THE LAST GUERRILLAS

THE WEEK decodes the failed Maoist revolution through the eyes of top commanders and ideologues

- BY NAMRATA BIJI AHUJA/SUKMA, BASTAR, KANKER, DANTEWADA, WARANGAL PHOTOS BY BHANU PRAKASH CHANDRA AND KRITAJNA NAIK

Barse Singe is busy collecting fallen Mahua flowers. The Mahua is celebrated by the tribal communities in rural Chhattisgarh as the tree of life and spirit. Its flowers are dried, consumed or fermented into an elixir worthy of these hardy deciduous trees. Before the flowers fall on the moist forest floor, controlled fires are lit through the night, tracing pathways for forest dwellers and leaving behind fine ash that will cradle the blossoms by morning. At daybreak, the dry ash makes it easier for dwellers to pick flowers. Singe, in her late 70s, is gazing into the forest. But her eyes are not focused on the fire pathways. She longs for her son Barse Deva's homecoming.

The dreaded Deva, commander of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army's (PLGA) battalion number one, has been gone for 24 years, moving through forested hillocks and carrying out more than two dozen ghastly attacks on security personnel—wiping out a convoy of 23 Congress leaders and two security personnel in Jheeram Ghati in Bastar in 2013; killing 76 security personnel in the 2010 Tadmetla attack. The killings were carried out on the orders of his childhood friend—comrade Madavi Hidma, commander-in-chief of the PLGA.

THE WEEK met Deva after his recent surrender. He was born in Puvarti, along the Telangana border in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district: a village that has bred some of the deadliest military commanders of India's Maoist insurgency. Deva and Hidma played kabaddi, and ran, climbed and moved through the forest terrain together. They would go on to steal US-made Colt rifles, AK-47s and grenade launchers from the police and make improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to spread terror across the Chhattisgarh-Telangana border regions—the largest and last fallen bastion of left-wing extremism in India.