He’s never once mentioned them, even in passing, in all the interviews he’s given: the brother called Parshuraman, who was killed in a firefight with the Andhra Pradesh police back in 1994; the sister called Kanukamma, whose body was torn apart by bullets while fighting by his side.
He never once mentioned the son born that year, who went to school in Sukma wondering if one the things he’d learn that day was that his father and mother were dead. He’s spoken only of ‘The Cause’, the man who ordered the massacre of 29 in Chhattisgarh last week.
“The language of war is killing”, said 9/11 perpetrator Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Ravula Srinivas, secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, has long known this. His story tells us what happens when people cease to matter and only a cause remains.
Like thousands of their generation, Srinivas and the two key deputies alleged to have organised the Chhattisgarh massacre, became radicalised in the 1970s: a decade of disillusion with India’s post-independence dreams, of international crisis, of the birth of the cult of the Angry Young Man. Ernesto Guevara had died battling fascists in; Ho Chi Minh was defying the United States; Mao Zedong was—or so it was fondly imagined—building the new man. The System had to be demolished, brick by brick, and a new world built in its place.
It seemed possible, even in the most miserable corners of Andhra Pradesh—and like all true believers, the greying revolutionaries in the Dandakaranya forests would rather spill blood than give up their faith.
Now around 50 years old, the son of a family of traditional toddy-tappers and farmhands, Srinivas dropped out of the village school in Bekkal, near Warangal, in Grade 8. Srinivas’ elder brother, a source familiar with the Warangal Maoist landscape recalls, introduced him to the Maoist movement. Police records show he joined People’s War in 1982, married party colleague Savitri in 1985, and rose to command his dalam, or squad, in 1987. Late that year, for reasons that remain unknown Srinivas left the party and came home—but his brother dragged him back.
From then on, though, Srinivas’ rise through People’s War was inexorable. He was assigned to Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region in 1995, commanding Maoist squads in the area’s southern wing and then in the north. He rose to national prominence in 2010, ambushing a bus that was carrying police commandos, killing 40 people.
In interviews, he showed no concern at all that most of the victims of that attack were adivasi civilians. “Our aim was precise and correct”, he told INN, “The administration is using civilians as a human shield, so they got killed. I regret this”.
Later that month, Srinivas showed to some media people the Kalashnikov he purchased in 1988, for Rs 100,000. It was the same weapon he used in April, 2010, in the ambush that killed 75 Central Reserve Police Force personnel at Chintalnar. He didn’t regret that: it was war. Kunal Majumdar reported that Srinivas “at times became ecstatic as he told us about the highest casualties our cadre has ever inflicted on the Indian anti-Naxalite security forces in a single day”.
Ganesh Ueike, at Srinivas’ side in the 2010 ambush, and now heading CPI (Maoist) operations in Dantewada—was likely responsible for the physical execution of Saturday’s massacre.
The most educated of the three top Dandakaranya Maoists, Ganesh’s early life a quite different trajectory to his leader. In 1982, he was studying for a bachelor of sciences degree in Nalagonda, and well known locally as an activist of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing. Faced with the prospect of arrest in a police case involving the murder of rival, Ueike fled. No-one is quite sure how he ended up in People’s War.
From the mid-2000s, Ueike surfaced as the commander responsible for operations structure in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha area—and succeeded in turning it into the most active of all sectors during his four year term. In a 2006 interview, he had this to say on the Party’s use of violence: “whoever is against the movement is an enemy”.
Kattakam Sudarshan, the third man believed to have helped organise the massacre at Darba, heads the newly-formed Chhattisgarh-Odisha command of the CPI (Maoist). Born around 1959-1960, Sudarshan grew up in the mining town of Belampalli. His lower-middle class parents worked in the Singareni coal mines. Sudarshan studied for a bachelor of sciences degree, but dropped out in 1978 to work full time with the Radical Students Union—a far-Left grouping that was also the nursery for five of the seven CPI-Maoist Politbureau leaders still active.
Later, in 1981, he participated in a famous strike at Singareni which People’s War hoped would spearhead a working class revolution. The working class, though, let down the Party: its wage demands met, it abandoned People’s War. The peasant movement fared little better: politicians proved adroit in stilling the well of rural grievances People’s War had hoped to tap.
In 1980, Sudarshan went underground—and headed out to the Dandakaranya forests. In September that year, the Party had decided to expand its zone of operations “with the aim of establishing liberated areas”. In 1985, Sudarshan began to rise up the ranks—eventually into the Politbureau.
Even though the Maoists were decimated in Andhra Pradesh by 2003, the bases its commanders had set up in un-policed Dandakarayna provided safe havens to retreat to. In 2004, People’s War merged with the Maoist Communist Centre of India—and starting to fight once again.
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