3 min readUpdated: Feb 22, 2026 01:38 PM IST
The highest-ranking member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Thippiri Tirupathi alias Devuji, has surrendered in Telangana along with 20 other Maoist cadres, two highly-placed sources said.
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A top official said, “He is with us. We will record his surrender in a day or two.”
The surrender has come ahead of a March 31 deadline set by Union Home Minister Amit Shah to bring the Maoist movement to an end in the country. Security forces stepped up operations in 2024, particularly in Chhattisgarh, where at least 520 Maoists have been killed since then, including CPI (Maoist) general secretary Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju. Several top leaders and hundreds of cadres have also surrendered during this period, including Politburo member Mallojula Venugopal Rao alias Sonu, who was considered to be the ideological head of the Maoist party.
Some intelligence sources said Devuji, also known as Devji, may have been elevated to the top-most post of general secretary of the Maoist party after Basavaraju’s killing in May last year. The Maoist party has, however, denied this.
From Jagtial in Telangana, Devuji is now 62 years old and carries a bounty of Rs 1 crore.
“In the history of the party, there is no other leader of this rank who has surrendered,” a top intelligence source told The Indian Express.
For the past two decades, he had headed the Central Military Commission, or the military wing, of the CPI (Maoist), which has been designated as a banned organisation since 2009.
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Devuji is from the Madiga Dalit community. “Tirupathi’s leadership was going to be pivotal because he comes from a marginalised background and could have rallied the party’s cadre, including the Adivasis,” a top state intelligence officer said.
“There was a two-line rift in the party with those supporting Mallojula Venugopal believing that the Maoists should surrender to save the party, and those supporting Devuji asserting that they would remain in the forests for the rest of their lives to put up a fight,” an intelligence source said.
Devuji, who is among the three remaining members of the CPI (Maoist) Politburo, is from the second-rung leadership, when compared to two former general secretaries who helmed the party — Muppalla Laxman Rao alias Ganapathy who stepped down in 2018 and Basavaraju. “We have managed to get the second-tier leadership of the party to surrender, even as many of the party’s older leaders have been killed,” an intelligence officer said.
Tirupathi is believed to have joined the Maoist party in the 1980s, when it was still known as People’s War Group. PWG and the Maoist Communist Centre merged in 2004 to form the present-day Maoist party. “He was part of the Radical Students Union (RSU), which was the students’ wing of the banned outfit,” an intelligence official said.
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According to Telangana intelligence sources, the Maoist party now has an armed cadre strength of just 180 cadres who carry top-range weapons. At the commencement of Operation Kagar in January 2024, this number was 2,200.
The cadre base is supported by a militia base of 1,000 people. “In 2022, the militia was 7,000 in number,” an intelligence official said. The strength of the banned outfit has fallen manifold by 1/10th of its original size, a Telangana intelligence source had earlier said.
