Basavaraju—tech grad to Maoist commander-in-chief who scripted deadliest massacres including Dantewada

The Print

21-05-2025

The end came in Chhattisgarh's Abujhmad on Wednesday where the CPI (Maoist) general secretary and 26 other cadres were killed in a 72-hour operation carried out following verified intelligence inputs on the presence of a significant number of Maoist cadres, including senior leaders.
That he was a prized scalp for security agencies can be gauged from the Rs 1 crore bounty placed on Basavaraju's head, courtesy his imprint on various Maoist attacks including those on security forces and politicians over the years.
New Delhi: Maoist supreme commander Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju rose from a farmer's family to become the biggest military mind and strategist of the banned outfit, which was once declared as India's 'biggest internal security' challenge.
In a post on 'X', Union Home Minister Amit Shah congratulated security forces and agencies for taking out Basavaraju in the encounter carried out at Narayanpur district. 'This is the first time in three decades of Bharat's battle against Naxalism that a general secretary-ranked leader has been neutralised by our forces,' he wrote.
The killing of Basavaraju, 69, was the third such high-profile Maoist target, so far this year. In January, a joint team of Chhattisgarh and Odisha police and the elite CoBRA unit of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) brought down Ramachandra Reddy Gari Pratap Reddy alias Chalapathi at Chhattisgarh's Kularighat reserve forest. Chalapathi was a member of the central committee—the highest decision-making body of the banned CPI-Maois.
Similarly, forces in Jharkhand's Bokaro had last month killed another central committee member, Prayag Manjhi alias Vivek. Both had Rs 1 crore bounty against them.
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'The unifier & military strategist'
Born to a farmer's family at Jiyannapetta village of Andhra Pradesh's Srikakulam district, Basavaraju was among the five children to his parents. While the family was largely engaged in farming, he was bright in education and went on to pursue Bachelor of Technology from the famous Regional Engineering College, now known as National Institute of Technology, in Warangal.
Basavaraju quickly rose through the ranks on this basis of his aggressive military tactics—some of which were shown against the security forces and politicians. He was believed to be the main brain behind the 2010 Chintalnar massacre in which 76 CRPF personnel—the worst operation for the security forces in any operation so far.
He was also suspected to be the chief conspirator behind the May 2013 ambush on a convoy of Congress leaders in which 29 leaders, including Chhattisgarh unit chief Nand Kumar Patel, were killed in Darbha valley.
Basavaraju was among the few names in the Maoist hierarchy to be a member of all three top bodies—the Central Committee (CC), the Politburo (PB) and the Central Military Commission (CMC)—of the banned outfit. He was heading the CMC for around a decade and led the cadres during deadly period of attacks on security forces in central India between 2005 and 2013.
More importantly, he essayed a key role in unification of the erstwhile groups, People's War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI), to form the CPI (Maoist) in 2004.
Kondapalli Seetharamaiah had formed the PWG in 1980 after separating from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), led by the then general secretary Charu Mazumdar. Its mantle then fell on Muppala Lakshmana Rao alias Ganapathi, who was active in undivided Andhra Pradesh, Dandakaranya area (Chhattisgarh), and parts of Maharashtra.
The MCCI, on the other hand, was formed by Kanai Chatterjee in 1975. By the time of unification, it was actively operating in Bihar, Jharkhand, Bihar-West Bengal border area and parts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The PWG strongholds were in the southern states such as the undivided Andhra Pradesh.
'He (Basavaraju) played a key part in the merger of the splinter groups and led the background work behind making Maoist and its military wing a formidable outfit stretching from the Nepal border in India to West Bengal in the East, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh in the centre and Maharashtra in the west. He was a unifying force among the Maoist cadres as well as a strategist whose words and instructions were taken as gospel by lower cadres,' a security officer said.
After Ganapathi suffered prolonged illness, Basavaraju was elevated to the topmost position in the Maoist hierarchy as the general secretary of the CPI (Maoist) in 2018. He is said to have ordered the political assasination of BJP MLA Bhima Mandavi in April 2019 in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada.
The following month, Basavaraju also instructed an IED attack against a convoy of C-60 commandos in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district, killing 15 of them, trained specifically for anti-Naxal operations.
'He was the conspirator in chief of nearly all deadly ambushes and operations carried out by the Maoists in the last two decades. His elimination is a big success, coupled as lower cadres are already under severe stress from frequent and intensive operations in Chhattisgarh and all neighbouring states,' a senior security officer said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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