Indian communist rebel Nambala Keshava Rao was one of the country’s most wanted men, but few images of him are publicly available.
A photograph from his college days, before he went underground in the 1970s to join what is known as the Naxalite movement, shows an intense, bearded young man in a striped shirt.
This week, Indian authorities released a new image, showing the 69-year-old Rao, with grey stubble, lying on a forest floor and apparently dead.
The revolutionary’s death marked a moment of triumph for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has prioritised national security and only this month fought a short but sharp military conflict with neighbouring Pakistan.
The Naxalite insurgency, one of the world’s longest running, has claimed the lives of thousands of security personnel, rebels and civilians across central, southern and eastern India over more than five decades. But analysts said it was now entering its endgame, and Modi’s government has vowed to wipe it out in less than a year.
Amit Shah, the home affairs minister and Modi’s top deputy, announced on Wednesday that paramilitary police had killed 27 rebels, including Rao, who he described as the “topmost” leader of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), a leading Naxalite armed group.
“What you are seeing is the pincer movement closing in on the surviving top leadership,” Ajai Sahni, a counter-terrorism expert, said. “This is the end game for the Maoists – and as far as the movement is concerned, it can be declared a failure.”
At its peak in 2008-2009, Naxalite rebels were active in 223 districts in 20 Indian states, Sahni said. Now, they have been cornered by authorities into scattered pockets in just five states.
Rao and the other insurgents were killed in what police called an “encounter” in the remote Abujhmarh forest, a tract of hilly woods and scrubland mostly in the southern part of India‘s central Chhattisgarh state that is one of the Naxalites’ last redoubts.
Similar “encounters”, mostly in secluded areas, have resulted in the deaths of dozens of rebels, but human rights defenders have questioned whether authorities could have tried to capture more of them alive.
The theatre of fighting has centred mostly on India‘s tribal belt, where some of the country’s poorest indigenous groups have been caught in the middle.
“For every claim that the police makes which it calls an ‘encounter’, it could very well be a fake encounter or a partial truth,” says Bela Bhatia, a human rights lawyer and writer based in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar division, near the forest where Rao was killed. “There is kind of a police raj [rule] in these parts.”
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Naxalism emerged in the heyday of Maoist-inspired movements in 1967, taking its name from the village of Naxalbari, in West Bengal, where communists revolutionaries launched a violent peasant uprising against landlords.
Its first leaders were readers of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, with aspirations of global revolution and an agenda of overthrowing the state.
According to a biography shared by Indian intelligence officials this week, Rao was born in a village in southern Andhra Pradesh and became involved in leftist politics through the communist-affiliated Radical Students Union.
The movement was crushed, but resurfaced in other rural rebellions, mainly among agricultural workers demanding land redistribution.
In the 1990s, rebels fled an expanding security crackdown into the tribal belt, whose rugged terrain and thick forests were easier to defend in guerrilla warfare than the flat plains.
The region has been a rich source of resources, including timber and more recently minerals, with a mining boom taking off in the years after India opened its economy to the world from 1991. Adani Group and Jindal Steel are among the companies with coal, iron ore and other operations in Chhattisgarh.
“Businesses needed access to land, and these areas became militarised,” says Alpa Shah, an Oxford anthropologist and author of a book about the Naxalites, who lived in the tribal belt for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Hundreds of thousands of troops were sent in to clear the land.”
The state launched a counter-insurgency to root out the Maoists in Chhattisgarh in 2005, but alleged human-rights abuses alienated communities and India‘s supreme court declared the operations illegal six years later.
According to Indian intelligence, Rao received guerrilla warfare and explosives training from former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lanka-based militant group blamed for the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
He rose to become military head of the CPI (Maoist), then in 2018 the group’s general secretary. Indian authorities said he masterminded several attacks, including a 2019 ambush in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, in which 15 police were killed.
But forest clearing and technological advances – including the use of drones and security cameras – have allowed security forces to push further into the rebels’ territory.
Last year Modi’s government announced that by March 2026 India would wipe out Naxalism. The home ministry launched Operation Kagar, a major crackdown that analysts said had sapped the militants’ recruitment and morale. Sahni, the counterinsurgency expert, said the movement was in its “terminal stage”.
But Oxford’s Shah cautioned against writing the group off as a spent force “We have heard this claim many times by Indian leaders that this is the last battle, we have got rid of this movement.
“We have also seen that when it seems nothing is going on, a new movement in the name of Naxalbari is born again.” − The Financial Times
