New Delhi: Security forces Tuesday arrested the last known absconding Maoist leader, Misir Besra, in Jharkhand. A member of both the central committee and politburo of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Besra was the only Naxal leader to have evaded the security forces so far.
Anoop Birtharay, Inspector General for the Jharkhand Jaguar—an elite special force of the state—confirmed Besra’s arrest to ThePrint. A joint team of the state police and Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) of the Central Reserve Police Force nabbed two other senior leaders—Mochu and Gaurav—from a vehicle at the Dhanbad-Giridih border in the state.
With Besra now in custody of the Jharkhand Police, both the central committee and the politburo of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) are defunct. In other words, this development marks the end of the Maoist movement in the country.
The arrest comes months after Union Home Minister Amit Shah told Parliament that the armed part of the Maoist movement had been wiped out from the country. On the eve of his deadline to eradicate Left Wing Extremism (LWE), Shah said in March this year that the outfit, which once had 21 members in its top decision-making bodies, had only two remaining. “All main armed Maoist cadres have been finished,” Shah said in the Lok Sabha.
The arrest is also a massive operational success for the Jharkhand Police and security forces, as Besra had all but ruled out surrendering and joining the mainstream. ThePrint had earlier reported in April that appeals issued by Besra’s brother, son and son-in-law could not influence him to come out of the forest in Saranda and lay down arms. Besra had in the past escaped several operations carried out by the Jharkhand Jaguar and CoBRA in the Saranda forest of West Singhbhum district.
Flushed out in a series of encounters, Besra escaped Saranda and was moving towards Giridih, sources in Jharkhand Police said, when he was arrested by the force based on precise intelligence.
A native of Giridih, Besra was influenced by Left ideology early in life, as his college years coincided with the movement against landlords in the villages of Giridih and neighbouring districts. In the early 1980s, police records suggest that Besra worked in tandem with Prashant Bose, a senior Maoist leader at the time, travelling from village to village to propagate Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI) ideology and sow the seeds of armed rebellion.
The MCCI was the precursor to the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which came into existence in September 2004 following its merger with the People’s War Group, active in Andhra Pradesh.
Before his arrest by the forces Tuesday, Besra was also held by the Jharkhand Police during a chance patrol on the national highway in the state in September 2007. Besra escaped two years later when Maoists attacked police personnel at a court in Bihar’s Lakhisarai district where he was being taken on a production demand by the Bihar Police.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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