Hyderabad: Thippiri Tirupathi alias Devuji alias Devji, one of the highest ranking office bearers of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), is said to have surrendered in Telangana with 20 other Maoists.
“He is with us. We will record his surrender in a day or two,” an official has been quoted by The Indian Express as saying.
Devuji’s exact position in the party is unclear, but intelligence agencies have claimed that he was elevated to the post of general secretary after the death of Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju in an encounter with security forces in 2025.
The CPI (Maoist), however, denied this.
But it is clear that Devuji ranked among the top 2-3 leaders of the outfit. His surrender comes ahead of the March 31 deadline set by Union home minister Amit Shah to root out Left Wing Extremism from the country.
In keeping with this deadline, security forces stepped up operations in 2024, particularly in Chhattisgarh, where at least 520 Maoists have been killed in less than two years. A large number of top leaders and hundreds of cadres also surrendered during this period.
Among those who surrendered was Politburo member Mallojula Venugopal Rao alias Sonu, who was considered to be the ideological head of the party.
Devuji (62), is from Jagtial in Telangana and carries a bounty of Rs 1 crore.
He is known to have Tirupathi to have joined the Maoists in the 1980s, when it was still known as the People’s War Group. The PWG and Maoist Communist Centre merged in 2004 to form the present-day CPI (Maoist).
“He was part of the Radical Students Union (RSU), which was the students’ wing of the banned outfit. 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 headed the Central Military Commission, or the military wing, of the CPI (Maoist), which was designated a banned organisation in 2009.
Intelligence sources have claimed that the Maoists now has a 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 told the newspaper.
