“Opinion | The Death Of The Indian Maoist Should Be A Wake-Up Call For Every Armchair Revolutionary”, News 18, March 13, 2026
“Nobody in Bastar had ever asked for a vanguard. The Gond tribals of Abujhmad had their own word for the forests they lived in, saal, meaning the Shorea tree, and they had managed those forests for centuries before anyone arrived with a manifesto. What they got instead, beginning in the late 1960s and accelerating through the 2000s, was a Marxist-Leninist organisation run largely by upper-caste Telugu. intellectuals telling them that armed revolution was their only path to dignity.
Nambala Keshava Rao, the man. who led that organisation until security forces killed him in May 2025, had imagined seizing state power by 2050. He did not live to see 2026. By the time of his death in Abujhmad, the same forests he had controlled for decades, his party had haemorrhaged from 223 districts to fewer than 20. Eleven of his Central Committee members were killed or surrendered in 2025 alone. The Politburo, once sixteen strong, now has three active members.
This is the movement that significant sections of India’s academic and journalistic establishment treated as a legitimate, if extreme, expression of tribal grievance for the better part of 30 years. Lawyers filed briefs, researchers published. sympathetic analyses, and journalists attended press conferences in the jungle and wrote about what they found with barely concealed admiration…….”
Read full article at news18.com
