Dr B Karthik Navayan
The Communist Party of India (Maoist) has always presented itself as the fiercest enemy of caste oppression. Its programme promises to annihilate caste through a protracted people’s war. Yet, as Operation Kagar (launched 21 April 2025) races toward the March 2026 deadline to wipe out Left-Wing Extremism, the party is collapsing along the very caste fault lines it swore to erase. Over 350 cadres are dead, more than a thousand have surrendered, and the active Central Committee is down to single digits. What drones and Greyhounds could not achieve in two decades, caste resentment has finished in months.
The Upper-Caste Exodus and its Aftermath: Two of the largest surrender waves have been led by upper-caste leaders from the Telangana plains. Mallojula Venugopal Rao (Brahmin, Politburo member) surrendered on 14 October 2025 in Gadchiroli with 60 cadres and 54 weapons, wearing a silk, ironed, green dress, handing over his AK-47 with a smile to another Brahmin, Devendra Fadnavis. Thakkallapally Vasudeva Rao (Velama) followed weeks later in Chhattisgarh with roughly 200 cadres and a massive cache of arms and logistics before Chhattisgarh Dy CM Brahmin Sharma.
Of the people these two leaders brought out, 99 % are Adivasis. Even among the handful of Telangana cadres who surrendered with them, there is not a single upper-caste person. The leaders themselves now live safely in Telangana, giving interviews from police guest houses and pocketing crores in cumulative rewards. The Adivasi cadres they once armed and sent into the forests cannot return to their villages because they fear Salwa Judum-style revenge killings and cannot survive in towns, as it will be costly for them, and are too “high-profile” to be absorbed into the shrinking District Reserve Guard units. Many will end up as security guards or peons for the very mining companies they once fought against, setting up.
Reliable sources say Venugopal Rao never accepted the transfer of the General Secretary post from Ganapathi to Nambala Keshav Rao (an OBC from the Kalinga community) in 2018. From that moment, he is believed to have quietly begun planning his exit and may have been nursing ambitions for the top post ever since: Dev Ji’s Rise and the Inevitable Showdown. After Basavaraju’s death in May 2025, Thippiri Thirupathi, alias Dev Ji (Mala, Scheduled Caste, 62) from Jagtial, Telangana, emerged as the new General Secretary, the second Scheduled caste person to hold the post in the party’s history. The first Central Committee Secretary was K G Sathya Murthy, also known as Shiva Sagar, who was expelled by the Brahmins and other Upper Castes from the present Maoist Party and from the previous Peoples War.
Whether Thippiri Thirupathi, alias Dev Ji, was formally elected or filled the vacuum is unclear. Still, one fact is beyond doubt: even if Venugopal Rao had not surrendered and had stayed inside the party, the Central Committee would still have chosen Dev Ji. As Dev Ji’s recent statement (signed “Abhay”) points out, Venugopal had begun pushing a liquidationist line as early as 2020–2022, and the entire Central Committee unanimously rejected his arguments. The timing of the upper-caste surrender wave immediately after an Untouchable Scheduled Caste (Mala) leader took charge can therefore hardly be called a coincidence.
The Hidma Killing and the Counter-Propaganda: On 18 November 2025, Madvi Hidma, the legendary Gond Adivasi commander of PLGA Battalion-1, was killed along with his wife and four guards in Maredumilli forests (Andhra Pradesh). Three days later, former Bastar MLA and tribal CPI leader Manish Kunjam publicly alleged that the encounter was staged and that Dev Ji had a direct hand in luring Hidma out and getting him eliminated. The Maoist party condemned these allegations by Manish Kunjam in a recent statement issued by Vikalp, the media in charge of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, and asked Manish Kunjam and Soni Sori to retract their false allegations against Dev Ji.
Informed circles within the erstwhile Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, however, point out that this narrative that the Dev Ji played a role in killing Hidma surfaced suspiciously soon after serious allegations began circulating that Venugopal Rao and Vasudeva Rao could be linked to the 2025 encounter killings of Renuka, Keshav Rao, Ramachandra Reddy, and Satyanarayana Reddy. As a counter-move, the story that “Dev Ji masterminded Hidma’s killing” appears to have been quietly floated like ripples under a leaf by these two surrendered leaders or their proxies.
Several facts weaken Kunjam’s claim. Whatever little guerrilla structure remains, most observers believe Dev Ji is still there, operating within the remaining zones. If the police had really caught a Central Committee member with a ₹1–1.5 crore reward on his head, they would never release him. That too, he is a scheduled caste person without any privileges like Brahmin leaders in the Maoist Party. No matter what Manish Kunjam says, the very fact that even today, in late 2025, a significant number of Adivasis still want to continue the armed struggle is itself proof of Dev Ji’s positive influence on the ground. Many, therefore, suspect that Kunjam’s allegations carry the shadow or at least the prompting of the Venugopal–Vasudeva Rao circle.
The Real Caste Contradiction: The Maoist movement’s foot soldiers have always been overwhelmingly Adivasi and Dalit; its top ideologues and strategists have been disproportionately upper-caste or upper-Shudra from the plains. When the heat became unbearable, the plains comrades negotiated safe passage and rehabilitation packages; the forest comrades were either killed in encounters or abandoned to a life of insecurity and humiliation. This is not an accident of Operation Kagar. It is the logical culmination of decades in which “caste annihilation” was repeatedly postponed until after the seizure of power.
Former Maoists Mallojula Venugopal Rao and Thakkallapally Vasudeva Rao continue to claim in interviews that they are still committed to “working for the welfare of the people.” This sounds hollow and hypocritical. Ever since they surrendered along with their arms and ammunition, they have been openly sharing their phone numbers and urging active Maoist cadres to follow suit and give themselves up to the police. In the underground Maoist culture, a cadre earns respect only when they surrender with the party’s permission and without handing over weapons — as senior leaders like Bandi Prakash and Pulluri Prasada Rao did recently. Surrendering with arms is seen as betrayal.
It is deeply ironic that, on the one hand, they actively encourage their remaining comrades to surrender, an act considered unethical and treacherous within the movement, while on the other, they proclaim lofty ideals of serving the people.
This glaring double standard exposes what many believe is the real motive behind their surrender, their inability to accept the proposal of Thippiri Thirupathi, a scheduled caste person, as the new secretary of the Maoist party.
Operation Kagar is not merely crushing an armed movement; it is exposing that the movement itself was never serious about crushing caste. When a so-called untouchable caste person finally reached the very top, key upper-caste leaders preferred to destroy the party rather than serve under him. That, far more than drones or DRGs, is what has brought CPI(Maoist) to its knees in 2025. Until the revolutionary left confronts this truth without evasion, every call for “New Democratic Revolution” will ring hollow and every Adivasi corpse in the forest will mock the red flag that promised liberation but delivered only another layer of hierarchy.
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Dr B Karthik Navayan is an advocate at the High Court of Telangana
