the police claim is that they tracked his vehicle after collecting intelligence for months, and caught him mid-travel.

Any appointments, even in the Maoist hierarchy are political and complicated, and there are machinations within. For years, there has been conflict on the lack of tribal representation in the central committee and the politburo, comprised mainly of the original band of Maoist leaders from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Almost all of the fighting cadre, estimated at between 8000-10,000, are tribal. In August 2018, Pahad Singh, a tribal, who was one of the top military leaders in the MMC zone, and a divisional commander, surrendered because of differences with the top leadership, including Teltumbde.

In the short term though, this does not necessarily mean an immediate end to the violence. The Maoists are still very strong, in Bastar particularly, and retain the ability to cause damage. Senior police officials say that they are acutely aware of possible retaliation and the need that the organisation will feel to raise the morale of their own cadre. Ambushes in Chhattisgarh are still fairly common, and with the use of improvised explosive devices that can cause mass damage, the State apparatus will be on high alert.

In the long term though, this week has clearly been a setback for the Maoists and will be a crucial bookmark in the history of the insurgency in India.