On 25 May 1967, in a little-known hamlet called Prasad Jote—a small village under the Naxalbari police station in Darjeeling district, West Bengal—three men came together to ignite what would become India’s longest-running armed movement.
The incident occurred specifically in the area of Jhoru Jote–Prasad Jote cluster near the India–Nepal border, an area that today falls under the present ‘Naksalbari’ Sub Post Office (PIN code 734429), operating within the Siliguri postal division.
Few realized that day they were witnessing the first pages of a violent but historic chapter. As peasants rose in protest against the exploitative jotedari system, police opened fire, killing 11 villagers—including eight women and two children—in what would become known as the Prasad Jote massacre.
That same day, Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and Jangal Santhal—a trio from vastly different social and political backgrounds—galvanized a peasant uprising that would go on to alter the course of India’s internal security and leftist politics for nearly six decades.
Historians broadly agree that Charu Mazumdar, a Brahmin, was the ideological architect of the movement. His Historic Eight Documents, a set of monographs, laid out the Maoist roadmap for revolution in India.
Kanu Sanyal, a Kayasth and tireless field organizer, built underground cells and mobilized tea garden laborers and sharecroppers across the Terai region—earning a reputation as the movement’s tactical mind and grassroots mobilizer.
Jangal Santhal, a Santhal Adivasi leader with deep credibility among tribal peasants, was the charismatic frontline mobilizer, leading the first confrontations and mass marches.
While some accounts sought to portray him merely as the “muscle,” this understates his importance as the movement’s tribal face and the bridge between ideology and action.
Their objective was simple: to overthrow the feudal land order through armed revolution, inspired by Mao Zedong’s theory of protracted people’s war. The movement drew its strength from landless peasants, tribals, and marginal farmers—long oppressed under the jotedari system.
The shockwaves from that day reverberated across the country for almost six decades and thirteen different Prime Ministers. Following the Prasad jote police firing, in 1969, Charu Mazumdar and his comrades formally launched the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) [CPI(ML)], choosing 22 April—Lenin’s birthday—to signal their internationalist roots.
The term “Naxalite”—born from Naxalbari—entered the national lexicon. (“Bari” in the local dialect means ‘home’, so Naxalbari literally translates to ‘Naxal’s home’.) If not Naxalite, it could just as easily have been “Prasad jote-lite” or “Bengal-lite.”
In the years that followed, the movement spread to Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra, and Chhattisgarh, finding recruits among the poor, dispossessed, and disillusioned.
The forests of Dandakaranya—first mentioned over 2,500 years ago in Sage Valmiki’s Ramayana—became a de facto “liberated zone” for Maoist guerrillas.
Over the decades, leadership changed hands, ideology splintered, and the insurgency hardened into guerrilla warfare—with ambushes on police convoys, attacks on paramilitary camps, and systematic extortion from contractors.
The bloodiest episodes included the 2010 Dantewada massacre, in which 76 CRPF jawans were killed, and the 2013 Jheeram Ghati ambush, which wiped out the top leadership of the Congress party in Chhattisgarh. In 2010, then-Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh described Naxalism as “India’s biggest internal security challenge.” By then, Naxals were striking almost at will.
However, last week, nearly 58 years after that fateful May in Prasadjote, the Indian state delivered what is being hailed as the most significant blow to the insurgency in decades.
On 21 May 2025, in a meticulously coordinated operation lasting over 50 hours, security forces gunned down 27 Maoist insurgents, including the 72 years old Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju—the General Secretary and top military strategist of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)—in Abujhmad, the last and most fortified bastion of the so-called liberated zone.
The symbolic value of this act will not be lost on anyone—the killing of the most senior Maoist military commander, at his home, under the protection of elite PLGA (People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army) guards, and executed by the District Reserve Guard (DRG)—a unit composed largely of surrendered Naxals and local tribal youth—carries a message louder than any bullet. That former insurgents, now in state uniform, penetrated the heart of Maoist territory to eliminate their ex-commander, marks not just a tactical success but a psychological and ideological rupture in the movement.
Basavaraju, a former engineering student from Andhra Pradesh turned hardened guerrilla, was the last surviving link to the old guard of the CPI(Maoist). He was the mastermind behind the Dantewada and Jheeram attacks and carried a bounty of ₹1.5 crore. His elimination in Abujhmad—a Maoist stronghold for over two decades—is widely seen as the collapse of the insurgency’s command-and-control structure.
His death marks the first time in over thirty years that the Maoist leadership has suffered a blow of such magnitude. It is, by all counts, a crippling and symbolic moment in India’s internal war.
From the paddy fields of Prasadjote to the jungles of Abujhmad, the Naxalite journey has spanned 58 years, thousands of lives, and unquantifiable social cost. Once hailed by some as the “spring thunder” of agrarian revolution, the movement became, over time, associated with coercion, violence, and a parallel system of justice.
The fall of Basavaraju does not just mark the tactical decapitation of a rebellion. It closes a historic arc—from the idealism of 1967 to the battlefield of 2025. Like Basavaraju, who represented the last pillar of the movement, the three men who sparked the Naxalbari uprising also met markedly different ends—each reflecting the contradictions, disillusionments, and brutalities of the cause they birthed.
Charu Mazumdar, the fiery ideologue and founding General Secretary of the CPI(ML), died in police custody on 28 July 1972, just eight days after his arrest in Kolkata. He was reportedly denied treatment for asthma and tuberculosis, leading to allegations of state-sponsored custodial death. His death marked the ideological rupture of the first phase of Naxalism.
Kanu Sanyal, who later became critical of armed violence and the direction the movement took after Mazumdar’s death, continued to work within legal left politics for decades. Disillusioned and isolated in his later years, he died by suicide on 23 March 2010 at his home in Seftullajote near Naxalbari, leaving behind a note criticizing the fragmentation of the Left and betrayal of its original goals.
Jangal Santhal, once the movement’s tribal face, fell into obscurity after the 1970s. He was expelled from the CPI(ML) in 1971 for criticizing Mazumdar’s tactics. He struggled with alcoholism and died in poverty and near-anonymity on 4 December 1988. His body reportedly lay unclaimed for hours—an ironic end for a man who had once led thousands.
The epitaph of the Naxal movement was written last week—putting a full stop on what began as a cry for justice and equality but ended as a long, violent detour in the name of revolution.