From fighting his father to becoming arch-nemesis of forces—Basavaraju, a rebel till the end

The Print

23-05-2025

The father, however, could not convince the son of the precedence of landowner rights.
A B.Tech student, Basavaraju, wanted to distribute his share of his father's land among landless farmers. His father, a teacher who owned 40 acres, rebuffed the demand, saying he had already sold his son's share of the land to give him an education at a prestigious college so he could get a chemical engineering degree that mattered.
New Delhi: Influenced by the Radical Students Union, linked to the erstwhile Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist), during his days in Warangal's Regional Engineering College, now an NIT, Basavaraju started having arguments with his father over the clashing interests of landowners and landless farmers who tilled their land.
Not the end of his affinity towards RSU and its activities, Basavaraju first had a brush with the law in 1979. Andhra Pradesh Police that year booked him on the charge of murder of a B.Tech student in a clash between students supporting the Radical Students Union and those leaning towards the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Basavaraju was the number one accused in the murder of the student, John.
Basavaraju was arrested in Andhra Pradesh's Srikakulam on 21 January 1980. He, however, jumped bail soon after his release from jail and reached Andhra Pradesh's Visakhapatnam in the first week of June 1980, when he met Maoist leader Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad. The then-head of the RSU unit in the district, Azad, became the spokesperson of the political bureau of the CPI(Maoist) before being killed in a July 2010 encounter.
According to police records, Azad instructed Basavaraju to move with Ravindra Reddy, a deputy commander of the People's War Group (PWG), a CPI(ML) arm, to the Sileru agency area in the Alluri Sitarama Raju district of Andhra Pradesh. Azad asked Basavaraju to establish the Rythu Coolie Sangham or Farmers' Labourers' League. Following Azad's directions, Basavaraju set out on his new journey, armed with three country-made pistols and 18 live cartridges. Thereafter, he became an underground CPI(ML)-PWG cadre.
He rose quickly and became a district committee member of the CPI(ML)-PWG in Visakhapatnam from 1983 to 1985. After PWG founder Kondapally Seetharamaiah's expulsion from the CPI(ML)-PWG, Basavaraju entered the party's central organising committee in 1992-93.
His rise continued with his appointment as a CPI(ML)-PWG central organising committee member before taking charge of the subcommittee of military affairs (SCOMA) at the central level in 1995.
As SCOMA in-charge, Basavaraju played a key role in forming the CPI(ML) People's War after the merger of CPI(ML)-PWG and CPI(ML) Party Unity. 'He also attended a central military camp and underwent military training in explosives, use of landmines, military formation, field drill, attack on police stations, use of arms & ammunition, etc.,' police records say.
In 2001, Basavaraju was inducted into the CPI(ML) People's War Politburo and appointed as the in-charge of the party's central military commission during the ninth Congress in Chhattisgarh's Abujhmad.
Years after taking over the reins in the central military commission, he planned an armour loot in the Koraput district of Odisha. In the attack that lasted for nearly six hours, the Maoists looted 1,000 advanced firearms and 1,000 other weapons worth Rs 50 crore roughly on 6 February 2004.
He also consolidated the military and organisational might of the banned Maoist outfits by playing a significant role in unifying the CPI(ML) People's War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004.
A year later, Basavaraju orchestrated a jailbreak in Bihar's Jehanabad district, allowing 389 prisoners to escape jail.
He remains among the few names in the Maoist hierarchy to be a member of all three top bodies of banned Maoist outfits—the central committee, the politburo, and the central military commission.
His elevation to the rank of the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) was on 10 November 2018. Since then, he held that rank till his death in an encounter earlier this week in Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh.
'His promotion marked a strategic shift from ideological leadership to military aggression, focusing on guerrilla and mobile warfare strategies and strengthening the PLGA (People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, armed wing of the CPI-Maoist). He was an expert in explosives, IEDs, military formations, and attacks on police stations,' Bastar Range Inspector General (IG) Sundarraj Pattilingam said.
Bastar IG said the Chhattisgarh government had declared a Rs one crore bounty on Basavaraju, and the overall reward by combining offers by other states and agencies for catching him amounted to Rs 10 crore. The state government had declared Rs 3.33 crore for all 27 Maoist cadres killed in the latest operation, the Bastar IG added.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
Also Read: Over 200 'senior Maoists' eliminated since 2021 on path to 'Naxal-free India', top commanders prove elusive