KOLKATA/HYDERABAD: The CPI (Maoist) lost its prime mover in West Bengal and the Northeast on Thursday with the police killing of Kishenji, 56, in a police-claimed shootout in the jungles of West Midnapore district.
Joint forces of the state and Centre claimed that the top Maoist leader, a member of the CPI (Maoist) Politburo and Central Committee, died in a gun-battle with personnel of the 207 Cobra Battalion.
Coming after the killing of another top ranking Maoist leader Azad in July last year, the loss of Kishenji is a major setback to outlawed CPI (Maoist) which is facing intense heat from security forces in West Bengal’s Jangalmahal. Kisheni was one of the top five leaders of the Maoist group by virtue of being a member of both the Central Committee and the Politburo, He is credited with possessing organisational skills vital to an underground outfit.
Though not ranked on par with Azad as an intellectual, observers of the naxalite movement say Kishenji was a multi-skilled man: a poet, writer and skilled organiser of the movement in West Bengal and, of late, in the Northeast.
Kishenji was born Mallojula Koteshwara Rao in the family of a Gandhian freedom fighter in Peddapalli of Karimnagar district. He finished his Intermediate during the Emergency days and was among the founder members of Radical Students Union (RSU), the student arm of the then People’s War. Subsequently, he joined Osmania University to pursue law but gave it up after a couple of years to become a full-fledged activist of the naxalite organisation.
He rose to become the state secretary, carrying the nom de guerre of Prahlad, and suffered a bullet wound in his hand in an encounter with the police. By the mid-80s, as the AP government stepped up the heat, he moved to Dandakaranya where he took the name Ramji and worked for sometime .
Over the past 15 years, however, he was mainly operating out of West Bengal and in the process acquired mastery of the Bengali language even as he ensured the spread of naxalite activity to most parts of the state giving jitters to the then CPM government. At the height of the Nandigram episode, he gave soundbites to various media channels explaining the stand of the Maoist group.
One of his two brothers is also an underground leader of the Maoist group while another lives in Hyderabad, not connected with ultra left politics.
