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Indian forces have killed top Maoist leader Nambala Keshava Rao in the central state of Chhattisgarh, home minister Amit Shah confirmed.
Rao, commonly known as Basavaraju, was the general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India Maoist, the most powerful Maoist insurgent group in the country.
He was one of 27 rebels killed in a gunfight with security forces in the forests of the Narayanpur region. One police officer also died in the operation.
Mr Shah noted that Rao was the first Maoist leader of such high rank to be killed in nearly 30 years.
The home minister hailed the operation as a landmark success, while prime minister Narendra Modi praised the forces for the “remarkable” outcome.
Maoist rebels, who started their insurgency in the late 1960s and control swathes of what is known as the “red corridor” in central India, have long claimed to represent indigenous tribal communities neglected by the state and exploited by private corporations seeking to extract natural resources from their ancestral lands.
The Indian government has pledged to dismantle the movement entirely by March 2026. A sweeping security crackdown in recent months has reportedly led to dozens of arrests and surrenders.
The Maoist conflict has reportedly claimed over 10,000 lives so far, although violence has declined in recent years.
Rao, India’s most-wanted Maoist rebel with a Rs 1.5 crore (£130,000) bounty on his head, was the ideological architect and strategic mastermind behind some of the deadliest Maoist attacks in the country, according to local media.
Rao was born in 1955 in the southern Andhra Pradesh state and graduated with an engineering degree from NIT Warangal before joining the People’s War Group, a Maoist faction that later merged into the Communist Party of India Maoist, in the early 1980s. He reportedly received guerrilla training from the Sri Lankan insurgent group LTTE.
A key strategist for the Maoist rebel movement, he was accused of orchestrating several major attacks, such as the 2010 Dantewada massacre, the 2013 Jeeram Ghati ambush, and a 2003 assassination attempt on Andhra Pradesh’s then chief minister.
Rao rose to become chief of the Maoist group in 2018, directing operations from underground while eluding intelligence agencies.
His killing reportedly came after weeks of coordinated efforts tracking Maoist leaders in the dense forests at the junction of Narayanpur, Bijapur and Dantewada districts.
“A landmark achievement in the battle to eliminate Naxalism,” Mr Shah, the home minister, said. “Today, in an operation in Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh, our security forces have neutralised 27 dreaded Maoists, including Nambala Keshav Rao, alias Basavaraju, the general secretary of CPI Maoist, topmost leader and backbone of the Naxal movement.”
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