In sprawling hunt for final Maoist leader: 3,000 elite troops, ₹1 crore reward, and a nudge from his family

DEep interior the heavy Saranda forests in Jharkhand, o'er 3,000 CRPF CoBRA commandos from Chhattisgarh feature been deployed as component part of a high-stakes hunt for the last active CPI (Maoist) Central Committee member, Misir Besra. And as the elite troops turn the heat on one of the country’s most wanted men, they have found support from an unlikely corner — his surviving family, estranged, but desperate to see him live.In his late 60s, Besra, who carries a reward of ₹1 crore and comparable bounties in nearby states, is holed up in the forest along with a clutch of loyal troops. His family has made a final appeal routed through the government, calling on him to lay down arms.Security forces said Besra, known by the aliases Bhaskar, Sunil, Sunirmal, and Vivek, refuses to surrender, even as most other senior Maoist leaders have either laid down arms or have been neutralised over the past two years, following a renewed push by the Centre to wipe out the insurgents.Even as elite commandos of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) comb the forests, a more intimate appeal is being made from within Besra’s family.Over the past month, the Maoist leader’s son and his younger brother, Devilal Besra, have written letters urging him to surrender, saying the insurgency has effectively collapsed.“The government officials said they would somehow ensure that the letters reach him. Maybe it will compel him to surrender and join the mainstream like others. I wrote to him that I may not understand why he became a Naxal then, but I know that refusing to surrender or fighting the security forces now is wrong,” his son, who asked not to be named, said.Besra’s son, who works as a helper at a canteen in southern India, said he last saw his father in the early 1990s, when he was just five or six years old.“I have faint memories. My grandfather had taken me to the jungle to meet him. He then deserted us and then joined the Naxal ranks. After that, my mother also left us,” he recalled. “I do not want to be identified because he has been a missing figure in my life, our lives. In all my documents, my uncle is my parent. I make an honest living. I don’t want anyone to find out who my father is.”According to Devilal Basra, the Maoist leader left his home in Girdih district around the late 1980s and never returned.“He was studying in PK Roy Memorial College, Dhanbad, where he completed his graduation. He must have met Naxals when he took admission in the post-graduation programme there,” he said. “It has been almost 40 years. We only saw his photos in newspapers and were told that he had become a top Naxal leader with crores of rupees as the reward for his arrest.”Speaking about the efforts to capture Besra, a senior government official said: “Three battalions of the CRPF’s CoBRA commandos have already reached Jharkhand. They are working with the Special Task Force (STF) of Jharkhand Police to find Besra and his other cadres. It is difficult for Besra to enter Odisha and even Chhattisgarh because there are no military cadres to assist him in the jungle. It will be a matter of days or weeks before he is caught.”Apart from being part of the Central Committee, Besra was a member of the party’s politburo and also headed the outfit’s Central Military Commission, security officials said.A long-time operative in the Saranda region, Besra allegedly masterminded dozens of Naxal attacks, including the April 2004 ambush in which 32 police personnel were killed. He was arrested in Ranchi in 2007, only to escape in 2009 following a Maoist attack on a court complex in Bihar’s Lakhisarai.“He has just been lucky so far. His closest aide, Anal Da, a Central Committee member with whom he spent decades in the proscribed party, was killed in a gunfight with security forces in January this year,” the official cited above said, adding that Anal Da was among 15 Maoists killed in the firefight in Saranda.The official also said that Besra escaped during another shootout last month. “But, it won’t be long before the forces get him. Even Hidma [top Maoist commander Madvi Hidma] ultimately ran out of luck after initially managing to escape several gunfights over the last two years,” the official added.Records seen by HT show that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) is also probing three cases against Besra, including a July 29, 2024, case linked to the recovery of cash, explosives, and extortion material in Jharkhand’s Tonto forests. It is also probing the January 4, 2022, Maoist attack on former Jharkhand MLA Gurcharan Nayak, in which two of his bodyguards were killed; and an April 25, 2022, case over alleged attempts to revive the proscribed outfit through fresh recruitment in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.In all three cases, Besra has been booked on terror charges under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).In stark irony, even as Besra spent decades waging an armed struggle against the State — often targeting public infrastructure such as schools — his brother, Devilal, now works as a para-teacher in a Jharkhand government department.As uncertainty hangs over Besra’s fate, his family waits for a word that may never come. “We are yet to get any reply from him to our letters... We don’t even know if those senior government officers managed to send that letter to him,” Devilal said.“I worry for him. He is family, after all. But then, he chose his own path.”