Former Maoist commander Devuji says arrested before surrendering
Devuji spent four decades underground in armed struggle
The Long Walk: Four Decades, One Ideology, and an Unfinished Promise
The man sitting before the television cameras in Hyderabad spoke with the calm certainty of someone who had spent forty years listening to the whisper of leaves in dense forests and the distant crackle of police wireless. His name was Thippiri Tirupati, but the jungles of Chhattisgarh and the hills of Maharashtra knew him as Devuji. For four decades, he had been a ghost, a strategist, a commander in an armed struggle that had claimed countless lives on both sides.
Now, he sat in a collared shirt, a free man—or so the world believed.
“I did not surrender,” he said, his voice steady, his eyes unblinking. “The police arrested us. Then they told us they would show it as a surrender.”
The words hung in the air, a challenge to the official narrative. On February 24, the Telangana police had announced with fanfare that a top Maoist leader had surrendered, ending a 42-year underground journey. But Devuji was rewriting that story in real-time, and with it, the easy assumptions that people make about men who take up arms against the state.
He was born in Korutla, a small town in Jagtial district, to Venkata Narsaiah, a farmer who tilled his own land and hoped his son would till it after him. But young Thippiri read different books. He read about landless labourers, about feudal oppression, about revolutions in distant lands. In January 1982, at an age when most boys are thinking about college and careers, he walked into the forest and joined the People’s War Group. He never looked back.
Or so it seemed. But looking back is all he has been doing since February 24.
In the forests, Devuji was a legend. He operated across three states, survived countless encounters, buried comrades, and buried enemies. He rose through the ranks to become a Central Committee member, though he now dismisses rumours that he was ever the general secretary. “Had there been a Central Committee, there would have been that agenda,” he said, a cryptic statement that spoke volumes about the state of the organisation he left behind.
His family in Korutla heard about his “surrender” on television. His younger brother, a schoolteacher, sat in his small government quarters and watched the press conference with mixed emotions. For decades, he had carried the burden of being a Maoist’s sibling—the whispered conversations when he went to the market, the gentle distance maintained by neighbours, the quiet dread whenever news broke of an encounter in some distant forest.
“I used to pray every night,” the brother would later tell a close friend, “not that he would surrender, but that he would survive. Just survive.”
Devuji’s survival, however, came with conditions. In his first public appearance, he made it clear that while his weapons may be gone, his ideology remained intact. Marxism, Leninism, Maoism—these were not abandoned at the police station along with his rifle. They were, he insisted, the very foundation of whatever came next.
“If we wanted to leave the path, we would have surrendered like Sonu and Ashanna did in Maharashtra last October,” he said, referring to two senior Maoists who laid down arms before the Maharashtra government. “That was not my plan.”
The police, for their part, have a different story. They speak of Operation Kagar, a sustained campaign that squeezed the Maoist presence in Telangana’s forests. They speak of arrests, not voluntary surrenders. But they also, by Devuji’s own account, made a choice.
It was an extraordinary admission from both sides—a police force that chose to capture rather than kill, and a Maoist commander who lived to tell his story because of that choice.
What comes next for a man who has known only the forest for 42 years? The world outside has changed. Mobile phones, once strictly forbidden in the ranks, are now in every hand. Politics has evolved, castes have realigned, and the very issues that drove him into the jungle—land rights, feudal oppression—have taken new forms.
Devuji says he will continue to fight for people’s problems, but within the legal framework. It is a fine line to walk—carrying a revolutionary ideology while working within a system that ideology sought to overthrow. He insists it is possible. “Earlier we solved people’s problems from underground,” he said. “Now we will do it openly.”
In the villages of his native Jagtial, farmers who remember the fiery young man who left for the forests are watching with curiosity. Some are sceptical, others hopeful. A landless labourer who once received help from the Maoists in a dispute with a landlord wondered aloud: “Will he still remember us now that he is on television?”
Devuji’s final message was for those who see his emergence as an end.
Forty-two years underground. Countless operations. Comrades dead, enemies fallen, a country transformed. And now, a man who has known only the darkness of the forest walks into the harsh light of the media, insisting that he has not changed at all. Whether that is the greatest truth or the greatest delusion, only the people he now promises to serve will ultimately decide.