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Indian security forces have killed a top communist rebel leader, home affairs minister Amit Shah said, in what he called a “landmark achievement” in the country’s fight against one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies.
Shah said troops had on Wednesday “neutralised 27 dreaded Maoists, including Nambala Keshav Rao”, general secretary of the Communist party of India (Maoist), in an operation in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.
CPI (Maoist) is a leftist armed group that has played a leading role in what is known as the Naxalite movement, which has been battling the Indian state since 1967.
“This is the first time in three decades of Bharat’s [India’s] battle against Naxalism that a general secretary-ranked leader has been neutralised by our forces,” Shah wrote on social media site X. “I applaud our brave security forces and agencies for this major breakthrough.”
Indian social media users shared images of what appeared to be the corpse of Rao, who went by the alias Basavaraju. Rao had a bounty of Rs15mn ($180,000) on his head and Indian intelligence agencies said he was a mastermind behind several deadly attacks on security forces, including one in 2010 in Dantewada in which 76 police officers were killed.
“In a situation in which the movement has already been enormously circumscribed and damaged, getting to someone at this level of the system is a serious shock to the organisation,” said Ajai Sahni, a counterterrorism expert.
Sahni said that as general secretary, Rao held the highest executive position in the the CPI (Maoist) and was one of the Naxalites’ “senior-most leaders”.
Shah, a powerful ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has vowed to make India “Naxal-free” by March 2026. India has this year been carrying out one of its most extensive counter-insurgency operations yet against the Maoist rebels.
Recent security operations by the Modi government have significantly weakened the Naxalites’ reach and capabilities. India claims its paramilitary police have killed dozens of rebels this year in what it calls “encounters”, or gun battles, in Chhattisgarh, the heart of rebel activity.
Shah said that “Operation Black Forest” led to the arrest of 54 Naxalites and surrender of another 84 across in the three states of Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Maharashtra. Rao was killed in Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur district.
India’s Maoists mostly operate in thickly forested areas inhabited largely by indigenous tribal people, using the inhospitable terrain for cover. The insurgency centres on in what Indians know as the “Red Corridor”, a swath of eastern, central and southern states.
Many affected areas are rich in minerals, sparking conflicts over mining rights. Maoists claim to protect local communities from exploitation and seek to overthrow the government, establish a communist state, and redistribute land and resources.
The violence has claimed thousands of lives, including civilians, rebels and security forces, but Manoj Joshi of the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi said the militants were now “virtually finished”.
“Recently there have been so many ‘encounters’, with 10 people killed here and 20 killed there, that I don’t see how much capacity they have left,” Joshi said.
