Giving up on Mao | OPEN Magazine Special

In April this year, a man the top Maoist leader had entrusted his life to, became scared for the safety of his own and crossed over to the other side. Babu Kawasi had been Maoist chief Basavaraj’s personal bodyguard since 2016—at that time he was the head of the CPI (Maoist)’s Central Military Commission. Before that, Kawasi had been a bodyguard to previous Maoist chief Ganapathi as well. As part of the party’s Company No 7, Kawasi had guarded its top leadership for 15 years before he gave up. In April, he left the Maoists along with his wife and surrendered to the police.

Kawasi said he had felt the jungle closing in on him. As security forces began to push into the Bastar region, drastically shrinking the areas Maoists had once control over, the game began to change. Maoists had pockets of sympathy among the Adivasis. But with the security thrust, the leadership became more and more paranoid and turned against the Adivasis they were supposed to fight for, resulting in scores of killings of people on suspicion of being police informers. The people who formed the core base of the Maoists began to turn against them.

Less than a month after Kawasi’s surrender, his former boss was trapped in the hitherto inaccessible jungles of Abujhmad and killed along with 26 other guerrillas.Kawasi is not the only man for whom the jungle turned inhospitable. In the last few months, there has been a wave of surrenders, signalling a decisive shift among the Maoist cadre. In July, in one instance, 66 Maoists, including a number of mid-level leaders who collectively carried a reward of over ₹2 crore, surrendered. Before that, 22 others surrendered together. Many others are surrendering in smaller numbers as well. “The top leadership of the Maoists is almost gone,” said P Sundarraj, Inspector General of Police (Bastar Range), a key man behind the latest push against the insurgents in the region. “In their absence, the grip on the local cadre is loosening and they are now surrendering after realising the futility of the movement,” he said.

Disclaimer: Excerpt from “Giving Up on Mao” by Rahul Pandita, published on August 1, 2025 in OPEN Magazine.Read the full article here: https://openthemagazine.com/features/giving-up-on-mao/