The Red Army

The Maoist doctrine of agrarian armed struggle influenced sections of India's Left since the 1940s and posed a major security threat to the State, only to crumble rather rapidly in 2025

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

MUPPALA Lakshmana Rao must be quite a restless man now. 2025 has been the worst year for India's Maoist rebels, who launched a mission to overthrow the Indian State through an armed, agrarian revolution way back in 1967.

Known to the world as Ganapathi, Rao is one of the architects of the revival of Left-wing insurgency in India, after the first wave of the Maoist aka Naxalite movement faltered in the early 1970s. Over time, the Indian Maoists became one of the largest and most lethal Left-wing armed groups in the world, perhaps second only to the western Asia's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

He is past his mid-70s. Going by his organisation's practice for elderly leaders, he likely lives in some urban centre-away from the jungle life of guerrillas. His party, the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist), is faced with unprecedented setbacks in its stronghold of central India's forested and hilly tracts.

Reports of rapid crumbling of the mighty force that he helped build over four decades keep pouring in.

In southern Chhattisgarh and its bordering areas in Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, guerilla platoons are being wiped out in security offensives. Dozens of fighters are laying down their arms. The Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh (MMC) zonal committee has publicly sought three months' time to surrender. The Telangana state committee has unconditionally extended its unilateral ceasefire.

"This is the first time since the Naxalbari (1967) and the Srikakulam (1968) struggles that four members of the central committee and 17 members of state committees, in addition to the general secretary, have been martyred in the space of a year," the party said in a statement issued in September 2025 on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the CPI-Maoist's formation.

It acknowledged the need to address "questions arising in the revolutionary camp regarding its future".